Here's a question for the physiologist types among
the listers and lurkers:
Given a usual "rate of attack" that the "aerobic
monkey" jumps on the back of elite 800m racers;
if you could plot it on a curve would it be
on a standard x-y axis, or is it a "logarithmic"
curve?
That is, is the "rate of attack" on the body
progressing at an exponential rate later in the
race, rather than a straight-line "more fatigue
for every 20 meters" ?
If so, then the ability to even-split and still
produce world class times might INDEED be considered
a "kick"-
...as it usually appears to the naked eye looking at
a video and ignoring the stopwatch...
...just another observation without anything but
casual guesses to back it up :-)
by the way, this is coming from somebody whose modus
operandi in his all-time 800 PR was to go out in 54
to try to maintain contact with the big boys, then
hang on through the inevitable Bataan Death March
over the last 300, for a 60-second second lap, for
a respectable 5th place in a field of 10 and a
personal PR.
My usual plan of attack was go out in 55 or 56
and come back in 59 or 60, but this particular race
happened to be a dual meet against a university a
couple of hundred miles away, which also happened to
be the university where a female-type was attending
who I happened to have a keen interest in at the
time, and she was in the grandstand...
...funny how stuff like that can take a second or two
off your well-intended going-out-the-first-lap strategy,
and also give you a bit more incentive to maintain-form-
gainst-all-odds during the Death March when you feel
like your legs are in MNF-Super-Slow-Mo mode even though
your brain is trying to get them to go Super-Fast-Mo
mode.
One other interesting note: every single one of my
800 PR races from my junior year in high school though
my last year in college (8 PR races over six years)
all had one thing in common:
a 60-second second lap. It was the FIRST lap that
kept getting faster as I got in better shape, and
ran against better competition.
Is that typical PR-progression, or abnormal?
And a couple of decades later you wonder why you
didn't invest more miles in those 5am round-the-town
road workouts, now that 24 years after 'retiring' from
competition you've heard more about what 'everybody
else' was supposedly doing.
On the other hand, maybe the number of 1970's college
middle distance runners who, like me, occasionally found
it easier to 'pull up the blanket over the head in the
dorm room and hit the 10-minute-extra snooze button on the
alarm when it went off at 5am' actually OUTNUMBER those
who never missed a morning training run their entire
four college years.
So THERE- I'm in the majority. I feel better now :-)
RT
On Sun, 22 Jul 2001 11:20:36 -0400, you wrote:
> It could be argued, persuasively, I think, that Borza didn't kick, he
>just slowed down less than Bucher and everyone else. Sort of like Dave
>Wottle's dead-last-by-10-meters-at-200-to-first gold medal in '72.
> Geoff Pietsch
>
>
>>From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>>Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>>To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>>Subject: t-and-f: Jacobs not a DNF
>>Date: Sat, 21 Jul 2001 15:05:17 EDT
>>
>>if you were able to watch the Monaco telecast yesterday you will have noted
>>that Regina J didn't run in the 1500, even though the official sums list
>>her as a DNF.
>>
>>gh
>>
>>ps--if you saw the men's 800, can you believe how much ground Borzakovskiy
>>gives up, depending on his kick?
>>
>>Bücher ran 50.2/52.7 compared to Borza's 51.2/52.0.
>>
>>
>
>
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