Runners
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Words of wisdom! The last week of a taper is rough.
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@cander49 looks like PR weather should be low 40’s to start and top in the low 50’s with some cloud cover.
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Thanks, yeah, temps are looking great. I'm a bit concerned with wind, but hopefully it won't be too bad!
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Sending vibes to make sure it’s all at your back.
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Kipchoge does it! 1:59:40. Impressive effort!
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1:59 Challenge for anyone interested. Pretty incredible regardless of the controlled scenario.
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@BloodnThunder think we will see him go sub 2 at a sanctioned race? The mental barrier has been broken…
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@BloodnThunder think we will see him go sub 2 at a sanctioned race? The mental barrier has been broken…
I don’t think he’ll quite get there. You’d basically have to get him and Kenenisa Bekele to agree to work together for 41 out of 42k before actually racing each other, build a field of world class rabbits that can take both of them through at least 35-37K at sub two pace, and have perfect conditions weather wise on race day.
Based on what the organizers have determined and used for the two attempts a race like Berlin would have to have at least five rabbits able to run sub 2 pace for a roughly an hour and 45 minutes. The odds that five rabbits would even have good enough of a day to hold that pace for that long is really slim. Then you have to bank on your two racers being able to hold it for another 14ish minutes while not executing any race tactics until the last 2.5 minutes. One surge with 5k to go could blow it for both of them.
I think that’s the beauty of the feat at this point though. Only one man in history has been able to achieve it even under conditions not WR ratifiable. It gives it a bit of a superhuman quality.
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Good points. While he is ‘only’ 1:40 off, that’s a lot of time to take out in reality.
Saw the female world record was set this weekend as well at Chicago. @cander49 has now run two races where a wr was set, so he must be the X factor.
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That women's WR came as way more of a shock to me than the sub 2 by Kipchoge. It had been totally untouchable for over 16 years and then all of a sudden, smashed. Unfortunately, it makes me very skeptical of the legitimacy.
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Where do you think the failure is? Doping?
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Yes. Almost three years ago to the day her Marathon PR was 2:24:45, which is world class for a female. When an athlete is already an elite a 10+ minute improvement is really just not feasible. Last year at Chicago she 'only' ran 2:18.35 so In a year she improved 4.5 minutes. In today's day and age there is really only one explanation for that type of gain.
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Interesting. I’ve just looked at some progression on Wikipedia- her previous pr was set in April at London. In 6 months she took out 4:16. By comparison, it took Kipchoge 5 years+ to take out 3:51 from his first marathon in 2013 to the current wr. His progression to the wr certainly looks more organic, with improvement in seconds, while she has tended to make huge leaps. Her first was 2:47:59 in November 2015 (maybe an outlier?), so she’s taken out over 30 minutes in 4 years. If you discount that, 10+ minutes in three years seems like a lot.
I was thinking today of Lance Armstrong constantly repeating that he’d never tested positive as proof he wasn’t doping. We all know how that went. I’d like to think we are in a new era, but maybe it’s a new era of better/undetectable drugs or regimen. Thinking about Balco and Barry Bonds, he didn’t test positive because no one knew the drugs he was taking even existed. And heck, people who are masters level cat 3 have been caught doping to win local races…
I’d have to guess it’s rampant in ultra running. No governing body, no out of competition testing, no real testing except at certain races. I read an article somewhere where Sage Canaday said you wouldn’t even have to be careful or microdose. Just stop so your body flushes everything out if you’re doing a race where you might be tested. -
Enough with these shin splints. I run a mile and the pain becomes unbearable. I have to run interval sprints. The only way it doesn’t hurt
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Good points. While he is ‘only’ 1:40 off, that’s a lot of time to take out in reality.
Saw the female world record was set this weekend as well at Chicago. @cander49 has now run two races where a wr was set, so he must be the X factor.Hahaha. I had a fairly mediocre day in Chicago this year, but at least I was only 1:53 off my PR with a rough second half and a decent bit of late race puking. Motivated for next time. I think my diet is holding me back right now, so I'm going to clean it up and cut all the ridiculous junk food that I eat.
There should be zero doubt that Brigid Kosgei is doped to the gills. She's in the Gabriele Rosa group, for which many of the previous world beaters have test positive and get banned (Asbel Kiprop won 4 combined Olympic or World Championships gold medals on the track, Jemima Sumgong won an Olympic gold and the London Marathon, Rita Jeptoo won the Chicago Marathon twice and Boston three times). Sadly, Rosa also coached some big talent before all the bans that must all be heavily suspected for doping, such as Paul Tergat (former marathon WR), Martin Lel (winner of NYC and London Marathons), and Moses Tanui (world champion at 10,000 and two-time winner of Boston Marathon). Rosa, himself, was charged with doping his athletes in Kenya, but the case was eventually dropped.
