By Ben Lindenbaum.
Mobin Shahjalal is a track coach and cross country coach at The Fieldston School in The Bronx. He is short, focused, and all compact lean muscle. One teacher described him as having “bridge cable arms and legs.” He is a careful observer of his students’ “forms” and gives advice quietly, but compellingly, to his runners. Although he’d never bring it up in a conversation, some thirty-four years ago he ran for the newly created Bangladesh in the 100-meter dash at the 1988 Seoul Summer Olympics. Mobin, who was born and raised in Bangladesh, earned a spot on Bangladesh’s national team for eleven years, where he was the lead sprinter in the entire country. Mobin ran with the inspiration needed by a new nation that wanted to establish a place for itself at the Olympics.
At the 1988 Olympics, Mobin competed against some of the best athletes in the world. In his heat, where he ran a time of 10.94 seconds, he raced against the Canadian Ben Johnson, who went on to the finals and held the world record time and the gold medal for twenty-four hours (until he was found to be doping). In that final race, American Carl Lewis set the actual world record with a time of 9.92 seconds. In fact, Lewis was one of three runners to run a sub-ten second time at the 1988 Olympics.
Interestingly, since 1988, fifty-six competitors have beaten Lewis’ mark. In the 2020 Olympics alone, three men ran faster times, and all six of the recorded final race times were sub-ten seconds. The current world record, set by Jamaica’s Usain Bolt in 2009, is one-third of a second faster than Lewis’ time, at 9.58 seconds.
Why have times decreased so much since Mobin’s time in track and field? Was Mobin’s competition less athletic than the speedier competition of today?
Humans are constantly evolving. But when we look at recent physical human advancements and improvements, many of these occurrences are not related to evolution, but instead developments in technology and science. Consider the average human life expectancy. From 1900 to 2015, the average American's life expectancy increased by more than thirty years, from 48.2 years to 79.0 years. Yes, evolution may have played a role in this increase. But the real driving forces are the significant advancements in medicine that occurred over the twentieth century.
In running, a similar statement can be made. Despite the significant improvements in race times through the years, human beings have not gotten vastly more athletic by nature. Instead, outside factors can account for most of the differences in times.
At the 1936 Berlin Olympics, the spotlight was on Jesse Owens. Not only was he a Black runner on an American team in the age of Jim Crow politics, but he was racing in a Nazi Germany ripe with beliefs of Aryan superiority. With his blazing speed, Owens won four gold medals and broke world records in the 100-meter and 200-meter races, while simultaneously making a statement to the world about Black equality.
But if Owens ran his fastest 100-meter time of 10.2 seconds at the 2013 World Championships, he would have finished a whole 14 feet behind Usain Bolt, who won with a time of 9.77 seconds. Would Owens actually be a whole half-second slower than runners of today? Or is there something else at play?
When Owens walked onto the tracks at the 100-meter and 200-meter races in 1936, he did so with a trowel. “It was a soft, cinder track,” described Olympic historian Bill Mallon. “[Athletes] came out there with a small lift shovel you’d take to the beach and dug a little hole in the track and put their feet in that to push off of. It wasn’t anywhere near the starting blocks we have now.” The current starting blocks used by sprinters, usually made of aluminum, have adjustable foot pedals that allow sprinters to maximize the power of their starts.
Additionally, the cinder track, as Mallon explained, “was like crushed red clay, somewhat similar to what they play on in the French Open tennis tournament Roland-Garros. It was a soft mushy track, it wasn’t that fast. Starting in the 1960s, artificial, rubberized surfaces came into being. They have more rebound, you didn’t sink in with each stride, and the times improved with that.”
Synthetic tracks continue to improve. A track created for the Tokyo Olympic Games provides what many runners have described as a trampoline effect. According to the company which designed the track, it can improve runners' times by one or two percent. This increase was certainly seen in Tokyo, where records were set in the women’s 100-meter, the men’s and women’s 400-meter hurdles, and other racing events.
