Obama VS Alexi Pappas

Anyone with a basic understanding of athletics knows this isn't true. But also it's selfish to attribute success solely to hard work.

It takes both (talent and hard work). Both the president and Alexi both come off as idiots.

Is ANYONE surprised a liberal diminished hard work?

This is a man who won a Nobel Prize without doing anything.

So why is she slower than Emma Coburn?

Less talented or not working hard enough?

Liberalism = a mental disorder wrote:

Is ANYONE surprised a liberal diminished hard work?

This is a man who won a Nobel Prize without doing anything.

There are many talented high schoolers who cruise through high school without doing as much work as their less talented peers.

An untalented runner has no easy days; they may have slow days, but they don't have easy days.

messi wrote:

An untalented runner has no easy days; they may have slow days, but they don't have easy days.

Sounds like that problem might be overtraining.

I think it's naive to say that talent plays no role in how successful a runner becomes. Does Alexi Pappas really believe that she's one of the most successful runners in the country because she works harder than everyone else?

Put another way, I go out and train every single day, do whatever I can to get better. But, no matter how hard I try, I will never be as talented as Galen Rupp. Even if I devoted the rest of my life to training, I have a limit that is well below professional level.

While I have no doubt that Alexi Pappas works hard, she has to admit that she was gifted with a runner's body that can move efficiently and withstand intense training.

How old is Pappas? 24? She's right at that age where she will begin to realize that talent plays a much bigger role in her success than she thinks. All it will take is a few subpar season of running even though she is doing EVERYTHING right to get the picture. They were both right here, but Obama's argument is more grown up and realistic.

In Claude Bouchard's Heritage Family Study Series, they did a study of 86 nuclear families, recruited and tested over 700 family members and, among other things, but them all on an interval training program in a laboratory for 20 weeks and retested them. They found that while the mean gain in VO2max was 19%, 5% gained nothing at all, and 5% gained 40-50%. Overall, they found that genetic differences explained ~40% of the variation in individual performance.

They found the maximum inherited ability to be 47%. The also found that there was no relationship between baseline VO2max, and the gain due to training:

"Hence, part of the genetic component for VO2max expresses itself only in response to an active lifestyle.

http://www.pbrc.edu/heritage/

To both Alexi Pappas and people like Malmo (who want to believe that VO2max is meaningless): You're totally full of shit. The scientific evidence here is quite clear.

Ivy League -

It is an athletic conference, not an indicator or guarantor of higher-order thinking.

oh for pete's sake alexi - you have been a top runner at every level - even HS. You are that fast because of your talent and your work ethic.

To say that I could have been a sponsored Nike runner if I had just worked as hard as you is absurd and insulting to me - your talent is one in a million.

chalking your success to just hard work with a drop of talent is a slap in the face of many people.

Alexi is being ridiculous. I met her in high school when she had run her opening mile of her freshman or sophomore track season, can't remember which. She ran sub 5.

Of course she worked a lot harder to get to where she is now, but she was running 4:4x as a sophomore. She then QUIT RUNNING for a couple years because of soccer, eventually resurfacing at Dartmouth. Her inconsistent training and rise to the top whenever she does train obviously indicates she is one of the most talented runners out there.

I'm not discrediting the hard work she did in addition to her talent, but she is sure as Hell talented.

This would explain some of what Daivd Epstein wrote about in his book, i.e., having a high baseline level of fitness being one kind of talent, a high responder being another, etc.

He knows that runners work very hard but he's probably right that different runners respond very differently to the same training, enough to account for differences between the top and lesser athletes. Notice, though, that hard work accounts for more than talent in distance running. Hard work (meaning at least 80 miles per week, with two to three workouts, will get any man 20-35 years old down below 17:00 for 5k, but the hardest work of all will not get most men below 14 for 5k.

Talk to any professional athlete out there, they probably say they are the hardest working and least talented athlete. Running pristinely makes you aware of your flaws, and you feel it on such a deep level you can fail to see them in others.

She probably just looks at all the (few) better females out there, and calls them the talent and her abilities as a result of effort. But she's failing to realize she is no different, no less special, just an average hard working girl with a gift that makes her running special.

messi wrote:

I agree with Obama that running is easier for talented efficient runners than untalented inefficient runners.

It is more to do with the efficiency than anything else. In my observations untalented runners often work harder than talented runners because it is NEVER effortless for them like it is for Alexi Pappas.

Obama was dead-on with this one.

http://gotracktownusa.com/inside_track/2015/01/alexi-pappas-president-said/

If she had any talent in the brains department she would have said that Obama was born with natural intelligence and leadership abilities and that is why he was in the white house. So in the end, not only was the president correct, Pappas is also a moron.

Alexi is a lot stupider these days because of the centro sauce and spending time vegetating at oregon clown kollege.

The "many people" offended by that would also be lying to themselves. Sure, maybe they're less talented. Yet did they really train to their absolute max potential? Did they really spend each day of training as well as they could? If not, maybe they could have become better than they reached, and who knows by how much. In "How to become CEO" by Jeffrey Fox, he said that you must always be ready to take on more responsibilities, no matter how much you're already doing. That's the only way you could advance and handle a promotion. The same holds for running: you must believe you can do more.

My first cross country race in high school I ran over 22 minutes. By the time I graduated I had run low 15s and was a state champ. Looking at just that Alexi would say that I was a very hard worker.

BUT, the reason I went out for cross country in the first place was that I was always good at running compared to my peers. Without doing any training I was always quicker in basketball and had more left at the end of soccer games. I just had to work hard to unlock the talent that was there.

Thinking back to my college team, we all pretty much did the same training. The key workouts were the same (paces varied, obviously), and our mileage was within 10% of each other. But while some of us were running mid 24s, others struggled to break 30 (this was a DIII team). What was the difference? Talent.