The Lure and Romance of the Double
Those distances are magic! The Ten Thousand … the Five Thousand … the very sound sings of Olympian efforts by the world’s finest distance runners over the decades in the two longest track races in the Olympic Games.
Now a new era dawns! It took more than a century since the birth of the Modern Olympics in 1896 before Bob Anderson, an American distance running visionary, grafted those two distances together in a new running event, indeed a new sport, with its own rules, regulations and tactical variations, called the Double Road Race™. A new sport in which participants would run those two distances on a road course, thus emulating what we’d all seen those heroic Olympians do over the decades in the Olympics themselves – only the participants in the Double would run those distances back to back with only a one-hour break in between!
by Dave Prokop
http://www.doubleroadrace.com