Portland Traffic (from NoPo to Beaverton= 30 min to 60 min rush hour) ruined the Manhattanite Mary Cain's motivation
Portland Traffic (from NoPo to Beaverton= 30 min to 60 min rush hour) ruined the Manhattanite Mary Cain's motivation
zxcvzxcv wrote:
None of those athletes were close to as young as Cain when she was with Salazar. They are all listed at 22 and joined within the last year or year and a half. They were all physically mature. Kejelcha already had a world indoor medal before Salazar and had already run 12:53. I am sure, as is almost everyone, that Kejelcha is several years older than that. His improvement curve certainly indicates that. Brazier, who is 22 now had run 1:43.55 as a freshman in college in 2016, just joined the group last year, Klosterhalfen, who is also 22, has been a pro for years and just joined Salazar last year--she's the same age as Cain. She had already run sub 4 and sub 15.
Cain was 16-17 when he started coaching her from a distance and then joined her at 17. The video showed how he was borderline abusive in his training in the sense not that he was not giving her hugs and encouraging her but that he was giving her incredibly difficult workouts even after races, hero workouts ("Best workout/race of your life," he said to Hasay and Cain in the video), and actually encouraging her to vomit (he's similar in one of the 3:47 Kejelcha videos, where he came back ill from attempting the 1500m record in Europe). She did 4:24 for the mile, then roughly 5:30s for 3M, 1:43 600m, 62, 27, and she had never even done a 3M tempo to that point. It is entirely obvious that this was foolish and guaranteed to get her injured at that age. You have to build up to things like that. Hasay was doing the workout with her but was about 5 years older. 27 is faster than her pr 400m pace at the end of almost 8 miles of work at 1 hr pace on down to 300m pace.
As for talent, this was the youngest runner to break 2 in U.S. history, and a 55 400m runner (maybe faster) and 4:04 1500m runner. All that even with the slumping posture. If you want to blame anyone, Salazar is the only one who deserves it. Textbook case of ruining a huge talent.
This pretty much sums up why Track isn’t popular and people rag on Alberto. To quote “he was borderline abusive in the sense he was not giving her hugs and giving her hero workouts”...
Imagine any other sports saying this nonsense. Hey Popovich, go easy on the guys today, it’s a shove. Hey Bellichek, stop yelling at the guys, it’s mean.
This is professional FUCKING sports! Not hobby jogging or high school.
I'm not so sure that coaching is a science.
The in vogue thing with training at the moment is moderation. Moderate volume, moderate intensity, etc. Tinman is big on this. While I do think that is beneficial for some, it does not work for all. It'll keep you healthy and all that. But you don't see many of the top runners training like that. BTC, NOP, etc. They all run high volume with varying levels of intensity. It's still early days from Tinman's training group, but none of them are world beaters. NOP and BTC get better talent, but they also develop talent. Hunter is tremendously talented, regardless of what Tinman says. Shelby was talented, but Jerry turned her into a world class athlete. Engles was talented but Julian has taken him to the next level.
There are a few examples out there of Cain's insane workouts but how do we know that every session was like that? They probably weren't. Many of the crazy workouts we see from NOP are post-race workouts. On these days they definitely push the envelope.
Another point is to recognize when this occurred. It was 2013-2014. I get the impression that Salazar has backed-off a bit with the crazy stuff like this. I remember an interview with Salazar at the Nike elite camp where he talked about pushing Galen & Mo too hard in a workout before indoor worlds and they never recovered. Perhaps Salazar has learned. Or maybe it's Julian. Cain would have been a better fit for Julian, who seems to be less intense than Salazar.
Yes. He did.
Does anyone here actually follow track? I understand that Salazar is an a**hole so hating on him is fun but girls don't necessarily improve as they get older. Check out the US High School Top 10 list:
https://trackandfieldnews.com/tfn-lists/high-school-all-time-top-10s-girls/
There are 10 names on the 1500 list and only 5 of them got faster after high school - Hasay, Cranny, Efraimson, Rainsburger (18 when she PR'ed), and Donaghu. That's a 50% failure rate and of course their PR's were slower than Cain's. Once Cain ran 1:59/4:04 the chances of her improving were fairly slim.
Problem with Al Sal is he doesn't have a system based on science.
Daniels and Lydiard do.
Since Arthur has passed she should ask Jack Daniels to to coach her.
Would he? Yeah, that's what he does.
Worstworst wrote:
This is professional FUCKING sports! Not hobby jogging or high school.
Calm down, Kenny...
Chet Manly wrote:
Does anyone here actually follow track? I understand that Salazar is an a**hole so hating on him is fun but girls don't necessarily improve as they get older. Check out the US High School Top 10 list:
https://trackandfieldnews.com/tfn-lists/high-school-all-time-top-10s-girls/There are 10 names on the 1500 list and only 5 of them got faster after high school - Hasay, Cranny, Efraimson, Rainsburger (18 when she PR'ed), and Donaghu. That's a 50% failure rate and of course their PR's were slower than Cain's. Once Cain ran 1:59/4:04 the chances of her improving were fairly slim.
Did you read the first two pages of this thread? General data on teenage girls is not the point. Was Salazar the right person to coach an 800m star? Her 1:59.xx 800m was her best event compared to her global peers. Did Salazar over-train Mary Cain? Did Salazar race Cain too much? Ajee Wilson, a couple years older than Cain was not asked to race 5000m races. Wilson was seen as an 800m specialist and treated like an elite 800m specialist. Would you say Cain was treated as an elite 800m specialist as a teenager?
Javman wrote:
Discus? Were you expecting someone to throw a discus?
Learn how to SPELL!!! DISCUSS!!!!
