I was going by individual performances at major competitions ie. World Champs. By virtue of Curt Clausen's finishes in '99 (4th) and '01(7th) walkers have obliterated anything the runners have done. Granted this past year's x-c season was tremendous and things are looking well for our distance corps, but they still lack a single outstanding performance since '93. Walking has a terrible lack of depth and that's obvious in my post that speaks of that embarrassment. So I wasn't looking at depth charts at all. Allen ps-Its rare that Mike Rohl would ever agree with me, at least he did understand the context of my post. As for Malmo, please elaborate on how you think junk miles or slow runs benefit you.
-----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Monday, October 08, 2001 7:57 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: t-and-f: What's Embarrassing? Yesterday, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote, >In defense of the walk though, I do have to say this, at least the >walkers have consistently performed better at the distance events than >our running brethren. Since I don't know much about the current state of either race walking or distance running, I was curious about how well this statement is demonstrated in the national depth data I compile annually. I haven't yet asked Mirko Jalava for permission to use his 2001 lists for this purpose, but this is what I found in the 2000 data: The charts summarize the number of athletes each country placed in the world top-100 rankings for 2000 (plus ties) and the highest-ranked of these. Since one or two placings may represent only exceptional individuals, rather than national program strength, I've truncated the lists to three placings or more. The data base drawn upon is the world list from Mirko Jalava's web site <http://www.tilastopaja.com/>. snip------------