If Owens were to run on these new tracks and with actual starting blocks, his time would have been much faster. In fact, a biomechanics analysis of Owen’s joints found that if he were running on the same track Bolt ran on, he would have finished just one stride behind Bolt.
Race tracks are not the only evolving elements. Tremendous research and development have been focused on runners’ accessories, particularly footwear. The unbelievably light spikes of today are a far improvement from the original prototype invented in the late 1890s by Joseph William Foster, founder of the athletic shoe company J.W. Foster and Sons (which was later absorbed by Reebok). These shoes were made from cowhide leather and resembled dress shoes.
The track spikes that runners choose to wear can have a considerable impact on their times. Track spikes provide runners with more traction when they run, allowing them to push off the ground faster and with more strength. USA track and field National Team coach Darryl Woodson describes the importance of track spikes, “If you look at [track spike] plates and feel them, and know anything about the resistance of force and ground contact, then yes, spikes do make a difference. There are spikes that, because of what they weigh and the curvature of how they fit your foot, give you maximum returns.”
As track spikes have improved, some sprinters are gaining competitive advantages over others. This competitive advantage has been in the news recently, as many critics have complained about Nike’s new “super spikes.” These critics include Usain Bolt, who complains that the new technology means sprinters will be able to unfairly beat his records. The advantages provided by Nike’s new spikes are exceedingly clear, to the point where shoe companies Reebok and Brooks allowed their sponsored athletes to use Nike’s spikes at the Olympic Trials. The shoe’s carbon-fiber plates and new foam technology return significantly more energy to the runner.
Accessories and track materials are not the only improvements that have affected track times. Runners’ approach to training has vastly expanded and improved. In 1954, Sir Roger Bannister ran the first sub-four-minute mile. Bannister, who was practicing as a junior doctor at the time had achieved this record with minimal training, running for only 5 hours a week. For his time, Bannister’s training regimen was common. Says Mallon, “Back before World War Two, athletes trained a half hour a day maybe.” “Keep in mind too that Bannister was a full-time doctor tending to the needs of his patients in the newly created National Health, universal health care, in post-World War II Britain,” says Bob Montera, high school teacher and cross country coach. “He was a part-time runner. But he was a remarkable runner who worked in the real world. He was an ‘amateur’ which is what the Olympics were all about. That is no longer the case.”
Runners today can train for significantly larger periods and their training regimens are more effective. Says Woodson, “There’s a lot of things you can’t see with the naked eye, and being able to use devices, cameras, or whatever it may be to aid us … to see the finite things that make one step a little bit better, because that’s what it adds up to, every little step.”
Michael Conlon is a physical therapist and the founder of Finish Line Physical Therapy. He explains how the technology used by his company to analyze stride gait has improved, saying, “Over the last 20 years, it went from recording somebody’s gait with a video camera to phones to our first gait analysis program Dartfish, which was very basic, to now we’re with a company called Motion Metrix.” Motion Metrix uses depth cameras to create 3D models of runners. Conlon describes how this change in technology helps, “people to improve their form in terms of stride rate, stride length, [and] running economy.”
This new technology has also led to a greater understanding of the science of running, allowing coaches to design workouts that maximize their athletes’ potential. According to Woodson, the running community now better perceives “what development means and how to teach development.” This is a great improvement from previous training perceptions, where “everything was done in more of a commanding way and hoping that things came out right. It was instituted in a more verbally, ‘you have to do this,’ versus ‘this is the reason why it works.’”
Conlon agrees with this assessment, explaining that, “Coaches are becoming more educated in terms of they're not doing a ‘one size fits all’ type of program anymore. It's very individual-based. Some athletes peak at 50 or 60 miles a week if they’re training for a marathon, other athletes peak at 100. So [coaches are] learning, understanding, and communicating with the athletes themselves and understanding that they are all different.” Conlon adds that coaches have started to work more with physical therapists to help athletes recover better and to prevent injuries from occurring.
