I have tried to hold off clicking on any of these videos on YouTube, because they are women's track, and I know as soon as I hit one of them I'm going to get way more, because I already binge watch men's track and field once a month, so they try to sneak women's events in on me already. I don't really care about women's track and field.
Though if I cared about anything in that category, it would be distance runners, and what Katelyn Tuohy has been doing is remarkable. If you pick up at about the 5.00 mark you will see the DMR leg before hers and get some idea how deep a hole she is starting from. When she gets the baton she is not even in the camera width of the leaders, but by the 8.30 mark you can just see how she is making up space.
For the world record in the DMR, the anchor leg was about 4.28. Tuohy is running other events in this meet (won the 3000), which tends to depress times as training for different events can vary and runners try to conserve energy for other races. (This has been an issue with Matt Boling of Georgia, who is a Swiss-Army knife of a runner for UGa, picking up points in a lot of events but not developing a specialty which might win him an Olympic medal. There is considerable debate what his coach should be prioritising.)
And Tuohy is a freshman. Middle-distance runners tend to peak at 8-10 years older than her.
Ah, the heck with it. In for a penny, in for a pound. Here's Ryan Crouser, who blew apart* the previous WR last year, now breaking his own record in the shotput this week.
Still waiting for Mondo when the international meets start in a few weeks.
*When the incentives for an event become great enough that many athletes can devote their lives to it, performance accelerates rapidly. The record for putting the shot went up over 12 feet in the 50s and 60s (Parry O'Brien, Dallas Long, Bill Nieder, Randy Matson), but it has only crept up slowly since. Crouser added an amazing 9" to it last year. Similarly, if you look at old sports footage you can see how performance has improved since football players didn't have to go sell cars during the offseason and parents saw that their kid might make a living that way. In the NBA in the 60s, guys would smoke on the bench.
It's interesting to note the differences in body types and style among middle distance runners. Tuohy is a great runner who pumps her arms hard throughout the race, almost like she's sprinting. She's got a powerful stride and high back kick. Yared Nuguse is also unorthodox but at the other extreme. His arms hardly seem to work; they are held high, relaxed, and across his centerline; somehow, it's counterbalanced by a long and extremely fluid stride with a high back kick.
ReplyDeleteI suppose there's much more uniformity of body type from the 10k to the marathon, but in the middle distances from 800m - 5,000m there's always been room for the Alberto Juantorenas vs. Sebastian Coes,
Keep the t&f videos coming!