Triathlon or xc skiing. Maaaybee swimming but that's stretching it. Triathlon or skiing would have been DII (what I ran) but swimming would have been DIII walk-on or club.
Triathlon or xc skiing. Maaaybee swimming but that's stretching it. Triathlon or skiing would have been DII (what I ran) but swimming would have been DIII walk-on or club.
Tiger Webb wrote:
TPaine wrote:
golf.
so i have running and golf. sweet. i am sooooooooo cool.
I actually did both cross and golf in high school in the same (fall) season. One of the few high schoolers who was all-conference in two sports during the same season. I ran D3 so I'm pretty sure I could have been just as successful on the golf team. These two sports aren't exactly the best for attracting the ladies, however.
Have you seen the WAGs on the PGA tour?:)
Seriously Golf would probably have been my best bet given my build and base speed. But in golf working insanely hard and moderate talent can take you a long away. But you need to start pretty young and have access to place where you can practice 3+ hours/day. And no I don't have delusions that I could have made it on the PGA. The gap between a really good amateur guy who might be able to play in college and the PGA is like the difference between running in college and being an olympian.
LennyZ wrote:
Cringe wrote:
Distance running doesn't get near the best talent due to other sports like basketball, soccer and so on. There are so many basketball and baseball teams out there that if you are halfway decent at the highschool level you have a shot of making a team somewhere.
That was longwinded..
This logic is flawed. I would contend that running is the most competitive sport out there, in the USA and in the world. This is the case because everybody... and I mean every single person, started running when they were toddlers and knows how they naturally stack up against their peers. The natural selection into the sport of running is extremely high (i.e. I really don't know if I am a naturally good swimmer because although I can swim to survive, I have never raced anyone). Even if a great athlete is attracted to baseball or football for the reasons stated, if that athlete is very fast, they will also try running races. And if they are super fast, they may even quit baseball and football to pursue running.
This is true somewhat for the sprints, not so much distance running. You will notice though that good number of the best HS sprinters are just doing it for football conditioning. They don't take the sport super seriously.
How many English Premier League players had to fake mediocre 5k times 2 months ago? They are elite athletes, and it's not like they don't run.
Is a collegiate soccer player or wrestler a more talented distance runner than the guy on your high school team who took 4 years of running at 40-50mpw to run 18:20? - Probably. Do even 5% of them have the potential to be Joe Parks (Iona) if they switch to running full-time? I think not.
Countless former collegiate athletes pick up distance running in their 30's since there's nothing to compete in any more and suck at it.
SDSU Aztec wrote:
Sprintgeezer wrote:
It didn’t work like that.
Americans first got interested in me at the Peace Games. This was way back. They would talk to people now and then. Schools talked to my parents, but I didn’t care, and they told them I didn’t care. Some guys from some farm teams used to watch me play and came around a few times, but I was already firmly on the aircrew track. Matter of fact they came to our house while I was gone for a week at aircrew selection.
I couldn’t have cared less about their overtures. Money had no meaning to me, because mo matter how much money you had, there was no way you could fly a high-performance military aircraft.
Hard to explain, but piloting like that is like going into the clergy. You cannot be bought, and everything else pales in comparison.
Yes, I was very young.
So you were/are a foreigner?
Yep, but been here 20 years now.
Bzzzzzzt. Wrong. wrote:
I'm sorry. Pretty much every successful distance runner I know went into running because they did not have the athleticism or hand-eye coordination to be great at any other sport. I'm including myself in that. I believe it was Jerry Schumacher, talking about how every runner who thinks they could be a good steeplechaser is wrong because it takes coordination. He said if you lined up a team of really good runners and had them try to shoot a layup, almost none of them would make it.
Maybe he's wrong. It sounds like there are a lot of pro-level baseball and basketball players here. But they're already making $400K and have a trophy wife to go with the 14-minute 5K, so why bother?
Not everyone here is a successful distance runner.
Some of us are failed sprinters!?
Avocado's Number wrote:
Sprintgeezer wrote:
Hey Avocado that’s great. I used to spend hours as a kid reading books of plays, and practicing my back-rank strategies!
:)
(Curiously, almost forty years after my last serious chess game, and despite many tens of thousands of miles on the roads and trails, I'm apparently once again better at chess than at running. And sadly, it's not because I've suddenly gotten better at chess.)
