The Brutal truth about talent vs hard work.

Talent does not change. You seem very defensive and confused. You should have trained harder if you believe that was you limiting factor. Must have been your lack of work ethic that limited you. My lifetime PRs are much better than yours and I never tried very hard.

Top guys cluster in particular training groups because the group and the coach are more important than the genes.

lol.

I feel pretty comfortable knowing that anyone whose "lifetime PRs are much better than mine" wouldn't feel the need to claim it here.

Good thing you avoided becoming one of those "jerks."

And yet you felt compelled to tell us your life story of starting out as a slow chubby kid who overcame life struggles to become a lightning fast runner. What a joke.

I have ran with guys who ran as much as 130 mpw, but maybe it was they ran TOO MANY MILES TOO HARD??? Did ja think! I remember talking to this kid from Georgetown who told me it was okay to be tired, that was part of the training process! Well, yeah, most of us did think that!

Some guys are better off running 60-70 mpw and it is literal fact that some of them are the best in the world. It is not because they do not train hard, it is because they train smart and do enough of the right things!

DoubleDonkey

I'm pretty sure there is a psychological theory that supports that when people succeed at something they tend to overemphasize their skill and work ethic and underemphasize luck. Conversely, when people fail, they tend to overemphasize luck and underemphasize their own contributions.

You win at poker and you think you are better than others. You lose and you blame the cards you were dealt.

I ran on a D3 team, and I feel that about a third of the team had what it took in terms of work ethic to be Olympians. They lacked high end talent and injury luck.

Many people who visit these boards were at least some of the better runners on their high school team, or at least good enough to run at college. People here downplay that ... if you were one of the best runners in high school, you were probably 1 in 100 in terms of talent. If you were good enough to have any success at any college level, you were probably 1 in 1,000. If you were D1 and good, or top level D3, you were probably 1 in 10,000.

National class? You are probably 1 in a million. Olympic medalist? 1 in 10 million.

That is called genetic luck.

It of course takes much more than genetic luck, but I'd say the majority of college runners have what it takes in terms of hard work to succeed at the highest level. At some point, it is all about luck and not work ethic.

...Really... Okay, then, how do you know what your ceiling is or was or should be. No one knows that budweiser. By the way I am pretty sure you said the same thing in your two sentences at least three times! Look at it again!

Sincerely,

DoubleDonkey

Not many people stay with anything, unless they have a little bit of talent in it! Thank you very little.

DoubleDonkey

Actually I got a good laugh from your post. I think your punishment is to read it 10 times and then sing it 20 times. Then you might "get it."

What this thread also shows is that there are considerable differences in intellectual talent, not just athletic talent, with the less talented being least aware of it.

You don’t believe there is a point of diminishing returns? If Lindgren and Ryun had increased their training by 20%, would they have run even faster? Did Ryun’s 46 second 440y speed come supernatural levels of training?

Alan Webb beat Ryun’s HS record while running 60 mpw and Kessler’s 1500m which converts to 3:51.5 with 75-90 mpw and a late start to serious training. Colin Sahlman ran 3:56 with 65(?) mpw. I don’t believe the three could have possibly run any faster had they trained like Ryun did. Obviously the point of diminishing returns is significantly less than what Ryun did and he was lucky he didn’t suffer significant injuries. Limits are set by levels of physical maturation and talent, and overtraining won’t raise them.

actually my posts are about not limiting yourself.

there's not a word about being chubby or any of life's struggles but you can take whatever you want out of it.

Why did you underachieve? Did you limit yourself? Why didn't you run 12:50? Why didn't you become an Olympian? Was it because you are lazy?

You know, you are so right. If you can just give me that complete list of what 'talent' actually is, I'll gladly identify what element or elements I was missing that prevented me from being an Olympic gold medal winner.

Until you are able to do that I'll just pass on further discussion with you.

You lacked no talent. You lacked willpower. You are not strong minded like the best. You just did not work hard enough. I assume that it carried through to your work life.

This really is it in a nutshell. How close do you get to your abilities? Look, it took two years of walk on at a D2 school and hitting 80 miles a week to get to 34 minutes for a 10K. There are high school kids who walk on at 16 and run 36 minutes from a soccer background. I'm not the least talented person in the world, there were other D2 runners I beat, but training with even 31 minutes 10K runners on the way to that meager 34:20 showed me, in stark terms, what the talent gap between me and them was. I can't imagine trying to train with a 27:50 guy, even on the easy days.

Here is the question I faced at 20: If I trained at the that level, 80+ miles a week for a decade, do I think that I would ever become Brian Sell who we know went from not making varsity in HS to an Olympic team? Hell no. I could have probably dropped another 30 seconds off of that 10K and run 33:XX and lost a few more years of my life to it. But there were other things in life calling.

I don't think that I bumped up against the ceiling of what my physical limits were, but I think I got close enough to see them and realize just how little talent I had compared to all the guys in front of me at the race.

And unlike the OP, I enjoyed the hell out of it.

@kickers usually win:

Ron Daws

Brian Sell

just to name two

Ron is another example from the ‘60s where there is no information about training or racing. He only ran 2:20 so I don’t think you citing him means much.

Sell played multiple sports in HS and didn’t run to his ability. A a strength runner like Sell with a 4:28 PR, should have been able to run 9:30 and not 10:06. If he had trained seriously, his 3200m PR would have come way down and along with it, his 1600m time. It’s very likely that if his focus was on XC/Track, he would have been at least 4:15/9:00.

When I was in HS, there was a guy from my section that went on to run 2:12 a couple of times and finished 6th at Boston. His HS PRs were 4:38/9:38 from his junior year, but they were not an indication of his talent. He had a tremendous XC season his Senior year, destroying course records and was at a near 9:00 level of performance. He was injured through out senior years and never approached his mile/2-mile times. Believing that based on his PRs, he was a guy that made himself into a great runner after HS, is not accurate.