seymour butz wrote:
Let's face it, apart from Rupp and the Kenyan-Americans, American distance running (10K and up) is an embarrassment. We have professional runners struggling to run 28 minutes for 10K and 2:12 for the marathon. Since our white boys aren't getting it done, why are we not looking into recruiting Native Americans into the sport? A lot of these guys have incredible natural talent. I went to high school in South Dakota and every year there were Natives that would show up and run low 16s for 5K on basically no training. Problem is none of these guys would go to college so after high school they never ran a step again.
But just imagine if we get a large group of these guys to build up to 100 mpw over several years. We'd have more sub 2:10 marathoners than we'd know what to do with.
This is an interesting and complex topic. There is a lot of natural talent in the Native American community. I was a volunteer coach with a youth program when I lived in Arizona, it was not uncommon to see high school age kids run a 5-minute mile or go on a 3 mile run at altitude and in the heat with no training. One summer, I had a 15 yo girl Navajo run an 11:20 2-mile on a dirt track in sneakers with only a week and a half of training. I was super excited, but she stopped showing up with no explanation. I was told the issue was that some of the boys and/or her parents didn't like the fact that she was training with boys. Albeit, they didn't always progress much beyond the initial time trails, because of poor dieting, inconsistent training and overall lack of focus. When coaching Native American kids, you have so much crap to deal with, social issues, Natives typically don't trust non-Natives and when you start having some success, the parents, tribal leaders try to figure out how they can benefit and sometimes the kids simply have more important things to do besides training. I had a group of kids who were all first-year runners who paper could have placed at the AAU XC Nationals. They easily won the AAU regional race and I was able to raise money for the trip. In the end, everything fell apart, the parents and tribal leaders wanted some of the money for themselves and refused to believe my motivation was purely the kids and running. There are economic and cultural things that stand in the way and are particularly difficult for an outsider to navigate. That was many years ago, when Native American kids spent all of their time outdoors, I am told that nowadays, many of them sit around playing video games like the rest of American kids.
I believe there is still a lot of talent, but to succeed, it's going to take someone who is Native American, understands Indian culture and can navigate all of the non-running issues you have to deal with. Quite frankly, I think the kids would have to be removed from the reservation and allowed to focus on running. To answer the question, we are definitely not tapping into the Native American talent pool.