by Brett Larner
special thanks to Ken Young at ARRS, the IAAF and All-Time Athletics for their database assistance in preparing this article
Last month I published a comparison of the results from the American NCAA Pre-Nationals XC Meet and the Hakone Ekiden Qualifier Road Race which showed that more Japanese university runners were running as fast or faster for a hilly 20 km on the roads than American university runners were running for a hilly 8 km XC. I received a fair amount of response to this comparison, much of it negative and much of it from American university runners, in the comment section, on message boards such as letsrun.com, and in my email inbox. One such letsrun poster asked what was apparently supposed to be a rhetorical question:
So how many of these "Rising Sons" have run sub-13:30 at age 18?
Yeah.The poster was referring to Americans German Fernandez and Chris Derrick, both of whom achieved this impressive feat in late spring this year, clocking times of 1…
special thanks to Ken Young at ARRS, the IAAF and All-Time Athletics for their database assistance in preparing this article
Last month I published a comparison of the results from the American NCAA Pre-Nationals XC Meet and the Hakone Ekiden Qualifier Road Race which showed that more Japanese university runners were running as fast or faster for a hilly 20 km on the roads than American university runners were running for a hilly 8 km XC. I received a fair amount of response to this comparison, much of it negative and much of it from American university runners, in the comment section, on message boards such as letsrun.com, and in my email inbox. One such letsrun poster asked what was apparently supposed to be a rhetorical question:
So how many of these "Rising Sons" have run sub-13:30 at age 18?
Yeah.The poster was referring to Americans German Fernandez and Chris Derrick, both of whom achieved this impressive feat in late spring this year, clocking times of 1…