Mike barry

Ed Brown and I paced him to that PR in Santa Barbara in 1990. Dan was such a raw and incredible talent, he needed to break 4:30 to qualify for nationals but had never broke 5 minutes before. We boxed him in and convinced him to run at our pace and he did it, he was hurting afterwards but he was physically capable. We trained with Sam Adams and used the Rob Baker method of training your brain and body to run first three laps at a fixed pace and then sprint out the last 300 with whatever you got left. (Rob is still the Deca WR holder in the 1500 and trained with Sam Adams for many years.) Typically, we would run 6 to 8 x 400's at 65 - 70 second intervals on a 3 minute cycle after our Saturday workouts. This conditioned us to pace the first 3 laps and not go out to fast (just stay in the zone), speed interval was depending on the athlete. A 70 second pace gets you to the final 300m mark at 3:30 (65 gets you to the mark at 3:15, etc.) Even if you can't run the last 300 faster than 70 pace, you still finish 4:20 - 4:25. If you have enough gas in tank to increase speed, 4:10 to 4:15 is very doable. In Dan's case, we paced him at 71ish, he followed Ed and I ran right behind him and would yell at him if he broke stride with Ed's pace. We pushed him through it and it was a rewarding thing for us to see him do it. I wrote down the workout for him after the meet and he was going to start doing it, but after following his career, it was obvious he did not. I ran into Dan in Scottsdale about 15 years ago and we reminisced about that race. He even admitted he wished he had embraced the Baker method - I think he'd still be the WR holder today if he had. Mike Barry