Natural talent vs. hard work

asdfawerqwe wrote:

This prooves it all. 35 miles a week even training for the 1600 is incredibly low. Crank this up to 50+ with 1 to 2 quality speed workouts a week and you could break 5 easy.

Injuries can set you back greatly but if you're the type of person who gets injured consistently then drop off the running mileage and supplement alot of non impact cross training such as biking and swimming, they can keep you at a good aerobic fitness level and keeps alot of the stress off of your body that running causes.

Yeah, I'd love to get up to 50+ miles a week, but it seems that every time I try to increase, I get a hip injury (twice on the left, once on the right). Pool running's a pretty good idea but that would mean paying for a membership to the Y lol

That's a great attitude to have, that if anyone can beat you you may as well not bother. Noone on this board is the best in the world at anything, you do activities for yourself not for some arbitrary measure of success that you define so that you can never meet it. You make up your own criteria for what qualifies as success and if you want your criterion to be am I the fastest in the world then you're guaranteed to not-"succeed".

Also as a side-note running is definitely one of the activities that has the largest contribution from genetics on the amateur level. I would argue that any other major sport which has more skill involved (tennis, soccer, basketball) you can improve more by hard work than you can in track.

niceone wrote:

Also as a side-note running is definitely one of the activities that has the largest contribution from genetics on the amateur level. I would argue that any other major sport which has more skill involved (tennis, soccer, basketball) you can improve more by hard work than you can in track.

Absolutely. Sports like running that are limited by physiology have a bigger genetic component than skill sports.

niceone wrote:

That's a great attitude to have, that if anyone can beat you you may as well not bother.

Yes, you're right. To quit running in the way I did is a decision I've regretted for 41 years...

niceone wrote:

Noone on this board is the best in the world at anything...

Speak for yourself. Some of us are very accomplished athletes

thats fine wrote:

niceone wrote:

Noone on this board is the best in the world at anything...

Speak for yourself. Some of us are very accomplished athletes

aight Rudisha. We all know how you love sipping a nice beer and trolling letsrun.

What many people dont realize is this ethereal "talent" that people have is completely genetics. For example ATP synthesis is based off of proton gradients in the mitochondria of each cell. I can imagine that someone like galen rupp vs me (4:16 mile PR) has a much greater ability to reload his ATP stores so his muscles can have a much greater power stroke. Im sure his hemoglobin have a higher binding efficiency for O2: whether a more stable amino acid binding region to bind the O2 or to anchor the iron ion in the heme ring. His Cori Cycle (how the body deals with lactic acidosis), is certainlymuch more efficient than mine and thusly his lactic acid threshold occurs at a much faster pace (when the mitochondria is acidic enough from excess lactic acid due to lack of O2, atp synthesis shuts down as the body's evolutionarily developed failsafe switch or the mitochondria will waste excess energy it should not).

Yes mentally there is a component to running, but even thinking is goverened by genetics (production of neurotransmitters, ability to mitigate pain with seratonin, synaptic conduction and transmission etc...). Certain people just have better proteins for thses things (when someone has good genes, it means their genes code for proteins that actually carry out the biochemistry necessary for life).

I know it takes the "heart and soul" out of running...

90% of that is trainable.

The most talented runner who happens to be a very lazy person will always beat the least talented runner who happens to be the hardest worker. There is not way around that.

Right and the degree of adaptability is genetically influenced as well...

Hence why someone can run over 70 mpw for months and never crack 5 while someone can run for two weeks and run 4:30 (some D3 teams are this way, kids who can crack 4:20 amd kicks who can't break 5 despite doing same workouts and such on the same team)

Very true. It cannot even be contended that running is 90% or more genetic. I got in an argument with one of my older family members over this because he kept insisting that "if you train hard enough, you'll reach your goals." Which explains why I can train for a week and run faster times 100-5K than he ever did in his life with training. The same guy who invented the "10,000 hour rule" claimed the same thing applied to running. I know tons of people who have run over 10,000 miles, yet are nowhere near elite. My old HS coach, who was a 15:00 5K guy in college, claimed he was pretty talented but just worked his ass off to get where he was, and that he knew by then he had reached his limit in lowering his times. The whole 10,000 rule has no merit in any area. I knew several kids that played violin for thousands and thousands of hours, yet one of my friends was a prodigy with perfect pitch that outperformed all of them with far less practice and got a scholarship because of it. Same even with skill based sports. At the bottom level, practice helps more, but at a certain point, near the elite level, many genetic factors like hand-eye coordination, body type, etc. will separate the true talents.

It is interesting how our genetic expression is altered during our lifetime depending on changes in environment and behaviour. This is a fairly new field and is rapidly showing how flexible genetic expression may actually be.

This is why someone who drives themselves for long enough, using enough intelligence along the way, can seem to rise from nowhere to prominence.

So whilst moving to a different climate may see subtle changes in your gene expression as dominant ones become recessive and recessive ones become dominant, it is also conceivable that, or order to facilitate the vision in our minds eye, our genes combine in different ways than before, to make us seem more talented than we used to be?

