malmo wrote:
Your threshold of what impresses you is way too high. You could do some heavy lifting of your own and look up the results, you know?
Wow, you're a feisty little bugger today, aren't you? I was, in fact, doing just that as you posted this (I wasn't meaning to treat you like a hamster on a wheel -- I know you tend to have the most thorough and organized compilation of data on this board, so I figured you might have it at your fingertips). Truthfully, I couldn't remember our top showing over the last decade, but I knew it surely wasn't a top ten performance. And, indeed, no one has pierced the top ten at least since 1998. And no one has pierced the top 30 since 2002. Now, I know I will be ostracized for my next, what will be considered controversial, remark, but I just don't hold Abdi and Meb's performances (11th in 2003 and 2002) in the same light as the reminiscing about Porter and Virgin's. Americans to be sure, but I just am not to be convinced that they don't possess African distance running genes. But that's another topic altogether. I'm not asking to be persuaded, because I'm not going to be.
Of course, the entire short race/long race skews this entire argument, but in the spirit of this thread, the long race is the subject of my focus, because that's where one should find the greatest convergence of steeplers, 5000 and 10000 specialists, road racers, and marathoners.
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