Barry and I had a conversation about Allyson Felix about 18 months ago. Barry and Wes Smith, the head coach of the track team in Allyson’s freshman year, had been discussing her potential in the 400m. Barry had lobbied for Allyson to drop the 100m and run the 200m and 400m in her senior year at Los Angeles Baptist High School. The vote was 2-1 against swapping the longer sprint for the shorter one. In that same year Felix ran under 51.5 twice in the 4x400 relay.

Wes mentioned that he still had the test numbers for the camp she attended at the end of her freshman year. It was because of the camp that she asked Barry to work with her in the weightroom.

Included in the packet Wes saved was a 10 m trial time which was perfect for ASR. Barry plugged the 10m run and used more current numbers from her 100m and 200m (pre World Championship) to come up with a prediction for Allyson’s 400m time. Neither Wes nor Barry thought the time was possible, so Barry redid the numbers several times and in several different ways. The results were virtually the same: the range was from low 46s to high 48s (3% range of error) with 47.37 as the predicted time.

Barry called me that evening and mentioned what he had done with the algorithm. He believed that she was capable of running that time or better because of how she runs races. She does not have the consistently good starts to be as competitive in the 100m, but the longer sprints easily mitigate that problem. He also mentioned the predictions to Dr. Weyand, who questioned Barry about how he used the algorithm to arrive at those numbers. Dr. Weyand said that it would be interesting to see how it came out.

When it appeared that Felix was not going to be running the 400m anytime soon, we had no more discussion on the subject, and forgot about the numbers.

The subject came up again after Allyson’s 48s relay leg. Barry was not in the least surprised by her performance. In the years ahead, we could see the emergence of a 200/400 runner whose efforts will be as impressive as Michael Johnson's.

Ken Jakalski