I like Ike wrote:
@MAFDonald,
So are you saying he should be training differently than I should? What would you suggest? We've both got a target 5k race coming up in another month and a half. Would should he do differently than I during the remaining time?
We are not hyper-focusing on our relative speed, but I find it curious that a guy that's so much younger and has got so much more natural short distance speed is that much slower than I. You read so much here about just running the mileage, do a tempo and a track workout and things will drop yet it seems to work better for me (with less effort) than for him. I just wanted to explore that.
You are not revealing enough data to remotely pinpoint a trend. Maybe your friend's problem could be a100% mental, maybe it could be 1000 other things. Impossible to tell.
Right now we don't even know how long you've both been training for...are you both off the couch? Do you have any previous fitness from another sport like soccer? If so how many years, etc, etc, hopefully you get the point.
Now, if you trained x method a week and he trained y method a week, continuously for 1 year, 2 years, or longer, then and only then is it worth looking at patterns. Such a small/unknown sample portion of data is not worth hyper-focusing on anything at all.