The Kevin Beck Article about "Tinman Effect" is IDIOTIC

That's a run-on, Harvard. There's good reason it would be broken into a paragraph in a professional piece and you found this in a personal blog, instead.

And it's "their" not "there."

rojo wrote:

We all hae our genetic potential

Och aye rab yerr nae wrang aboot that.

godot wrote:

rojo wrote:

We all hae our genetic potential

Och aye rab yerr nae wrang aboot that.

Please tell me that you're in middle school.

aisletrainer wrote:

Teenage swimmers routinely win gold medals and their training is notoriously demanding but there are few telling them to hold back and peak at age 28. Training hard during the teenage years has advantages including a body that's outgrows injuries, less weight, less responsiblities, and a support system provided by the family.

Plenty of age group swim coaches purposely delay success of their swimmers while in high school, in order to give them the repetitions and stroke mechanics they need to be excellent when they finish growing.

There are thousands of examples. Mary Cain, for one.

Her life is F**ked up now because she peaked as a 16 year old. She doesn't have a real job. It's clear that her failure as a pro has done serious mental harm in she doesn't appear to be mentally stable.

Do you actually know Mary Cain and what's going on in her life?

rojo wrote:

I thought the piece was interesting and spot on. Basically, his theory is "We all hae our genetic potential, if you train a lot early, you will get closer to it earlier than most. So you'll improve less later on but eventually you end up near the same place."

It's wrong because the things it takes to be good in high school are different, and often times COUNTERPRODUCTIVE to being good as a collegiate or a pro.

In high school if you run 70 miles per week and do 2 threshold efforts every week, you'll run a good 5k and 3200. But the lack of speed development is going to hurt later on when you have no fast twitch muscle fibers. The high rate of stress fractures is going to work against you.

That's why the best athletes are ones that move up in distance. Shelby Houlihan was an 800m runner, low volume. Karissa Schwiezer was also an 800 runner.

You keep writing about all these dire things that will happen to runners who train hard and succeed when they are young but don't provide any support for what you say. Looking at Mary Cain I see someone who ran times that most high school boys cannot, won and placed high at major races, made a national team, got crapload of money from Nike, and went to college once she left Oregon. I see someone in her mid to late twenties with an education and more money than most people her age have who is young enough and educated enough to find a decent job and whose status as a minor celebrity could give her an edge over her competitors for that job. And if she wants to continue running she can. No, the results might not be what she'd hoped for but most of us learn to live with that.

What do you see here that's phucked up? How is it obvious that she suffered serious mental harm by being a 16 year old prodigy? Do you know her? Do you have some sort of credential as a mental health professional? Or are you just inventing things to support an idea you're fond of?

rojo wrote:

It summarizes what would take most people 3-4 paragraphs in one sentence (admittedly it's a long sentence)

And a good writer would have eliminated about 2/3rds of it as just distracting.

But yes the fundamental question is will training hard at young ( and there are probably drastic difference between say 10-14 and 15-18) reduce your lifetime potential. Good luck answering that. People will point at the prodigies that flame out. But for everyone of them there are a dozen Brian sells level talents who ran 430/10 and quit thebsport after HS.

rojo wrote:

I thought the piece was interesting and spot on. Basically, his theory is "We all hae our genetic potential, if you train a lot early, you will get closer to it earlier than most. So you'll improve less later on but eventually you end up near the same place."

There are no training tricks to mature more quickly into highest genetic potential. Some athletes physically develop faster than their peers, that is a fact. Short of going on hGH or getting held back to repeat a grade level (some youth sports parents attempt either or both), your rate is set and you won't see the zenith until after you've passed it. This silly theory claims to have confidence, if not proof, that peaking early results in a higher peak than peaking later. Maybe with the newer genetic biomarker measuring systems studies will be able to start predicting such things yet this piece and it's author do something closer to reading tea leaves.

aisletrainer wrote:

godot wrote:

Och aye rab yerr nae wrang aboot that.

Please tell me that you're in middle school.

Actually, I thought that was one of the funnier posts of the day!

How much more evidence do you need? Do you want a peer reviewed scientific journal? How about Alana Hadley who was running marathons at an extremely young age? peaked when she was like 16 with a 2:38. Hasn't raced in years. Do you think she met her genetic potential in the marathon at age 16? Or do you think MAYBE, just maybe she would have run faster in the marathon if she was patient and progressively built up to run it at 25?

There are countless examples of runners whose careers end because of injuries from overtraining. There are countless examples of girls that peak in 9th grade because they've been training hard for years and are never getting their period and never fully developing.

When I see Mary Cain I see a girl who wasn't physically or mentally ready to be a pro athlete at 18. She showed a ton of potential but one year after her peak she was essentially out of the sport. Her pro career was 2 years long. Do you think she made enough money in her 2 year career to retire from? She's come out publicly and said that she has scars from her time as a pro with Salazar. She says it gave her eating disorders, which is a mental illness.

