No, I live close to the Crescent Building.
I might try to sneak in a workout at SMU and check it out.
It’s a good training track, I don’t know of any Mondo in the area except for the Baylor Tom Landry Center. What do you do for weights?
[i]
“Yep, and you can put the goddess Sanya Richards in there too as her dad is a full blooded Jamaican. You know, sometimes looking into a racial group that is not your own and discovering the nuances is sometimes hard to do but being a black man myself I can tell you that there is definitely something different about the Jamaicans beyond there culture and language accent. They are a very tough and hardy group of people, mentally and physically; much more so then U.S born Africans”.
My guess is that it has something to do with the awful slave trade that happened long ago. You see, the people who occupy Jamaica come from the small groups of Africans that fought back and escaped slavery into the land where they occupy today. There bloodline stayed relatively in tact as well; they did not mix with Indians or Caucasians". [/i]
Posted this on another thread but brought it over here because I think we are on to something.
I lift at the 24 Hour Fitness at 75 and Royal. The last few months most of my upper body training has been gymnastics exercises I picked up from Christopher Sommer’s book. The only conventional lifts I’m doing right now are squats and power cleans. But I’m getting off topic.
Not anything new. There have been researchers for years looking into the various groups that were brought to Jamaica from Africa as it relates to athletic prowess (not just speed).
I think this goes to my point. It’s a tighter, more consistent genetic pool, and yet they all used different, individualized training programs. Even with seemingly similar, superior genetics you still have to assess and adjust to the needs of the individual. If you had looked at the above mentioned athletes and said “Oh, they’re all Jamaican, we’ll simply train them this way,” and then used the same cookie cutter program for all of them, they would not have achieved the success they did. Would they still have been great athletes? Probably, but they might also have been ruined or ended up injured before demonstrating their talent.
I wonder what he could have ran if he had been coached in a more “sofisticated” way. He could have gone even faster. He will never know.
The big question is why we have whites running elite 60m times yet struggle to dip under 10.10. There is something failing after 50m, and that could be genetical or training related.
Good point.
That’s an interesting point. The last time I really competed was in high school, and on average I was about a 12 sec 100m runner (I ran a freak 11.6 one day in practice). I routinely competed against black kids that ran 10.7, 10.8. My coaches were distance runners so I had no proper coaching (and I fought with them endlessly, which is why I didn’t bother running in college). And yet, even without proper coaching and being pretty skinny and not very strong I could still beat a lot of these faster kids out of the blocks and stay with them for about 30m. Then they would continue to accelerate and I would fall back (in retrospect probably because I was tightening up from trying to keep up with them). This also relates to my previous post about beating Ron Clark to 30m. If I had set the cone at 50m he likely would have mowed me down.
Could my acceleration ability have come from my soccer background? I was usually one of the fastest kids on the field. If we look into the background of some of these fast 60m white sprinters, we might find sports that involve short burst accelerations like soccer or football. As far as extending acceleration to reach higher speeds, who knows. Just an observation based on personal experience.
wHO KNOWS… for sure we have plenty of talented juniors and under 18…and they progress very slightly if any…
This goes to the heart of athlete development, which is really what this thread is about, how best to judge the trainings needs of athletes.
When talking about progressing from junior to more senior levels of development, coaching continuity plays a big role. This is why Charlie’s experience and insight is so valuable. I don’t know of another coach that trained sprinters from scratch to world class level on a consistent basis and without recruiting or screening athletes. He simply coached whoever showed up. The fact that most of his athletes were black had more to do with where he was coaching. That’s who showed up. If he had started in a predominantly white section of town, would the ethnic makeup of sprinting elite in the 80s have been different, at least from the Canadian quarter?
There could be any number of answer to why this is, but it’s only partially a matter of race and mostly a matter of individual characteristics.
A lot of the features that West African blacks are more predisposed to having aid more in top speed than acceleration. Narrow hips help keep rotational forces low and minimize long axis rotation (important for top speed, not accel). Long limbs relative to the body mean longer levers (more important for top speed). Higher white fiber content and stiffer tendons allow for lower ground contact times (essential at top speed, but not so much during accel). Muscle fiber distribution favoring the hips, hip flexors, and hamstrings aid in top speed and SE (quad development can make up during early accel). And psoas development (which is on average 3 times greater in blacks than in whites) is needed for efficient top speed running.
Now, all of the features listed above primarily play a role in top speed. It’s possible to have wide hips, short legs, short tendons, and a mixed fiber type and still have good acceleration. Since black athletes more commonly display positive characteristics, it would make sense that they would commonly exhibit greater top speed and SE.
Having said all of that, it’s perfectly possible for a white guy to have all of the same characteristics as Usain Bolt, but it’s unlikely (truth be told, it’s unlikely for a black guy to have those characteristics as well).
The reason we see less white sprinters is because West Africans more commonly exhibit the traits that make them great sprinters. And since Olympic sprinters are already 1 in 10,000,000 (or more), it’s just a matter of finding those with the right characteristics. What this may mean is that for every 4-5 black guys capable of going sub <10, there may only be 1 or 2 white guys, but they’re there none the less. Race says nothing about an individual’s abilities, only their individual characteristics do.
As for the relative success of white athletes in the 200M and 400M in comparison to the 100M, this could be a case of the really good white athletes actually having been located, or it could also relate back to genetics. I would personally assume that Mennea and Wariner could’ve done great the 100M (or 200M in Wariner’s case), but might have been steered away for one reason or another. Either way, their accomplishments show it’s not about race, it’s about finding athletes with the right characteristics.
It’s just that fewer white athletes exhibit them, so the search is a bit harder.
this is a very interesting discussion. I agree with many of the posts. With that said i have always been intrigued with topics like these. It seems to me that there are so many white athletes placed in events that are supposed to cater to “caucasions.” Obviously this has been stated by others but an athlete like Trey hardee comes to mind. Hes 6’5" 210 decathlete. He has run very impressive times from a 10.2 100m, as well as long jumping close to 8 meters. I cant help but imagine what he could really accomplish if he were treated as 100m sprinter. HIs stride frequency for his height is incredible…then theres the matt bruno from cali who was the first white sprinting champion in years when he won in 2002 i think, and oh yeah he beat REGGIE BUSH lol.
Trey Hardee’s wind legal pb is 10.40, not 10.2.
In the decathlon legal wind is up to 4 m/s…so maybe here is the misunderstanding…
Keep in mind that the main question posed by this thread is whether race predictably determines or contributes to the training requirements of athletes. At least that’s the issue I’ve been addressing.
My point is that individualization of training is of such central importance that training variations between a given white sprinter and a given black sprinter will not necessarily be any greater than the variations between two given black sprinters. Again, what are the needs of the individual?
Talking about different training requirement between the races in general necessarily entails talking about training programs in general. But there are no general training programs (that work). There are general training principles, but their specific application in terms of volume, intensity, workload distribution, etc. is totally dependent on the needs of the individual.
Talking about statistical differences between sprinters of different races and the anthropometric factors that contribute to performance is one thing. But I’m not sure it yields any practical training advice for a given individual.
Flash, that was pretty much the point of my post. Anthropomorphic factors determine ability (and training). Race does not.
Yes, decathlon has a different wind legalities as already pointed out. Not to mention the USATF site routinely has inaccuracies, but that is another matter altogether. Look up the results.
The funny thing to me is the fact that many training programs that we use today on Africans mostly have been developed in cold climate (e.g. Russia, Poland) regions.
Nevertheless, I have the belief that racial groups are quite different from each other (beyond skin color) and that all racial groups have there own natural proclivities.