2014 World Junior Women’s Distance Preview

Before the preview, a soapbox: the World Juniors, World Cross, and World Relays should all be held every year. Cross and relays are for another column— the young bucks are up right now, and they won’t be back for two years, and that’s a problem.

To be eligible for World Juniors, an athlete has to be at least 16 and no older than 19 on December 31 of the year the championship is held.  The only thing wrong with this rule is that it stopped December 30-born Dathan Ritzenhein from becoming the first ever American to win World Junior Cross. My beef with WJCs is that if age is the defining factor of the meet, then that meet needs to be held every year. Imagine if a state only held its championships every two years; people who were seniors in the off year would be losing their prime year to compete.

The same thing is happening to Mary Cain. She just turned 18 in May, meaning that if there were a Baby Worlds* in 2015, she’d still be young enough to compete.  This seems insanely arbitrary in our insanely objective sport— why should Alexa Efraimson, whose conception was perfectly timed to leave her 17 for this cycle and 19 for the next one— have a better shot at winning a global title than Cain does?

Welp, we’re in Eugene. I guess all we can do is throw our hands up and pay homage to Bill Bowerman and Steve Prefontaine’s (possibly apocryphal) haircut argument from Without Limits:

Pre: Well, Bill, this isn’t going to be fair!
Bowerman: Why not?
SP: What’s the standard for how long hair gets before it’s offensive? It’s a completely arbitrary length!
BB: Right. So is the length of a meter. Does that make a 5000 meter race unfair?
SP: Of course not. Not when everyone agrees on what the length is.
BB: Then, let’s all agree.

*“Baby nationals is still nationals.”— Nick Symmonds

Women's 1500 (prelims 3:15 EST Friday, final Sunday 6:15 EST)

First, there was sliced bread. And sliced bread was good at dividing loaves, but couldn’t crack 4:20 in the 1500. Sliced bread held the title of Greatest until 1982, when Kim Gallagher (who went on to two Olympic medals in the 800) ran 4:16.6 in the 1500 and Patti Plumer ran 4:35.24 for the full mile. For 26 years, Gallagher held the American high school metric record and Plumer the English.

And in 2008, spliced bread, Gallagher, and Plumer were all dethroned when Jordan Hasay ran 4:14.50 to qualify for the Olympic Trials final in Eugene. Later that summer, Hasay and her future Oregon teammate Alex Kosinski went to Poland and turned in two of the best US women’s 1500 finishes when they were fourth and sixth at world juniors. For most of Obama’s first term, Hasay was simply the greatest thing since sliced bread.

Next, there was Mary Cain, Alexa Efraimson, and Elise Cranny, who took less than six years to surpass Hasay by more than any record-breaker in the history of American’s high school distance running. The fastest pre-1970 HS time we can find is Francie Larrieu’s 4:16.8 from 1969, meaning it took 39 years for that record to drop 2.3-seconds to Hasay’s 4:14.50. In the last two years, Cain ran 4:04.62, Efraimson ran 4:07.05, and Cranny ran 4:10.95.

The trio didn’t so much beat sliced bread as they did salt every wheat field, burn every silo, break into suburban kitchens to destroy bread slicers, and systematically replace the world’s bread supply with a some other, gluten-free staple.

And now, for the first time, our best are so unbelievably good that even without the very best of them contesting the event, the other two are serious medal contenders. Efraimson is so talented, so young, and so lucky that she’ll have another shot at WJCs in two years (see above).

Dawit Seyaum freaking beat Jenny Simpson in Efraimson’s breakout race on Randall’s Island, so forget any chance of beating her. Another Ethiopian, Gudaf Tsegaye, has broken 4:03. And that only leaves 4:07 woman Sofia Ennaoui as entrants who have run faster than Cranny. The two Americans have a great shot at grabbing the first ever US medal in the event, if not the first two.

Women's 3000 (final 11:15 EST Thursday night)

As for the 3K, LetsRun does a fabulous job cutting through all of the pablum we’ve been served this summer and gives us the real reason Mary Cain is running the 3000, and it’s not her justifications that “it’s only one round” or that “I’m usually a miler, I just figured I’d mix it up a bit”. It’s simply that it will be much, much easier for Cain to win the 3000 than it would be for her to win the 1500 or 800.

While Cain hasn’t run a high-level race longer than 1500 since last winter, a) she’s good as ever at 1500, and worse in the 800, which points to prep for a longer race and b) see above.  Salazar has probably been eyeing this race for a year when designing Cain’s training.

Her 9:38y(i) from last winter is faster than the field’s bests outside of Lilian Rengeruk’s 8:53.41; Rengeruk ran that time this year and won World Youths last year, so it’s safe to call her and Cain co-favorites. Cain’s long-demonstrated tactical aptitude should assuage American nerves between now and Sunday evening.