If Bekele was a farmer and didn't train a single time in his life, what would his 5k time be?

Did you do that literally the first time you ran a mile? Period? Not a few weeks of training. Not a few other smaller races. Not some running in gym class. Literally. Your first. Mile?

Yes, first anything. I didn't play sports and didn't know running was a sport. I ended up running 4:15 in high school on pretty minimal training and 14:30 in college on 70MPW.

Impala31 wrote:

ahaha not even break 25.

almost any African kid breaks 25 with 0 training.

We are not talking about an overweight couch potato American.

Is it not said that bekele did not stress aerobic system while young. A lot of African kid walk/run a lot to go scool and play games like soccer. It is not even training but they are in good condition.

Working in an African farm all day long, walking a lot, playing soccer games when kid is way enough for bekele to break 17 and probably 16'.

Well said. Half the responders to this thread seem to be envisioning Bekele strapped to a gurney for 25 years in advance of this experiment, whereas your average 25 year old Ethiopian farmer (especially one at racing weight) is pretty fit. Never mind the fact we’re talking about perhaps the most talented 5k runner we’ve seen.

My guesses are:

Impromptu weekend race: 15:39

1 year of dedicated, intelligent training: 13:20

Lifetime best after a few years: 13:00

Has anybody in this thread ever stepped foot on a farm before? I doubt it.

Imagine being on your feet all day long, with minimal technology and at elevation. Also imagine you have the best 5k talent the world has ever seen. Now consider your estimation of >20 minutes.

Clearly you don't know what means the Word "Talent".

A person like Kenenisa not overweigth, at the age of 25 years, working as farmer (therefore, a manual job, where he needs to use energy), can easy run UNDER 15' in his first attempt on the distance.

Forget the idea that, with his talent, he has to spend one year for running 15', and start to think that the natural aerobic ability of the best runner all-time can produce, with no training, a performance that, for example in Italy, put him about position one hundred in the seasonal lists.

Don't do the mistake to think athletes of that level can reach their results because hard training only. In percentage, I give 80% to the natural talent, and 20% to their training, if carried out under a proper coach and in the proper way.

Without speaking about top levels, several years ago I had some Italian athlete, not runner, who decided to start at 23 years of age, went to the Track of Sisport Fiat for being tested, and ran 3000m in 8'52". At 27 he ran 13'23" (5000) and 2:11:51 (Marathon), at 28 ran 28'01" (10000) and at 30, 61'07" (HM).

One person every billion people on Earth can have Kenenisa's talent, and every comparison with normal people is a useless and stupid attempt.

Well, considering that Todd Williams ran his first mile in gym class in under 4:40 you’d have to think that Bekele would be under 16 for sure. The thing about athletes like Bekele is that they’re extremely competitive. Combine that with 1 in a billion talent and there you have it. I might even put him closer to 15 than 16.

What people are failing to consider is pacing. Remember, in this situation Bekele has NO IDEA what time he's capable of. He'd do either one of two things:

- Set off too fast and completely burn himself out so he runs a time much slower than what he's capable of.

- Set off way too slow and then at the end think "Huh. That wasn't as hard as I expected."

You are all assuming that he magically sets out with a perfectly even pace, but pacing takes at least a few days, possibly weeks of training to grow accustomed to.

Even if he were physically capable of running sub-16, no way is he actually doing it.

He could run sub 15 but you are probably correct that he woukd I nly run 16 minutes because of improper pacing.

This thread is even worse than most with the absolutely silly predictions of 18 or 19 or 20 minutes. There are millions of 15 and 16 minute guys in the world who could run 19 minutes if this situation applied to them. Look at this article and maybe you will rethink how fast a poor farmer from Kenya who is an untrained world class runner could go if offered $1000 to race a 10 year old girl. If you say anything over 17 minutes, you should be banned.

https://deadspin.com/10-year-old-girl-sets-a-world-record-1576257746

talent go wrote:

He could run sub 15 but you are probably correct that he woukd I nly run 16 minutes because of improper pacing.

This thread is even worse than most with the absolutely silly predictions of 18 or 19 or 20 minutes. There are millions of 15 and 16 minute guys in the world who could run 19 minutes if this situation applied to them. Look at this article and maybe you will rethink how fast a poor farmer from Kenya who is an untrained world class runner could go if offered $1000 to race a 10 year old girl. If you say anything over 17 minutes, you should be banned.

https://deadspin.com/10-year-old-girl-sets-a-world-record-1576257746

Yes, I have to agree with this post here. I think to say he would run 19 minutes+ is unrealistic, but also those saying he'd be pushing the 14 minute mark are equally stupid.

My personal estimate is that his potential would be in the 15s but his actual time in the 16s due to pacing. And with a couple of week training his time would plummet.

A while back I had a kid come out senior year for track, mostly because we had hit it off in class. He was a pretty good athlete, but hadn't done organized sport. Ran 5:04 for the mile in a time trial off of one week of training.

He was no Bekele.

