United States Sub-4:00 Milers list no longer being updated because of supershoes

Trending this way forever wrote:

It's been trending this way forever, I hate that the excuse is 100% 'super shoes'... Go back 15 years to the year 2008 how many high schoolers ever ran sub 4? How many in a typical NCAA season? The answer is 4 athletes 80+ years of high school track, and typically in NCAA there were only 15-20 athletes running sub 4 in the mid to late 2000's... Then go to 2015 before even the vaporfly existed, let alone the new spikes. From 2011-2015 we add 3 new sub 4 high schoolers in five years, almost as many as several decades before that. And how many NCAA runners are running sub 4 now in 2015? The answer is 32, a new record. And that's before any super shoes. Now let's bump up to 2019, still before super spikes, and we have another 3 high schoolers in only 4 years. So we got 6 of our 10 sub 4 milers in a span of 8 years, before anyone was wearing super spikes. US running was already starting to explode. It had been decades since US athletes were sniffing global medals, and now in the past decade we've got medal contenders in nearly every event. And then you have to remember that a portion of NCAA sub 4's is because of extra covid eligibility, and another big thing is the number of 300 meter indoor tracks and banked tracks that are available for people to compete on. Far more athletes are getting good opportunities to run fast, and more athletes are spending more time in the NCAA system before they go off to the real world and start working. Most 4 flat milers do not continue training 100% after college, so this extra time spent in the NCAA is huge.

malmo wrote:

lksjdflkj wrote:

Here's some fun facts: Ryun and Clarke competed on both cinder and synthetic but never ran as fast as they did on cinder. Ryun's 3:51 mile WR was finally broken by .01, 8 years after he set the record and 7 years after all-weather tracks were introduced. Clarke's 5,000m WR was broken by less than a second 4 years after all-weather tracks were introduced and his 10,000m WR was broken by only one second - again, 4 years after all-weather was introduced.

Is all-weather really that much faster than cinder?

.

The only thing that the "stats" show is that Ryun and Clarke (and Jazy, Keino and Snell) were extreme anomalies. The shoes and the tracks were terrible. Basically hard leather and soles with nails hammered into them.

I came into the sport just as the cinder tracks were almost all phased out in favor of rubberized asphalt. I did get a chance to run on cinders TWICE. Todays yoots couldn't imagine what they were like. The rubberized asphalt weren't much better. Your spikes stuck to them, especially when it was hot...then they melted causing you to stick to the track.

Finally the modern synthetics, Tartan, etc started catching on in the 70s, so racing and foot comfort improved dramatically from the "all-weather" asphalt tracks.

Training shoes: breaking them in used to be a painful process of blisters, bloody socks, bandaids and callousing, something that runners haven't experienced for 40 years.

gebre gebre gebre wrote:

malmo wrote:

The only thing that the "stats" show is that Ryun and Clarke (and Jazy, Keino and Snell) were extreme anomalies. The shoes and the tracks were terrible. Basically hard leather and soles with nails hammered into them.

I came into the sport just as the cinder tracks were almost all phased out in favor of rubberized asphalt. I did get a chance to run on cinders TWICE. Todays yoots couldn't imagine what they were like. The rubberized asphalt weren't much better. Your spikes stuck to them, especially when it was hot...then they melted causing you to stick to the track.

Finally the modern synthetics, Tartan, etc started catching on in the 70s, so racing and foot comfort improved dramatically from the "all-weather" asphalt tracks.

Training shoes: breaking them in used to be a painful process of blisters, bloody socks, bandaids and callousing, something that runners haven't experienced for 40 years.

This was a bad shoe?

Link:www.flickr.com/photos/37901436@N08/170...

gebre gebre gebre wrote:

malmo wrote:

The only thing that the "stats" show is that Ryun and Clarke (and Jazy, Keino and Snell) were extreme anomalies. The shoes and the tracks were terrible. Basically hard leather and soles with nails hammered into them.

I came into the sport just as the cinder tracks were almost all phased out in favor of rubberized asphalt. I did get a chance to run on cinders TWICE. Todays yoots couldn't imagine what they were like. The rubberized asphalt weren't much better. Your spikes stuck to them, especially when it was hot...then they melted causing you to stick to the track.

Finally the modern synthetics, Tartan, etc started catching on in the 70s, so racing and foot comfort improved dramatically from the "all-weather" asphalt tracks.

Training shoes: breaking them in used to be a painful process of blisters, bloody socks, bandaids and callousing, something that runners haven't experienced for 40 years.

This was a bad shoe?

Link:www.flickr.com/photos/37901436@N08/170...

Raddison wrote:

long gone wrote:

That's a dumb reason to drop it. With easy access to race results how hard is it to update the list?

It is probably a function of the amount of work required to verify the results. In 2002 there were 7 athletes added to the list from 4 meets. In 2012 there were 23 athletes added from 14 meets. In 2022 there were 63 added from 32 meets. You would hope for the list to be valid that some checking was done to verify the results. Obviously the major meets are easy to verify but smaller meets would be harder.

Maybe T&F is just getting too many emails from people claiming they ran a sub 4 minute mile at a local open meet. After some digging they find the meet wasn't fully sanctioned or the timing equipment wasn't calibrated properly.

On their web page they include the comment, "Thanks to Kevin Biolsi for his early-’18 historical vetting of the list which turned up multiple discrepancies." so obviously they have had problems in the past verifying results. They have probably decided that it has become too much work to keep the list accurate and rather than let it become corrupted they are just going to cap it off with the 2022 additions.