More is known about optimal fuelling, hydration and sleep. Improve those and you improve your daily training. Better quality training compounds and allows you to reach closer to your talent ceiling.
Kerr also had a system set up so his bedroom had less oxygen than the rest of his house (to mimic sleeping at altitude).
He had two pacers breaking the air for the first 1,000m (although he had to do it himself the rest of the way, which was bloody impressive). Meant he could relax mentally for the first 2.5 laps and didn't have to focus on pace. I think El Guerrouj set the previous WR in a race without pacers.
They also had pacing lights on the track which helps the pacers run at an even pace.
And there are all sorts of innovations like taking sodium bicarbonate to reduce muscle acidity, nitrates to dilate the veins and increase blood flow to muscles and high doses of caffeine to reduce the rate of perceived exertion.
As someone else mentioned, track surfaces are generally a little bouncier now than they used to be.
El Guerrouj had two pacers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvCsj7eJKKA
In fact, looking at this race, Tanui (the second pacer) actually stays on the track for longer than today's pacers did.
https://www.wada-ama.org/en/what-we-do/world-anti-doping-cod...
The gels are much the same. Getting the same nutiritional ratios used to require carefully controlled eating and certainly weighed vastly more than the gels adding both weight and complexity and likely being less performant.
Most(?) sports handle this by maintaining multiple leaderboards. The sub two hour 26.2 mile run was broken years ago, but the sub 2 marathon race was only recently completed, for instance. The difference being that the original was done much like this one in that it was paced, on a track, etc while the later was run in typical marathon conditions with other racers, variable winds etc.
Sleep is the biggest performance enhancer. They should ban that.
Dr Kyle works out the precise dietary requirements to support my training while my performance chef Jameel Austin does the shopping and makes the meals to ensure I implement that. Everything I put into my body is cooked by Jameel. He also works in a restaurant as a pastry chef – that’s not a food on my menu – but he comes to our house every Monday and Thursday to prepare the meals.
We also do an eight-day coffee fast before races. A coffee about three hours before the race should then have more impact. Regular blood-work informs whether any supplements are recommended by Dr Kyle. Supplements that I might have at different times of the year include vitamin D, omega-3 or beta-alanine.
Like most runners now in almost every distance and endurance sport, I will also take sodium bicarbonate before a race, but I never bother in training. Sodium bicarbonate is essentially baking soda and has long been known to buffer hydrogen ions and thus delay muscle fatigue. Its usage, however, has increased over recent years after it was produced in a gel that helps to bypass the gut and thus reduce the risk of gastro issues.Surely raw human potential cannot have progressed very much at all in the (at most) two generations represented by the 27 years the record stood.
Granted, the population is significantly higher, so it is more statistically likely that we've produced a genuinely faster human than existed 27 years ago.
I think it's fairly well accepted that most of the records being broken now are down to tech, nutrition, and aids. Springier shoes, mechanical pacers, better 'fuels', deeper understanding of exercise periodization, etc.
Give the old record runner all of the same boosts, the same training, I can't imagine he'd be noticeably slower, perhaps within hundreths, but I'd bet within a tenth or two.
Once that was done the flood gates opened and many others broke it in the following months. This is the “central governor” theory in endurance sports.
Progress had been steady for decades, but was interrupted by WW2.
There was one other person who did it a sub 4 minute a month and a half after him, then 3 more people the next year.
It was more down to improvement in training (Bannister was doing interval training, which was a new idea at the time).
We are assuming the old record is "the best a human can do because one person did it best" or some form of that.
There are likely hundreds or thousands of people alive right now who could break this record given the same lifestyle and training.
IMO, better training counts as "raw performance". I think that's more interesting than somebody happening to be born with a genetic advantage.
If you can find the human equivalent of the rabbit for greyhounds then maybe even more could be achieved.
Do you have any insight into what algorithm it uses? Like a ghost runner of the record pace or something?
They are almost always even splits, with a consistent pace through the entire race, though this can be adjusted if the runners request it; that is rare though.
They typically have green lights, which is the target pace, and then a set of blue lights ahead of them, which gives a visual indicator of how far ahead a runner is from the green lights.
[Josh Kerr's coach, Danny] Mackey was set to have a meeting with representatives from Wavelight on Tuesday to discuss the pace. He said they have yet to lock in specific splits, but Kerr told LetsRun.com in April that “an even split or a slightly negative split, I think, is the way to do it.”
3:43.13 mile pace is 55.45 per 400, which would mean 1:50.90 at 800 if they were to go for even splits.
Mackey says he hopes the pace is pretty even and “hopefully he’s got something left in the end.”
I would guess it's just uniform world record pace, and it's up to the runner to use their own strategy - stay just in touch with the light for the first three laps and overtake it on the fourth, or something.
Could give a psychological boost though - a placebo effect - even if you only believe that it gives you an edge.
In a mile it could be between 1 and 7 tenths, depending on wind and and how bad the default outfit was.
And that may seem insignificant but its big margins at the elite level.