The only innovation left is a banked outdoor track in a subterranean tunnel
The times in Boston on Saturday are a reminder that the shoes aren't the only technological marvel fueling post-covidian performances
Only one thing about my own blog really bothers me, and that thing bothers me a great deal. It’s not what little direct negative feedback my posts generate, which is invariably off-topic trolling that only serves to validate whatever the commenter is avoiding responding to. It’s not having too few subscribers or readers or too many. It’s not repeatedly complaining about ideas and behaviors that continue to gain momentum despite being objectionable to a growing majority of Americans. It’s not making predictions that turn out to be spectacularly wrong. It’s not even the typos that infect almost every dispatch, an annoyance I can live with.
The biggest bane of this whole project is my making errors of fact, especially easily avoided ones that are baked into whatever central thesis I might be offering. The fact that I conspicuously correct these errors on the Web versions of posts as quickly as I discover them, and never make mistakes on purpose, is little consolation. This is in part because I hate making mistakes, but also because I spend a lot of time vociferously criticizing people for making similar mistakes in related areas, although the driving reason for this isn’t the errors themselves so much as their often-intentional basis and a staunch unwillingness on the part of those committing them to correct or even acknowledge them. These occasional lapses often leave me on the verge of refunding whatever money the system says I owe subscribers and discontinuing the whole project.
In the e-mailed (newsletter) version of this post, I made the claim that Jim Ryun ran three sub-four-minute miles in high school. In fact, he did this five times. What made this especially galling is that I relied heavily on a Wikipedia chart I admitted I knew contained incomplete information, and then more or less assumed my own memory was good for filling in the gaps.
In any case, here’s what I think is the most important part of the corrected material, which only bolsters the original, incomplete point:
When Ryun went under four minutes for the first time in June 1964, Peter Snell’s world record was 3:54.4, and Ryun was only the 13th American ever to dip under the 4:00 mark, including three who were right in front of him that day. The first three times Ryun broke four minutes as a senior, he was chasing Snell’s revised world record of 3:54.1; in running 3:58.3, 3:58.1, and 3:56.8, Ryun crept closer to the mark each time. Ryun’s high-school best of 3:55.3 on June 27, 1965 came eighteen days after the overly forgotten Michel Jazy of France broke Snell’s global standard with a 3:53.6.
Ryun therefore crept closer to the shifting world record in each of his five sub-fours, finishing 4.6, 4.2, 3.0, 2.7, and 1.7 seconds behind it in that order. Jim Ryun was one of the best middle-distance runners on the planet within two years of going for his first practice jaunt.
It seems remarkable to me that anyone’s first five sub-four-minute miles were increasingly fast, let alone a high-school kid under enormous pressure. Sure, the other side of that is that Ryun was young and rapidly improving, giving him better odds than a pro of refusing to stabilize or backslide even briefly. But how rapidly is anyone likely to improve when already within five seconds of the world record? This is just another window among dozens into how special a runner Jim Ryun was: Picture a contemporary world-class runner’s first sub-3:50 miles being 3:49.0, 3:48.3, 3:48.1, 3:46.8 and 3:45.3. That’s how good he was, although if you accept the 10-second time shift, one must credit the 18-year-old Ryun with an eventual imaginary modern-era PR of 3:41.1. That’s probably optimistic, but…
Anyway, after all of that, you’ll see why I’m experiencing some trepidation about relying on numbers for the point I’m about to make, which is that so many people are running so fast in track races that I see no point in following invitationals, only championships, as the glut of superior performances is impossible to historically contextualize. And I’m not talking about the dustbin of history, but basically anything before late 2020, when Nike released its Dragonfly ZoomX “superspike” for sale to the public. I know the shoes get almost all of the credit, but it’s easy to forget how well-designed indoor tracks are and have in some cases been for at least two decades (see: Boston University).
Before the men’s 5,000 meters at the David Hemery St. Valentine's Invitational on Saturday, a total of 45 men had broken 13:15 for the distance indoors. After the race, that total had risen to 55. Amazingly, the first 17 finishers ran faster than 13:15.00, but seven of them were already in the sub-13:15 club. Six of those (Hillary Bor, Emmanuel Bor, Marc Scott, Mo Ahmed, Woody “William” Kincaid, and Shadrack Kipkirchir) set personal bests in repeating the feat, while Lopez Lomong, the sole exception, missed his PB by only 0.40 seconds despite his dotage (he turned 37 last month).
Seven of those men are members of the Bowerman Track Club. The slowest of those by far, U.S. steeplechase record-holder Evan Jager, was returning to action after turning in only one finish in the past eighteen months, an outdoor 7:42.51 for sixth place just over a year ago. So Jager’s time now stands as the 49th best of all time, but only earned him sixth in his heat and 15th in the event standings overall.
My mind is going to continue telling me that 13:13 is a remarkable indoor time for at least the rest of this season and probably beyond, even though undeniable and still rapidly accumulating data clearly spell otherwise. Because it’s now barely on the fringes of world-class, I can either recalibrate my results viewfinder along with everyone else or just wait for the championship races if I care to pay attention at all. It’s not that I find the impact of the improved shoe technology dispiriting or at all unwelcome, although one angle unquestionably sucks—Nike always builds the best new toys and enjoys their advantages for a couple of years before any other companies can even create bad knock-offs of their superfootwear.
I wonder if, say, Yomif Kejelcha already had some kind of magical prototype on his feet when he set the world indoor mile record (3:47.01) in Boston in February 2019, with the Nike Oregon Project still intact and Alberto Salazar still in charge of it. Perhaps Nike was then anticipating that the 2020 Summer Olympics would actually happen in the summer of 2020, and that it could outfit all of its own athletes in Tokyo in shoes then unavailable to non-Nike athletes before releasing them to the joggenrabbel late that post-Games fall. After all, we* have a recent historical parallel.
I also wonder if I have just sort of outgrown any real drive to express passing wonder at fast times whether they’re the result of a sudden jump in technology standards or whether they happen under adverse circumstances. I would rather write about other things, I guess. But when people are running really fast at the top level mainly thanks to shoes unavailable in decades past, it’s easy to discount truly outstanding outcomes, like Grant Fisher’s 12:53.73. Fisher showed in Tokyo last summer that he can compete with the world’s best, even if he’s maybe a hair away. But he’s on track to be one of the best Americans ever, in an era when that’s become harder than ever to accomplish independent of any subplantar speed-subsidies.
On the other side—the side I like because the view of it only looks more sublime over time—imagine this: Jim Ryun in superspikes, on B.U.’s 18-degree track, in the same shape he was when he ran 3:33.1 for 1,500 meters on a dirt track on a 97-degree day with pronounced negative splits. Add in EPO if you think that’s needed to fully equalize things, or don’t. Or consider Eamonn Coghlan’s 3:49.78 indoor mile world record in 1983 on a ten-lap-to-the-mile track at the Meadowlands in New Jersey. It’s impossible to not imagine how “The Chairman of the Boards” would have fared in an age when no one on the track even knows what “boards” means, just the coots in the stands and beyond. In a way, the added technology makes recalling athletes like Said Aouita even more tantalizing, because who wouldn’t want to see an in-form Aouita fitted with superspikes race a guy like Fisher? You can be bored and disillusioned with the sport and still have enough residual passion to want to see that script and may like it enacted into real-life racing dramas.