how to see natural talent??????

asdfdsa wrote:

How can you tell if a h.s. distance runner has natural talent? Fast improvement? steady improvement? running fast after running only a couple years?

Alsthey're in h.s.o, can you usually tell someone's natural talent while

Genotype him.

Alistair Cragg....thats talent!!! 3:46 in high school; for 1500m while training three days a week

gav800 wrote:

HAVING NATURAL TALENT MEANS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING

OH YES IT DOES!!!!!

But prolonged, intelligent, hard work can take you farther in running than in practically any other sport. A dedicated "untalented" runner can beat a lazy "talented" one more often than not.

But not quite far enough....If you are aiming high - The truthful fact is that if you dont have it you dont have it... And distance running is no different to any other sport...

If you actually compare it with other sports the population distribution is alomst identical

Lets see wrote:

But not quite far enough....If you are aiming high ...

Dat true. If talent was meaningless, a number of the 18:00 5k guys who are reading this and bashing 13:20 guys for their failure to run 12:45 would be running sub-13:00 themselves, assuming their legs worked as hard at running as their fingers do at typing trash.

Put another way, if talent didn't matter at all, there'd be very little separation between the #1 guy and the #20 guy on every high school, college or club team (since each team's members all do basically the same workouts), and they'd all be elite or near-elite.