World champion of long-term planning

If Alan Webb wins the metric mile at the world track championships in Osaka tomorrow, then I'm looking forward to hearing the sound of hats, if not running shoes, being eaten.

Over the last few years, Webb has been subjected to a massive amount of spurious advice from his countrymen and the US media, from runners and non-runners alike, all thinking they know more about what it takes to be world-class than the bloke who's actually doing the business. I thought we only went in for this level of ill-informed hyper-criticism of our athletes in Britain, so it's been a revelation to have watched him being slagged off as a useless failure, and being told to change his coach before it's too late.

I don't know how Webb and Scott Raczko, who was his high school coach, have coped with the six years since he ran 3:53 to become the fastest high-school miler in history. "Webb has spent much of that time in a maelstrom of rushed expectation
and blind criticism, fueled by the explosion of Internet message boards
and the country's fascination with precocity. No other distance runner
has been more scrutinize," says Sports Illustrated's Tim Layden in a pre-world's interview.

It turns out that while US fans were baying for titles and records, Webb instead took a long-term view, realizing that in order to be world-class and stay there, he needed to be much stronger. In effect, he has spent six years building a base for the future. The patience of the distance runner: a great lesson from Layden's excellent article.

The highlights:

* He struggled through the 2003 season, adjusting to the pressures of running for a shoe company's money and living on his own. ("Here I am, buying a sofa when I should be training," recalls Webb.) A midsummer bout of appendicitis also helped stunt the season. All of which led Raczko and Webb to make a long-term plan.

"We had both been caught up in trying to run fast immediately," says Raczko, who began coaching Webb in 1998. "The only way you can ever run as fast as the best milers in the world is to run a certain level of very hard workouts. The only way to do that is to build tremendous [aerobic] strength. So let's spend the next three years -- 2004, '05, '06 -- doing that."

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* In April 2006 Webb stunned the US track world by winning a 10,000-meter race in 27:34.72, the best debut ever by an American at that distance. His impressive range, from 800 to 10,000 meters, makes him one of the most versatile runners in history.

A hamstring injury and an episode of anemia cut short Webb's 2006 summer season, but that simply postponed the inevitable. For the '07 season Raczko reduced Webb's intense track sessions from a total of 10,000 meters per workout to fewer than 8,000 meters. "Just that little bit of difference, and it's playtime," says Webb. "You can really hammer."

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* The 1,500 is a strategic riddle, and races are often won by the luckiest, not the swiftest. If a runner moves too soon or gets boxed in, often his race is over. "To win any medal at all," says Kennedy, "you have to be tactically almost perfect."