Koby Thanks for posting your story, I was guessing your PRs would be in that range.
I think I was in HS during the beginning of the high school distance "revival". I was crushed my senior year when I lost the 1600 at the state meet by less than a second, but looking around and realizing I probably would've been lucky to make it out of districts/sectionals in other states put it in perspective for me. I was also a year ahead of the "Big three" (Alan Webb, Dathan Ritzenhein, Ryan Hall), and somehow them running ridiculously fast times trickled down. Up until my senior year nobody had run faster than 9:15/4:15 in my state (Maryland), but 2 years later my teammate ran 4:06/1:51, the mile record had been around for 30-40 years, but only lasted 4-5 years until Matt Centrowitz ran 4:03.
It's interesting to note that if you look at our HS/college PRs, we both seemed to have much stronger performances in the 1500 than the 5000. (although I would be willing to bet you were good for 14:30-14:45 at least had you run one) But for some reason my "sweet spot" has shifted to the 10K/HM range in my adult running career, I guess it's a product of tempo runs being the biggest component of my training or just my new found love for grinding out longer races at a moderately uncomfortable intensity. I am curious to see if the same would happen to you as you venture into longer distances. Regardless, it'll be very interesting to see how you develop over the next few months and couple of years, as I tend to believe that once you get a few months of solid training in you the fitness gains will really take off.
Thanks, Steve. Yeah those big 3 did really seem to jumpstart everyone. Now not only is the top end talent great, the depth of talent is much better. When I was in HS, you maybe had 50-60 guys or so a year nationally who broke 4:20 in the 1600m. Now I'd venture to guess you get 150 or more a year running sub 4:20. We had a great HS team at the time with numerous guys running in college and we ran a 7:53 4x800 andmade the national lists. I'm not sure now if that would place at a lot of state meets.
Anyway, yes I definitely focused on the 800/1500 in college, hence the stronger times there. In high school I was actually just as accomplished in Cross Country as Track but the bump from 5k in HS to 8k in college was my undoing. Plus every speed workout in XC was a race for me trying to keep up with 24 minute 8k guys. Man I hated college XC.
Agree that the usage of more tempo runs probably helps. I don't know about you but we didn't really run many tempo runs even in college. Coach basically said go run for an hour (sometimes more on Sundays) everyday other than speed days. I don't think he was/is the best coach (that's a whole other story) but it wasn't that far from the norm back then. Training has come a long way. I haven't done any tempo runs yet this year but think they helped a great deal last year.
You may have also been miscast as a miler when you should have been a 5k/10k guy. I think I was miscast as a half miler and ran too many of them. I had good speed but I think I trained for too much speed at the expense speed strength which always seemed to catch up to me as I bumped to the 1500. I ended up fading at the end of spring a lot and ran my fastest 1500m sophomore year. Probably should've been a 1500/3k/5k guy. Oh well, I didn't fight it at the time because I was so burnt from XC season that the shorter stuff was a relief. But looking back on it, we did workouts more appropriate for 400-800 meters. I never recall doing any interval longer than 600m. Mostly 200-400m with a lot of rest and fast. Would've been better off slowing them down, adding some 800-1200m intervals ocassionally and cutting rest drastically.
As for these days, I actually liked the Half better than the 10K last year which seems odd. Maybe because I had no clue how to pace the 10K, maybe because it was 90 and humid. But I felt like I could ease into the Half more. Even though my pace wasn't that much slower. I think my 10k is my softest PR and want to better it but there aren't as many options for 10ks anymore.