Seem perhaps would be the key word here. I do not think much is different from 40 years ago. If anything, I believe the importance of talent is being diminished as society is adopting the concept that hard work can take you anywhere. That applies to success, but people have expanded that to basically everything. They fail to realize that in areas such as athletics, your body can only do so much and everyone has their own limit/threshold. Talent is no different. Do you think people have naturally become more athletically gifted in such a short span of time? The only things that have changed are our aids: faster tracks, shoes, uniforms, training methods. That may be why it seems we are more talented. Sometimes the greatest talents have been out there, but they've never been discovered. I bet in America we could easily have 10x more elite track athletes than we do currently if track was our largest sport. Kenya, Ethiopia, Jamaica, why do they produce such talents every year without ceasing? Their main sport is track, hence they have a larger talent/gene pool to take from and produce athletes. Why is it so surprising that in America we have not had a 10K medalist since 1964? We're a country of 300 million, more than Ethiopia and Kenya combined. It is highly unlikely from a statistical standpoint that we have not had the talent necessary to produce a medalist in the last 48 years. I am sure in these last 48 years, we have had at least 1, hell, probably at least 10, more athletes that are more talented than Rupp that just never realized their potential. Rupp is very talented indeed, but he has had every resource available to him since he started running to maximize his potential, and he has done exactly that.

You should clearly run the 800. 35 miles per week is fine for that event and you can always move back to the mile once you aren't slow. Get in the weight room, run some true speed work (sprints) and run up some hills while you're at it. Do you practice form drills?

OP, your situation isn't that unusual. I was a little bit slower than you in the 400 and a little bit faster in the 1600 in high school. In college, I got down to 4:37 for 1500 and 17:25 for 5k. That took four years of hard work on top of the four year of hard work in high school. In graduate school, I became a coach and helped a lot of people make huge jumps from high school to college. Much larger jumps than I made myself. One guy went from 10:10 for 3200, having run for York high school, to 14:19 for 5k. But others made smaller improvements. Everyone is different. Some are late bloomers. Some, like me, never really bloom at all (perhaps I am just an extremely late bloomer? I'm still trying to find out).

You can get a lot out of this sport whether or not your are a scoring runner. As long as you work hard and bring an attitude to practice that helps your team's scoring runners want to work hard, then you are an asset to any team and any coach. And don't worry too much about what your potential is. In my first several years of running, I wasted many racing opportunities because I was too concerned about what I couldn't do and not focused on what I could realistically do. Reaching your potential, no matter how modest, is worth your time and effort. You should never be ashamed of it.

Also, see a physical therapist about your hip. If there is a physical limit preventing you from training harder, then go seek out the knowledge that you need to overcome that limit. If you can't run faster because you don't have the talent, that's fine and it's honorable to do the best that you can. But don't let yourself be hampered by a lack of knowledge.

Dr. Runner wrote:

Hence why someone can run over 70 mpw for months and never crack 5 while someone can run for two weeks and run 4:30 (some D3 teams are this way, kids who can crack 4:20 amd kicks who can't break 5 despite doing same workouts and such on the same team)

Why are you so determined for genetics to be so limiting? Stop using that cop out. There are many things that can affect people's running that have nothing to with genetics.

Just because one person runs faster off of the same training does not mean that genetics are involved at all. Most people don't even try to figure it out. They just blame it on genetics.

A Philosophical Perspective wrote:

Yes, how fast you run, at the beginning, in the middle of your career, and for your lifetime best, is partly a factor of talent, but it's the running itself that you do that is the real actvity, not whether or not it was easy for you, or whether your best race made you the fastest in the world, or your city, or just your own family. It's a joy of life. Don't stop because others are better. Keep running for what it does for you, strengthening you in many ways.

This is the same philosophy I have. And I'll say it's a mix of both, and your talent may lie somewhere else. I'm not all that fast, though I saw huge gains in my first year of actually training with a team. I went from running a 7:30 minute mile to a 5:58 minute 1500 during my first time training with a XC and spring track season (I'm a female, and not sure what my mile time was at that point in my training). I discovered longer distances were my thing after running several half marathons as well as placing higher on the 3000 as opposed to the 1500... The harder and longer the course, the higher I placed. The way I'm built lends itself more to long, difficult courses as opposed to a flat track. That year of track/XC was the only year I was able to run injury free. After that I kept getting hurt, so I haven't been in able to put in the miles to improve where I have the most natural ability. I don't keep running and pushing myself because I think I'm going to win anything, but I do it because it's something I love and enjoy seeing progress, even if I only place in my age group.

I think you'll find that a lot of people who really LOVE running are not all that fast (one of my friends I ran with could beat me in the shorter distances no problem, but she hated running).

Correction: 1971 [not 1972] - Senior, cross-country: 3rd in conference championship

And: "In that 1971 [not 1972] cross-country conference championship..."

I didn't compete in what would have been my senior track season, which was the spring/early summer of 1972.

Apologies for clogging up the thread with a duplicate post, but the error was bugging me.