Friend of mine who did his engineering PhD at MIT was pretty good, he won Canadian juniors or something like that, I’m mot sure how the structure goes. He was also great at ping pong, also won some big junior title.
I actually managed to get points on him in ping pong, he said I was great—better than I was at chess?.
Did you play at all at MIT?
Jeez, I just googled him, I think I just found his obituary. That was bizarre.
Cycling.
Definitely Soccer.
I’m a nobody D3 runner as it is, and even now barely practicing or playing soccer, I can still hold my own against guys who actually play on teams.
If I had years of practicing with teams I’d probably be at least an average D3 soccer player
karliots wrote:
Baseball for me. Could have played college baseball or cross country/track. I decided to go with running.
I played volleyball and lawn tennis in secondary school. I don't know if that answers your question.
[quote]Bzzzzzzt. Wrong. wrote:
I'm sorry. Pretty much every successful distance runner I know went into running because they did not have the athleticism or hand-eye coordination to be great at any other sport. mote]
That's not always the case. I believe size is a major factor. I played all sports. I was a pitcher, second baseman and centerfielder in baseball, quarterback, running back and kicker in football, point guard in basketball, and I bowled. I was 5'3" in the ninth grade and 5"8 as a senior. Just not big enough to be competitive in the team sports in college. There are exceptions, but you need to be astronomically good to play those sports at 5'8" and 150 lb. Much easier to be 5'8" and 120 and be very good at running.
The Angel of Death wrote:
DISC GOLF
Same here. Came up in ‘99/2000 playing a lot with Avery and Feldberg. Never really focused on either sport, but ended up cashing at a few Worlds and NT events. Made it to USDGC once. Was an also-ran at USATF cross. Did ok at a few ultras. Thinking about trying gravel cycling next.
I actually had to google what baseball is
Sprintgeezer wrote:
Avocado's Number wrote:
:)
(Curiously, almost forty years after my last serious chess game, and despite many tens of thousands of miles on the roads and trails, I'm apparently once again better at chess than at running. And sadly, it's not because I've suddenly gotten better at chess.)
Friend of mine who did his engineering PhD at MIT was pretty good, he won Canadian juniors or something like that, I’m mot sure how the structure goes. He was also great at ping pong, also won some big junior title.
I actually managed to get points on him in ping pong, he said I was great—better than I was at chess?.
Did you play at all at MIT?
Jeez, I just googled him, I think I just found his obituary. That was bizarre.
In addition to chess players, there seemed to be a lot of table tennis players at MIT when I was there, especially among the Chinese students, who all used the penhold grip. (I could never figure out how to return that serve.)
Yes, I played on the MIT chess team in the Greater Boston Chess League, and also played in some United States Chess Federation tournaments on weekends and in the summer. I passed up the Pan Am Chess Championships, which were the North American collegiate championships; it was just too much for me to deal with. I also played in intramural tournaments and team competitions. (Among my old running stuff, I recently came across a second-place trophy from the 1978 MIT intramural chess championship, which I had long since forgotten about.) All in all, though, chess took a back seat to many other things while I was at MIT.
I loved chess -- I still do. But I always found serious tournament chess to be a very stressful avocation, and it can be a huge time sink. I think that chess and distance-running attract some of the same personality types -- introverts, loners, perfectionists who are seduced by the illusion of mastery, through hard work, over a domain with clear, objective, and generally straightforward rules -- but the culture of distance-running seems much more normal, healthy, and sane.
How's the nostalgia circle jerk going on this thread?
Don’t know how old you are, but he was doing his master’s there around ‘90-‘91. Yes he was Chinese, but via Canada.
walking.
as fast as i can. long walks, tempo walks, and interval walking. on the days i cant walk i will walk around the house. it is good because i never run out of time in my day to walk around.
overthehill wrote:
I could have been equally successful in pretty much any sport I'd chosen.....zero success would be pretty easy to match!
This one is pretty funny
Cringe wrote:
Basketball and Baseball are the two of the most popular sports in the country.
Football is as popular as well
Climbing, I'm super light weight, naturally strong and lean AF. I can do 30+ pull-ups with perfect form any day of the week and have good grip strength. That being said I only climb maybe 10x/year.