What Is the Best 5K Time An Average American Could Optimally Be Trained To Run?

Asker of Things and I are 100% on the same page.

ipso facto, I thought that you and I are on the same side of the argument: folks saying 21:00 or 22:00 are way too high. I have provided statistical data to support a natural average of about 18:30 for a real world set of high school boys that work hard for 4 years. I never claimed that the analysis must stop there. I never claimed the final answer is 18:30, but it is strong evidence against those who think the final answer is anywhere above 20:00. I clarified that trends would have to be extrapolated until each man reaches his prime.

If my premise is flawed and you outright reject any sort of statistical approach to answering the question, nothing short of identifying and isolating the human 5k gene will answer the question to your satisfaction. Good luck with that.

ipso facto wrote:

you're whining by continually whining about research you can do yourself.

it's irrelevant because it doesn't have anything to do with the op. v02max ceiling is but one small factor of an athlete's physiological makeup and is not an indicator of what the average person can do in a 5k with optimal training for an optimal amount of time (you know, what the OP is about).

if you want to start a thread concerning VO2max, the genetic ceiling of that, and its correlation to race times, then do that.

quit hijacking this thread. i'll stop responding to your ignorance concerning this subject now.

feel free to post something stupid about 20 mins being the average or something to get this train back on the track.

ipso

you have no reading comprehension at all.

i keep telling you that i've done the research, but that doesn't matter unless i know which papers in particular you are basing YOUR opinion/statements on. why aren't you understanding that?

First Good Answer wrote:

Asker of Things and I are 100% on the same page.

ipso facto, I thought that you and I are on the same side of the argument: folks saying 21:00 or 22:00 are way too high. I have provided statistical data to support a natural average of about 18:30 for a real world set of high school boys that work hard for 4 years. I never claimed that the analysis must stop there. I never claimed the final answer is 18:30, but it is strong evidence against those who think the final answer is anywhere above 20:00. I clarified that trends would have to be extrapolated until each man reaches his prime.

If my premise is flawed and you outright reject any sort of statistical approach to answering the question, nothing short of identifying and isolating the human 5k gene will answer the question to your satisfaction. Good luck with that.

first of all, 30 schools does not support a national average.

in any case, what you're missing with your 'statistical data' is the entire premise set out by the OP.

That's the point. Even starting with a freshman in hs is too late. Plus high school times don't have anything to do with optimal training, which is precisely what the op is about. that, and the other reasons, is why your premise is flawed. You're not accounting for the majority of the necessary components in reaching maximum potential so you can't pretend to extrapolate any meaningful relationships with your completely inadequate data.

your 5k gene quip, while perhaps having some facet of relevancy, also does NOT address the op to a very good extent because genetics are irrelevant if the optimal training for an optimal period with additional optimal factors are not included. It's not about the dream-world task of isolating any random gene because there isn't any single gene to isolate in the first place; it's about maximizing potential in the fullest way possible.

obviously there will be variation in a genetic ceiling, but just using some 'data' from a few high schools does not in any way address that ceiling.

In this hypothetical example of optimal training and nutrition from birth, I would say that the average American male would be around 16-17 min for a 5k.

You can't use real world road race results because some don't train right, some aren't even really racing. 15 years of training will make the average person in the top 1% of the real world. This is true for running, swimming, or almost anything else you can think of.

Im in high school and my best is a 17:32 but im training to be in the 16:30's to 16:10 and my coach who is in his 30s can run like a 17:50

Jeff Young wrote:

Im in high school and my best is a 17:32 but im training to be in the 16:30's to 16:10 and my coach who is in his 30s can run like a 17:50

2012 called and wants their thread back.

Apart from that humans didn’t evolve by running 20 minute 5ks, they evolved by outrunning prey for longer periods of time.

@asker of things, Romny was more or less correct about 20 secconds knocked off the 5k reccord.

Don't get me wrong, I know that breaking world reccords comes down to hundreths of a second even for the 5k, it took Kipchoge a whole year to bring his marathon time down by only 1 seccond!!!

But to put to scale your request that the whole country of america (population 3.29 million) switches over to a gigantic running army, (the populations of china's army is 2 million). The size of the largest most successful high school cross country teams are only under 200 participants.

In america alone, there are aproximately 92,683 Kenyon BORN americans.

What im saying is, is that you've got yourself the largest most comited team -- a super army with one goal. With all that being said, yes, the world reccord WILL definately be broken by way more than 20 secconds. Yes, Its going to be a challenge, but son, you've asked for the super soldiers to do it.

Now to answer your original question about the national 5k average. First off, the training schedule you give to your super army is crucial. Are you going with the 4 year highschool schedual? are we going with the handy dandy NCAA 6 year super speed program?

These programs will get athletes fast, fast. This means that there is a limited amount of time to get your cross country team of 329 million to be as fast as possible. But when you take away the time limit and let them grow into healthy 30 year olds (training since a child) than their capacities expand drastically.

Every american by the time they reach their 30s will actually be more capable of being faster than kids who are in high school.

Look at any super star's times when they were in high school and their times after college and they differences are insane.The problem? People have to get jobs and pay for stuff. But if on the other hand every human in american trained with top college distance programs, until they were 35, any one of them could be wicked fast.

So my guess is that the average (50 percentile mark) would land on 16:15 flat. And i'm being more than serious.

Because you can always push your self to be faster than you think, and give decades of traning, your army's slower guys can definately get close to 17:30s pushing the spread mark up and up. And when you think about all the guys who are allready fast, by the time they get to the middle of college, all of the americans who are even remotely athletic will all be under 15:30s. S

So its not hard (for me at least) to imagine an america where the national 5k 50th percentile is 15:15. Bear in mind for this estimate, physiological limitations are not correlated with physical limitations.

5k average with physiological limitation: 16:30

5k average without physiological limitation 15:10

13:00

We had 30 guys on my college team who had trained through high school and college. These guys were very committed and self selected because they were the fastest guys in gym class and on the soccer field. Five of these self selected guys ran under 16 minutes during college. I have won many road races with times of 16:30. I have beaten thousands of well trained Americans. The average is about 22 minutes for a well trained population.