The Oromos are pastoralists, chasing cows and goats around. That's what is thought to have provided selection pressure resulting in Oromos and Kalenjins becoming fast runners. Sub-15 first time out.

"The reigning theory in the West is that runners from east Africa have some evolutionary advantage over runners from other backgrounds. Because so many of the elite runners come from the Oromo ethnic group in Ethiopia and the Kalenjin tribes in Kenya, it is assumed these groups must have adaptations or environments that make them faster. Perhaps it was their pastoralist fathers and grandfathers who spent generations running after cattle. "

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/running-circles-around-us-east-african-olympians-advantage-may-be-more-than-physical/

A story told about Abdi was that he did not run in high school and joined the cross country team at his junior college. There was a five mile time trial at the start of the season. Abdi, untrained, ran 25:xx.

Assuming that their base fitness is somewhere in the same range, I could imagine Bekele, the farmer, running around 15 for a 5k.

(Please disregard my username, it is not an attempt to be disrespectful.)

Thank you for your thoughts, Renato, but some of what you write here seems dubious. Firstly, with regard to 80% talent, 20% training. This would imply that the limit of someone who runs 25:00 in the 5km without training would have a limit of 20:00, or that someone who runs 20:00 without training would have a limit of 16:00. Both of these are certainly wrong. Maybe you meant to restrict only to 'elite' athletes, but it still seems very doubtful.

Secondly, as late as 1954, Zátopek set a world record of 13.57. This was a 1 second improvement on the world record of Hägg from 12 years before. Could Bekelele or anyone run within a minute of that time with no training? Absolutely no chance.

Not in response to Renato: I interpreted the question in the thread as 'what could Bekelele run off no significant aerobic training whatsoever?' This is what I based my not sub 20 and probably not sub 25 on. If the question is in fact 'what could he run if aerobically quite fit but without any running training', that changes things: obviously he could then go way under 20 the first time. I don't know how much under, but certainly not sub 15.

PresidentTrump wrote:

No way is a 25 year old farmer breaking 20 minutes first time out. At a shorter distance like a mile he would do much better maybe getting under 6. Running is all about specificity. Of course if he trained, the curve would be crazy steep.

The high school kids running 17 minutes were most certainly running around playing soccer etc. which is at least running in some form. A 25 year old ethiopian farmer, however talented, is not going to blast a 5km on nothing but potential after plowing fields.

What? I have no idea what he would run but I’m sure he’s more talented than I am and I ran 19 something with zero training. And I never ended up being that good at 5ks anyway, I only ever got down to low 17’s, which is a long ways off from mid 12’s. How can you be a runner and make such an uneducated assertion like that, that bekele wouldn’t break 20 without training?

Exactly. Talent is everything

david45 wrote:

JamesD2 wrote:

This seems very conservative. I was nothing special in high school, and as a scrawny 15-year-old maybe 6 weeks into my first season, I ran 3 miles XC in under 19. My teammates were like that too - after just a few weeks of training, it was pretty clear who was going to be decent, who was going to be good, and who wasn't. In one of the multitude of david45 threads, he asked how long it took people to break 20 in a 5K, and many of the responders said they did it easily in their first race. I'm sure a 25-year-old Bekele would have adapted to training much faster than any of us, assuming he didn't get injured.

Who was the Kenyan marathoner who basically did this - was an adult farmer when he started running competitively? Dennis Kimetto?

Exactly. Talent is everything

Keep telling yourself this bud.

David, there's a reason your last thread got deleted. What are JamesD2's credentials? Is he a coach? Where's his degree in exercise physiology? What are his credentials? Oh right this is an online forum where there are none, he stated his opinion as he is entitled to do so. The reality is you can improve a ton because even if your maximal potential is low, you're still at the floor of your potential. Shut up and run.

Long Time Lurker wrote:

david45 wrote:

Exactly. Talent is everything

Keep telling yourself this bud.

David, there's a reason your last thread got deleted. What are JamesD2's credentials? Is he a coach? Where's his degree in exercise physiology? What are his credentials? Oh right this is an online forum where there are none, he stated his opinion as he is entitled to do so. The reality is you can improve a ton because even if your maximal potential is low, you're still at the floor of your potential. Shut up and run.

My thread was deleted because the mods here hate free speech

david45 wrote:

My thread was deleted because the mods here hate free speech

No, it was deleted because you asked a loaded question of which you already planned your response to, just because you wanted to get a reaction out of someone because you get excited by that. I will refrain from derailing this thread but the reality is, everyone has potential. Some people have more potential than others. How hard are you willing to work to achieve your potential?

Long Time Lurker wrote:

david45 wrote:

My thread was deleted because the mods here hate free speech

No, it was deleted because you asked a loaded question of which you already planned your response to, just because you wanted to get a reaction out of someone because you get excited by that. I will refrain from derailing this thread but the reality is, everyone has potential. Some people have more potential than others. How hard are you willing to work to achieve your potential?

I was asking if it was possible for a coach to tell if someone had talent with only a couple of weeks of training. That is not a loaded question.