have some perspective wrote:
You guys throwing yourselves all over Rupp are nuts. Pacers or not, 2:09 on a mostly flat course in reasonable weather is just not that fast, even for an American and especially when compared to the top non-Americans. Rupp will probably run faster but at this point it's all speculation.
Even Alberto recognized this. He was 100% correct that Hasay's race was the performance of the day for NOP. Hasay ran the 2nd fastest time ever for an American woman in only her second marathon and came in 3rd against actual world-class competition (that was world-class yesterday, and not 3 years ago). That's genuinely impressive. Rupp is coming along nicely but the hype is premature.
Do people really think that Rupp should've thrown all caution to the wind and pulled this whole pack through a faster first half? For the sake of running a faster time? Maybe his goal was to win the race. Is that a bad thing?
Chicago is an unpaced race, so that is what you get. For whatever reason, the pack consensus was not to push it early. More like a track 10K where nobody pushes it until the final K.
The other side of the coin is something like Berlin where pacers take off at WR pace. The result of that is that a few runners get great times while the rest of the pack are destroyed by making the age-old marathon mistake of going out too fast. Look what happened to Kipsang and Bekele in Berlin. So people think that that is what Rupp should do? I think these time-trial races like Berlin are actually bad for the sport. I think the solution to all this is for the WMM races to offer time incentives. That would speed the pack up during the first half. Using pacers might be OK if a couple runners want to go for the WR, but I think it takes race strategy and cunning out of the race, which is too bad. I thought a lot of the Berlin race was boring because the runners were just following the pacers.