Dr. Joan Bushwell's Chimpanzee Refuge

Some of us had a feeling something big was coming yesterday. With 2008 less than halfway over and the real track action yet to commence, Shannon Rowbury, a 23-year-old middle-distance runner from San Francisco I randomly had the pleasure of training with and writing about this winter, had picked up a national title (the 3,000 meters at the USATF Indoor Championships in Boston in February) in her first race in over a year and lowered her personal best in the 1500 meters to 4:07.59 at the Cardinal Invitational two weekends ago.
The impressive thing about those wins was not just that she crossed the finish line in first place or ran faster than she had as a collegian at Duke, but the dominating way in which she turned back some of the best runners in the country. In Boston, having followed the leaders through 2600 meters at a clip of about 73 seconds per 400 (about a quarter of a mile), she dropped a 61 to put five seconds on everyone else; some women in the low-nine-minute range can’t run one quarter that fast, fresh and all-out. At Stanford she did more or less the same thing, blasting away from the field in the last 300 to again gap everyone by five seconds. Understand that five ticks of the clock is a huge gap at the elite level.
The message here was that Shannon had a lot more to give under the right circumstances. And give more she had to, because the qualifying standard for the Olympic Games is 4:07.00 (a country can send up to three athletes who meet this standard and can have one representative as long as he or she meets a lesser, “B: standard). Yesterday, at the adidas Track Classic in Carson, Calif., those circumstances presented themselves, and so did Shannon.
But even we optimists weren’t ready for this one.

Shrugging off a terrible job by the designated pace-setter, Shannon went through the halfway point of the race in 2:09 point something (about 4:03 pace) and, when the rabbit stepped off the track with 500 meters to go, was two seconds clear of redoubtable U.S. miler Christin Wurth-Thomas. Finding another gear somehow, Rowbury inched ever further ahead, her legs almost seeming to grow longer to those of us watching on television, and crossed the line in a stunning 4:01.61.
Here are the top ten all-time American performers in the women’s 1500 meters:

Slaney may have been clean when she ran her fastest 1500 in 1983, but she tested positive for testosterone in 1996, making all of her marks suspect. And Jacobs was popped for tetrahydroguinone (THG; “The Clear”) in 2003 after making a mockery of fair sport for years, her suspension at age 40 finally kicking her to the sidelines in disgrace. As a result, few would object to moving Shannon up the list to the #3 spot. And she’s only 23.
Slaney, once a fan favorite after crashing the national-class scene as a pigtailed 14-year-old in the mid-1970s and perhaps best known for her fall and subsequent anguish in the 1984 Olympic 3,000, and the comically photogenic Favor-Hamilton went under 4:00 five times each. It seems inevitable that Shannon, just 23, will be the next American to do it. She’s a rare talent, to be sure, but the collective progress of Shannon, Erin Donahue (who won the adidas 800 meters — not her best event — in 2:02.04, the third-fastest U.S. time in 2008) and of course Shalane Flanagan (30:34 in the 10,000 two weeks ago, by far the fastest time ever by an American) since each began training under John Cook and with each other is remarkable. All were great collegiate runners, but now they’re all world class, period. And with the Olympic Trials coming up in a matter of weeks, it’s an awesome time to be an aficionado.