nooo wrote:
uhh ya i could if i stopped running, ate more, and lifted/trained properly for it. just as the person who could bench 380 could run a 15:29 5k if he stopped lifting, ate less, and ran/trained properly for it.
I actually believe there are people on the planet for whom this would be true. But they are few and far between, and the limitation for most of them would be, yes, talent. It's a rare individual who would have the innate capacities to develop into both kinds of performer. [By the way, this combination of power AND slow-twitch aerobic capacity is probably best rewarded in another sport: rowing, or perhaps long-distance swimming.]
Yes, "innate capacities." Anyone who's done research in human physiology *knows* that people are born with different levels of potential in different areas of performance. The "problem" in distance running, I think, is that a lot of talent actually takes some training time to develop*; and from this, people conclude that training is the sole factor in reaching a given performance level. Not an unreasonable conclusion, but wrong.
I do enjoy the folks who think that, yes, there may be such a thing as distance-running talent--but not at *their* level of performance, which they reached solely through years of grit and determination and (impliedly) having much more virtue than the "lazy asses who run slow and blame their lack of talent." No, you got there through grit and determination and virtue AND picking the right grandparents.
Of course there are different levels of innate gifts, in many different physiological areas; as someone else has observed, talent in any particular area is a continuum, not an on-off. And the continuum of talent does NOT begin at whatever point you've reached through your years of training and dedication, etc. Accepting the fact that you have a gift does not negate your work!
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
*In one of my earliest lab stints, I did testing in the Human Performance Lab at a university in Upstate New York. We tested many athletes, but also "regular" people of various ages. One regular guy we tested had VO2-max numbers that were through the roof, so much so that we had to recheck all our equipment to confirm that it was correctly calibrated. In this capacity the man was much superior to every one of the serious local runners we had tested--and this was ~30 years ago, when serious Upstate runners were *serious*.
We encouraged the guy to give running a try--at the time of our testing, he only jogged a bit, now and then, to stay in shape for softball!--and he ran a local 5k on the road, a few weeks later. The serious runners buried him. Why? Because it takes training (for most) to be able to operate at a high percentage of your max. The longtime runners had put in that training; this guy hadn't. Doesn't mean he didn't have the talent, though; it just wasn't showing yet.
I just think it's amusing that people would consider fast sprinting to be a matter of talent, but successful distance running not to be. BOTH are a combination of talent and training; it's just that some folks are pretty obviously fast, even before they train formally for sprinting, while the distance folks generally need to train some before their talent shows through.
[Heck, even Jim Ryun had to spend a few weeks on the JV squad when he went out for cross-country as a tenth grader, and Gerry Lindgren wasn't a worldbeater initially, either. No knowledgeable person would suggest they weren't talented!
[OTOH John Walker and Mary Decker, as kids, won cross-country races without any training at all. A privileged few DO have that combination of talents, but they're hardly the norm in distance running.]