You know what, MOST sixteen year old runners who are in their twenties or beyond haven't raced in years. High school runners who continue after graduation are the exceptions. Personally, I do not rule out the possibility that someone like Hadley could have run a faster marathon at 25 but I'm not convinced she would have. It is not at all uncommon for young female prodigies to get slower once their bodies change at maturity and even if hers did not there is no way to know what would have gone on in those nine years. What I do know is that when marathon running appealed to her she took it seriously and got a very good result, something she can be proud of for the rest of her life if she wants to.

Without knowing Mary Cain personally it's just guessing to say whether she was or wasn't ready to be a pro athlete at 18. What does that even mean? There are loads of basketball players, baseball players, tennis players, who become pro athletes at 18. Why would a runner be different? It's unlikely she made enough money to retire in those two years but what 20 year old not born to a trust fund has enough money to retire? She'll likely need to get a job but nothing about being a pro runner makes that any more difficult than it is for anyone else. And yes, she had an eating disorder when she was with NOP but seems not to now so there's no obvious basis for thinking she's got a mental illness.

With Hadley, would you rather be a 6th grade spelling bee champion or Ken Jennings the most lucrative Jeopardy Champion with millions in earnings?

The argument in the article is that its best to reach your full potential sooner. The Mary Cain and Hadley examples prove that is FALSE because they could have had lucrative pro careers had they been patient.

You know nothing about eating disorders, they never go away. There are always urges and anxiety. Relapses are common.

any truth here wrote:

The argument in the article is that its best to reach your full potential sooner. The Mary Cain and Hadley examples prove that is FALSE because they could have had lucrative pro careers had they been patient.

Cain and Hadley don't prove anything because we don't know what would have happened if they had been patient. It is reasonable to speculate that they may have had more success if they'd taken a longer view, but "reasonable to speculate" does not equal proof.

And either way, I don't really understand this notion that a person's life is f#cked if they fall short of expectations in their athletic career. Being great at a sport early on and then having your entire life ahead of you to pursue greatness in other endeavors seems like a pretty sweet position to be in.

Your question assumes an either/or choice. Yes, if you KNEW that not preparing to win the the grade spelling bee was going to get you onto Jeopardy twenty years later you'd skip the spelling bee. But you don't know that will happen. In fact it's very unlikely that it will, so I'd try to win the spelling bee and then see what the next decade or so brings.

And actually, I know quite a bit about eating disorders and mental illnesses in general. I worked in mental health clinics for decades and taught graduate courses to people wanting to become mental health professionals.

that isn't proof wrote:

any truth here wrote:

The argument in the article is that its best to reach your full potential sooner. The Mary Cain and Hadley examples prove that is FALSE because they could have had lucrative pro careers had they been patient.

Cain and Hadley don't prove anything because we don't know what would have happened if they had been patient. It is reasonable to speculate that they may have had more success if they'd taken a longer view, but "reasonable to speculate" does not equal proof.

And either way, I don't really understand this notion that a person's life is f#cked if they fall short of expectations in their athletic career. Being great at a sport early on and then having your entire life ahead of you to pursue greatness in other endeavors seems like a pretty sweet position to be in.

It is also reasonable to speculate they would have had worse careers. Maybe of Cain tries to peak at 27 instead of 17, she never breaks 410, never gets a procontract, and never makes a world final.

And of course starting late also leads to early burnout. Look at wheating who started at like 16 and was done at 22...

Most people are never going to be at the top no matter how they train. We often over value highly trained youth talent cause we don't have a good frame of reference. We compare that kid who has been training for 3 years with the kid who started running 6 months ago and think they are the best ever.

And of course you can train stupidly at any age. I want to through out that kids running 10ks are probably training better than milers. One activity rewards aerobic development a lot more. As long as the kid are doing their sprints speed development shouldn't be an issue.

ddidididid wrote:

I will postulate the sport loses more kids who run 430/10:00as undertrained seniors(i.e. the kids who would have been 415/910 guys under Tinman) than they do to people training too hard earlier on.

😂😂😂😂

Tinman is truly magical!

macdaddy og, the wrote:

ddidididid wrote:

I will postulate the sport loses more kids who run 430/10:00as undertrained seniors(i.e. the kids who would have been 415/910 guys under Tinman) than they do to people training too hard earlier on.

😂😂😂😂

Tinman is truly magical!

More like a lot of sh*tty coaching. Easy to look good wheneveryone else is bad😂 way too many kids running 8months/year and maxing out at 35mpw....

And seriously does anyone think there is more than a like a couple hundred kids who are pounding out high mileage at 11?