:D That took the boredom away from the thread.
Lets be real v3 wrote:
LateRunnerPhil wrote:
Yes she was really tough and smart and fully dedicated to the sport. No, she was meant to become a world-class athlete (she already was!) and her body was just perfect for running.
Here at 17, almost 18 (fully matured):
https://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/NY-CM840_SP_CAI_P_20130809184358.jpgShe got injured because of training mistakes. The fact that she could handle Salazar workouts for so long and was never injured prior to working with him actually shows she was HIGHLY resistant to injuries. But there is always a line where if you do too much, too soon you will get injured, no matter who you are.
After Salazar she went even more downhill, as she trained high mileage and wanted to prove she can become good again she just ended up working too hard again. Her drive, the sheer motivation to win and become better and train as hard as possible is what prevented her from long-term development.
The video you showed is from 2019, long after her actual career was over. Running is now just a fun thing for her, obviously she gained a lot of fat and weight now (just look at her boobs) but it's not that her body became that way, that's because she is eating more now and not training nearly as much/hard as before. Most runners gain weight in a 2-4 week season break, even Meb and Lagat gain 10-15 pounds. Now imagine a 2-3 year break instead of 2-4 weeks, voila you got her new body.
What is not said enough is that runners are very delicate, not so different than other sports but more so. If anyone here has had a serious injury they know it can take you out of the improvement track permanently sometimes. The damage of injuries goes way beyond the body, it can be psychologically crippling. So perhaps for all these young talented ones who are obviously doing well with their existing training it might be best to keep their routine in place and very slowly introduce changes. We all know AS pushes tremendous volume and intensity. That seems to be a recipe for disaster for a lot of runners.
He seems to treat them all like young versions of himself - and we all know he was missing a few screws back then running himself to the ground.
Yes, you and I know Al is a Victor Von Frankenstein when it comes to engineering workouts. Some people here are just plain fanatics.
No coach in the history of the sport has succeeded with every athlete they coached. Lydiard, Igloi, Cerutty, Stamphl etc., etc they all had successes but also athletes that did not prosper under then but succeeded with someone else.
It may well be that every coach has certain fundamentals that they are unwilling to compromise on but every athlete is an individual and some runners might simply be physiologically unsuited to that coach's methods. Or it may be that the two personalities simply don't mesh. Whatever, it's difficult to blame a coach for "ruining" an athlete simply because that athlete hasn't fulfilled the potential that other people claim to see in them.
In this case, perhaps you could argue that Cain (and her parents given her age?) should have realised earlier that the link with Salazar simply wasn't working and relocated her training elsewhere?
He may be the best coach ever. Cain's dwmise is nobody's fault.
Coach of coaches wrote:
He may be the best coach ever. Cain's dwmise is nobody's fault.
No he isn't. He isn't even close.
Not close? LR is full of a bunch of idiots who have opinions not based on facts. Lay out some facts to show that he isn't in the top 10 if he isn't close to being the best ever. The facts support it.
Inquissima haec bellorum condicio est: prospera omnes sibi indicant, aduersa uni imputantur
Or, roughly: "This is an unfair thing about war: victory is claimed by all, failure to one alone."
Which more recently was stated by JFK as, "Success has many fathers, failure is an orphan."
If Cain had been successful at this point, everyone that had anything to do with her success would be claiming it as their own. But, right now, it appears that she's failed, so we blame one person.
That's ridiculous. No one person is to "blame" - there are way too many factors. As someone pointed out earlier, moving her across the country as a teenager into an academic environment with little support structure around her did not set her up for success.
Tacitus wrote:
Inquissima haec bellorum condicio est: prospera omnes sibi indicant, aduersa uni imputantur
Or, roughly: "This is an unfair thing about war: victory is claimed by all, failure to one alone."
Which more recently was stated by JFK as, "Success has many fathers, failure is an orphan."
If Cain had been successful at this point, everyone that had anything to do with her success would be claiming it as their own. But, right now, it appears that she's failed, so we blame one person.
That's ridiculous. No one person is to "blame" - there are way too many factors. As someone pointed out earlier, moving her across the country as a teenager into an academic environment with little support structure around her did not set her up for success.
The same experiment (complete with Portland) has been run with Alexa Efraimson who got to a slightly better 1500 time, but didn't have the speed of Mary. Alexa hasn't imploded, but she hasn't improved her times either, even though she's probably more race fit than ever. She's proved herself a good runner at the national level. I greatly admire her persistence, and obviously she still has a lot of hope for the future.
I guess, the point is (as many others have said in different ways) it's all a crap shoot with young athletes, and it's hard to figure out how much the coaching really has to do with it.
No, he helped her. Not in her running career, but in life.
At a young age, Mary saw there is a right way to conduct business and a wrong way.
The smartest move Mary could have made is to go back to school and put running on the shelf. Finish school, run for fun, and let the pro level people deal with all the crap.
9-hh wrote:
Problem with Al Sal is he doesn't have a system based on science.
Through trial and error he figured out what works. Sounds like science to me.
Come again??? wrote:
9-hh wrote:
Problem with Al Sal is he doesn't have a system based on science.
Through trial and error he figured out what works. Sounds like science to me.
Science? Well, his son had a beard at age 11 and his aunt Polly grew a third arm as they were guinea pigs.
At least Rupp came up clean though....
No scholarship limits anymore! (NCAA Track and Field inequality is going to get way worse, right?)
Does not wanting my kids to watch a bisexual threesome at the Olympics make me a bigot?
2024 College Track & Field Open Coaching Positions Discussion
Matt Fox/SweatElite harasses one of his clients after they called him out
