First Ritz, now Tegenkamp, who just went 12:58 in Brussels Golden League. Gotta love the resurgence of US distance running.
Thanks for posting this. The runners on here (and swimmers, I am just not one of them) need to do their part to balance out the cyclists; ) I had not been paying attention to this meet but this is very good to see.
Figured I’d spare some folks the horror of having to deal with the let’srun message boards, and having to wade through the 100’s of stupid threads regarding high school runner’s dating questions, the standard “Rupp is gay” insults, and how Al Sal’s runners are all doping nonsense.
Sto
But that’s what makes LR fun!
Great week for American distance running.
Full results are now posted:
Funny, it’s like the 4-min mile. Sometimes you just need to be reminded what is possible…
True dat. Seems like once Jenny Barringer / Deena / Goucher started going fast, it raised the level of all the women from 800 to the marathon. I think Ritz’s surprising run demonstrated if a marathon guy could break a 13? year old 5K record, then guys who had faster 5K PR’s like Teg and Solinsky had no real reason not to be running sub 13.
Too bad the season is over. These guys need to get into more races and hang on the the East African train and stick their noses in it more often.
And BTW, congrats on your win.
How exactly is this like the 4 minute mile?
In the year after Bannister broke the record, exactly one other guy pulled it off, John Landy. It was a couple of years till anyone else managed it.
I just think it’s an interesting demonstration of human psychology. I wonder if Ritz had gone 13:01, for example, would Tegenkamp still have gone under? Obviously the four minute mile is in a class of it’s own, because, for example, they told Bannister he’d die if he did it, and he was the first EVER which is different than being the “first American in a long time.” But I still think - as others have showed - that when folks who are “similar” raise the bar, I think people believe more in themselves, because they say, “hey that guy/woman is not that much better than me, I can do that.” And like that old adage, “whether you say you can or you can’t, you are right.” Of course, unlike the four-minute mile, I think it was “unspoken” that Americans didn’t have it in them to break 13, but unspoken is even worse, because it doesn’t give the athlete anything to “fight against.”
I knew there was a reason I couldn’t beat him in high school… 
Great to see Americans doing so well.
“In the year after Bannister broke the record, exactly one other guy pulled it off, John Landy. It was a couple of years till anyone else managed it.”
It’s true that in the 12 months following Bannister’s May 1954 sub-four mile only Landy went under four. But in May 1955 – within 13 months of Bannister’s feat – three other runners (Tabori, Chataway and Hewson) broke four minutes in a single race. By the end of 1957, 16 runners had broken four minutes. As Bannister himself said, “Apres moi, le deluge.” Look at it this way, too: In the nine years before Bannister broke four minutes, the mile record was unchanged at 4:01.3. In the nine years after Bannister broke four minutes, the mile record fell to 3:57.9 (Landy), then 3:57.2 (Derek Ibbotson), then 3:54.5 (Herb Elliott), then 3:54.4 (Peter Snell).
Is there a video anywhere? I couldn’t find one other than the post race interview.
Here, starts at about 2:00:00
http://www.universalsports.com/mediaPlayer/media.dbml?VCAT=1280&DB_OEM_ID=23000&id=646812&sid=13055.