by Brett Larner with 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 13:25.46 and 13:29.98 to become the first American 18 year-olds to break this barrier. At the time I didn't know the answer, but it struck me as a good question. I recently had the time to look into it and found, unsurprisingly, perhaps, that the answer is 'zero.' Japan's best current track runner, 22 year-old Yuki Sato (Team Nissin Shokuhin) came the closest, clocking 13:31.72 at age 18. Very close, but no cigar. Were Sato an American this time would put him at all-time #3 well behind Fernandez, just behind Derrick, and far ahead of star Galen Rupp's 13:37.91 mark, but the letsrun poster is correct, the U.S. has two men with such times while Japan doesn't.
Thinking some more about this, I wondered how the numbers would look if you expanded the question out from its original one-dimensional form to include data for 19 year olds, 20 year olds and other comparable ages and distances. I compared runners from the U.S.A. and Japan at five ages from 18-22 and looked at results for 5000 m, 10000 m, half-marathon and marathon, even though the latter is rarely raced at such ages in either country. Setting the letsrun poster's arbitrary criterion of sub-13:30 as a benchmark, I used the popular McMillan calculator to find comparable marks for these longer distances. The McMillan calculator gives times of sub-28:03 for 10000 m, sub-1:02:24 for half-marathon, and sub-2:11:36 for the marathon as equivalent to a sub-13:30 5000 m. The results are quite interesting and seem to show clear trends in where the emphasis in coaching, racing, ability or some combination of all three lie.
The table below shows the complete all-time listings by age and distance for runners from the States and Japan who have achieved these times. With the exception of the marathon, in cases where no runners of a given age have achieved the mark, such as Sato at age 18 in the 5000 m, the fastest mark is listed. Click image for a full-sized version. You might need to enlarge it a bit.
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