Tag: records

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Let me give you an idea of how athletically ungifted I am. I hadn’t run a timed 400 meters in years. So I went out to a track near my home to do some “speed” work, I was shocked at how slow I turned out to be.

Going at almost full speed on my first of five 400-meter runs, I circled the track in 90 seconds.

Just how slow is that, you ask?

Michael Johnson’s world record, set in 1999, is 43.18. That makes him more than twice as fast as me.

But I’m 43 years old,... Read More

Thirty years ago, on assignment for Kansas Alumni magazine, I interviewed two fifty-something athletes who -- can you fathom it? -- were still running track! One was Jack Greenwood of Medicine Lodge, Kan.
Jack was a legend even then, having set age-group world records in the hurdles and won titles in early Masters world championships. In 1997, he was elected to the second class of the USATF Masters Hall of Fame.
But by then he'd mainly hung up his spikes. 
Still, he remains T... Read More

When is a record not a record?
When I was a budding track nut in the late 1960s, I knew all the world records by heart. They didn't change much. Jim Ryun's 3:51.1 mile and Valeriy Brumel's 7 foot, 5 3/4-inch high jump seemed written in stone. At least in this Stone's imagination.
Now I've seen those records fall, and hundreds more. I can't conjure all the track WRs anymore. But I'm supremely confident I can find them if need be. A good almanac and a hundred Web sites all agree that the... Read More