I'm not that excited about Kipchoge's sub 2, to be honest. There wasn't really a doubt he could do it with that kind of pacing. Based on how easy it looked for him and how much he sped up in the last kilometer, he could have run 1:58:xx under those conditions. I've argued repeatedly that he was capable of 2:00:xx in Berlin last year with perfect conditions and pacing. It was slightly too hot and sunny (not a big deal, but worth probably 20-30 seconds, and his pacers did a terrible job, pacing a little unevenly and dropping earlier than they were supposed to. It seems possible that someone could organize a real race with a bunch of 2:03 guys getting paid a bunch of money to pace in that Vienna formation as long as they could hang on (25k at least?), and then he could just finish on his own. The race would be legal without having subbed in pacers, and he'd have a legitimate shot at sub-2 in a real race. The other main issue is that he's not, on paper, clearly the top marathoner in the world anymore, so it's less special given that Kenenisa Bekele could almost certainly have done it as well. Bekele is back within 2 seconds in a real race (2:01:41 in Berlin recently), and he did that coming off an injury with an abridged training cycle. Bekele beat Kipchoge on the track nearly every time back in the day, and he's running essentially the same time as Kipchoge without having enough time to be 100%. Dude was a full 30 pounds over race weight earlier this year after injury, took it off in two months, and came back to run a 2:01. If he stays healthy (a big if at this point in his career), there's no doubt he is capable of at least sub-2:01 under legal racing if the conditions are good. Ultimately, Kipchoge will always have a big asterisk on the 1:59, and it will steal the thunder from whoever does it under a legal scenario, which is too bad for them.
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Unfortunately doping is always one step ahead of the tests. That gap is shortening but it is still entirely possible to get away with it. Out of competition testing is key as that is when the real doping takes place. In some of the African countries out of competition testing is rare compared to the US and some European countries…. Then you have countries like Russia where everyone knows about it and they're all in on the scheme.
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Good points. While he is ‘only’ 1:40 off, that’s a lot of time to take out in reality.
Saw the female world record was set this weekend as well at Chicago. @cander49 has now run two races where a wr was set, so he must be the X factor.Hahaha. I had a fairly mediocre day in Chicago this year, but at least I was only 1:53 off my PR. Motivated for next time.
There should be zero doubt that Brigid Kosgei is doped to the gills. She's in the Gabriele Rosa group, for which many of the previous world beaters have test positive and get banned (Asbel Kiprop won 4 combined Olympic or World Championships gold medals on the track, Jemima Sumgong won an Olympic gold and the London Marathon, Rita Jeptoo won the Chicago Marathon twice and Boston three times). Sadly, Rosa also coached some big talent before all the bans that must all be heavily suspected for doping, such as Paul Tergat (former marathon WR), Martin Lel (winner of NYC and London Marathons), and Moses Tanui (world champion at 10,000 and two-time winner of Boston Marathon).
It's pretty embarrassing for the sport that Rosa hasn't been banned for life at this point.
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Agreed. But, let's be fair. It's not like Paula Radcliffe wasn't doped, herself. I have no delusions that anyone at their level is clean, but it's just annoying when the most obvious cases get the big results (Sifan Hassan, anyone?)
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Unfortunately doping is always one step ahead of the tests. That gap is shortening but it is still entirely possible to get away with it. Out of competition testing is key as that is when the real doping takes place. In some of the African countries out of competition testing is rare compared to the US and some European countries…. Then you have countries like Russia where everyone knows about it and they're all in on the scheme.
The problem with out of competition is that you can just skip two tests in a year (or in 100m world champion Christian Coleman's case, three, with extremely good luck and a technicality preventing him from getting banned) with absolutely no consequences. "Oops, I thought you were a burglar and locked myself in my panic room and refused to come out when you showed up to test me! Good thing there's no negative consequence for that!" - Mo Farah
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True. There need to be changes to doping controls regardless of the country. But the frequency with which top athletes from some countries are tested out of competition vs. others is an issue. They should of course be random but they should also be frequent. Unfortunately, even without skipped tests you can beat the system with microdosing, masking agents, etc. There really isn't a solution to the problem.
And you won't get any argument from me that Radcliffe was juiced to the gills.
What's also sad, and a bit comical, about all of the doping is it is also rampant at the lower tiers. Whether it's a pride factor or something else sub-elite and masters level competition has its fair share of cheating. It's not like they're making a living racing but for some reason plenty of guys still choose to do it.