As training regimens have become more advanced, they have become more specific to track and field. Says Fieldston Athletic Director Gus Ornstein, “[There’s a lot more] specialty coaching now. You can go and get a speed and conditioning coach or go to a speed and conditioning facility. … Those places weren’t around when I was in high school. You couldn’t go find a place that did that.”
On top of that, while it used to be common for young track athletes to compete in multiple sports, it is now more frequent that athletes focus their training on just one sport. As Woodson explained, “In other parts of the world, they focus on one event or one sport for the majority of their youth and, as a result, they become more technically sound. … We have youth that are playing three sports at their high school, and we find that’s how we get a lot of athletes that get injured. If you just focus on one sport or one area, how far can you really go? I think that’s where a lot of our growth is starting to come from.”
Ornstein has also found that high school athletes have begun focusing on one sport. “When I was in high school as a football and baseball guy, my mindset was that I’d play basketball in the winter to stay in shape,” he says. “Whereas now, kids are like ‘I’m going to take that season off and I’m going to go train. I’m going to go work on my speed and conditioning.’ I think that whole mindset has changed drastically.” It is worth noting that while focusing on one sport can make a better competitor, it isn’t as healthy for these young athletes. “I think that it’s at the detriment of kids' overall body health,” Ornstein proclaimed.
That said, Ornstein, who used to work at the Parisi Speed School, knows firsthand how effective this extra and more specific training can be in making a runner faster. Founded thirty years ago by Bill Parisi, the Parisi Speed School is one of many relatively new companies focused specifically on making athletes faster and more agile. “One of the biggest misconceptions [of the past] was that you can’t get faster,” says Ornstein. “People always used to say, ‘I’m either fast or I’m not.’ But our whole concept was that you can improve speed.” One way that people can get faster is through strength training. “People are spending so much [more] time working the lower back, glutes, hamstring, quad, which are [the body parts] that allow you to create acceleration. Through creating more force in the ground, you can create more acceleration.”
Even more recently, runners started focusing on nutrition. Proper energy and nutrients are needed to make the most out of training, exercise, and recovery. We have come a long way from the 1904 Olympic marathon, where runners drank alcohol and strychnine (rat poison) to ‘power’ them through the race, believing the substances were performance enhancers. Athletes work with trainers and dietitians to determine what is the best way to fuel their bodies. Says Conlon, “Some athletes are more successful when they’re going vegan. There are vegetarian diets that people are finding that work well for them. … I think athletes are fine-tuning the quality of meats and foods they’re eating and when they’re eating these certain foods.”
An understanding of nutrition has especially expanded in developing countries. When Mobin was training for the Bangladeshi National Team, nutrition was not considered. He recalls, “At that time my country was a developing country. Even our doctors and our dietitians were not sure how to proceed. We didn’t have the internet, nothing. … In our time, there was no way we could know what was going on in the world. Only what we used to see on the television, or in some newspapers. So we didn’t have that much for nutrition.”
Nowadays, every country and runner has a much-improved idea of nutrition. Said Ornstein, “Back then you just sort of ate and it was like ‘eat protein’ and there was this idea of eating healthy but people did not really know what it means. Now, the science behind health and nutrition is beyond what it ever used to be. The science behind supplements and how to use them and what’s effective and what’s not. And how that food interacts with your body. What you can put in your body to really fuel yourself and how to be the most efficient you can and get the most out of your workouts.” Now, instead of drinking alcohol during races, athletes drink Gatorade and other sports drinks while consuming running gels and chews.
When people think of athletes getting stronger and faster, they often equate this to steroids and performance-enhancing drugs. They assume that a reasonable explanation of why runners have improved is that the drugs that they put in their bodies have improved. However, this is not the case. Olympic athletes are tested frequently for steroids, making it almost impossible to dope without getting caught. Says Mallon, “The American public thinks that all the Olympic athletes are taking drugs. The reason Olympic athletes test positive is that they’re being tested twenty-four seven, three sixty-five, or they can get tested twenty-four seven, three sixty-five. They get tested so much more than athletes in the four American professional sports. Like the NFL, if they had to be tested like the Olympic athletes are they’d probably all test positive except for maybe the quarterbacks and the kickers.”
There has, of course, been a history of steroid use by sprinters, particularly in the 1980s. The hundred-meter dash event at the 1988 Olympics, in which Mobin ran, is now infamously remembered for its heavy steroid use. In the final race, six of the eight runners later failed drug tests or admitted to drug use, including Canada’s Ben Johnson, whose first-place medal and world record were rescinded just a day after the race when steroids were found in his urine sample. Says Mobin, “Now they can trace [instantly]. If they see someone extraordinary that they suspect of doping, then they will test them. But at our time, testing wasn’t that advanced. So yeah, at the time doping was a problem. At the world level, I would say it was a big problem.” Yet now, as a result of constant testing, steroid use is not a prominent issue in the running community.
The psychology of competition is also a contributing factor to faster times. Just forty-six days after Sir Roger Bannister ran the first four-minute mile, another runner broke his record. The next year, in 1955, two more runners beat the four-minute mark in the same race. When “the unachievable has been attained,” said Conlon, “it allows other people who have the athletic potential to follow through and push down the rope a little bit more. A huge component in endurance sports is the psychological aspect, which people often overlook. But it’s a part of life, it’s a part of sports, it’s a part of everything that we do.” Athletes are constantly competing with each other, striving to be the best in their fields. This competitive nature can be found at all levels of running, including at Fieldston. “I love when I see track kids in this school looking at the track records on the wall,” Ornstein said with a smile. “I’ve seen eighth and ninth graders looking at a record and say ‘I’m going to go after that when I’m older.’ The board is certainly a motivator. … I think seeing that and having something to go after is great.”
Overall, there are a multitude of things that have resulted in runners being faster: technology, training regimes, diets, and more. Additionally, as times get faster, the mindsets that runners approach a race with have changed and improved. But is this all there is to it? Can any of this time increase be accounted for by a change in the pure talent of the runners themselves? Are runners now in any way more naturally gifted than those of the past, or do they simply have more resources and knowledge available to them?
After taking a moment to ponder the question, Ornstein offered, “Sometimes they seem to be, right? People seem to be a little bigger, stronger, faster naturally. But I don’t know.” This question is, of course, impossible to definitively answer. But at the same time, all signs point to yes. When asked if records will ever stop being broken, Mallon responded, “You see this every 10, 20 years, if you go back. People make predictions for what are the ultimate possible records for various track events and every time they do that those records are broken within 10 or 20 years. … I don’t know if there are human limits because our species will evolve and improve over the next hundred, thousand, or hopefully ten thousand years if we’re still here.” Woodson had a similar answer to the question, responding, “As human beings keep evolving, we see that sprinters went from a certain stature of size and it was believed that a person was too tall to be a short sprinter to now they’re looking for the bigger males and females to be involved. As soon as a world record is established, we believe that’s the new model of the way we run and the way that person should look. So I don’t think that’s going to ever stop, no.” Woodson is alluding to the evolution of what the prototypical runner looks like. While the ideal sprinter used to be of average body type, coaches now are looking for taller athletes to be sprinters. Taller sprinters have an advantage because their center of gravity is higher, allowing them to fall forward faster.
But at the end of the day, there is no true way of comparing sprinters of the past to today’s sprinters. Ironically, although running, by definition, is one of the most straightforward sports, it can be argued that the records set by runners are inherently subjective. Behind every time set in a race, there are a large number of outside forces that play into it.
And yet at the same time, no matter how you look at it, a good runner is a good runner. Usain Bolt is still the fastest man in the world, and likely the fastest man in history. Jesse Owens, despite on paper having a slower time than many current sprinters, is still one of the fastest, and most inspirational, men in human history. Although Sir Roger Bannister’s mile time is now sixteen seconds slower than the current record, given his circumstances, his feat is still one of the most impressive accomplishments in all of track and field. And, overall, although their times may not show it, runners of the past are not that athletically different from the runners we see rewriting the record books today.
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