big city fan wrote:
A high schooler running 4:15 is solidly in the 99th+ percentile of the talent distribution.
You over rate it, If you timed ALL Male High Schoolers probably less than 1% can break 5 or even 6 Minutes Minutes, Have you seen High Schoolers getting out of School, The majority are in Atrocious shape, What has happened to the PE Classes?
I am not referring to the NP specifically, but in general, you a valid point. My H.S. had so many good half-milers that we could have fielded 2 sub-8 4x8 relays. Running 2 minutes was the baseline and was where you needed to be to participate in training. It wasn't until I started coaching myself that I realized running 2 minutes was an accomplishment. - It is amazing what happens when you coach to a certain standard and you have a lot of kids who push each other.
Math wizzer wrote:
Are you bad at math? 97th percentile means that there are thousands of kids who can break 4. My high school has 500 kids in the senior class. You think a dozen or so can break 4?
His point is that if they trained like pros from age 10, more would than we think.
Calirunfun79 wrote:
Two things:
1. Yes, the Newbury Big 4 ARE that talented.
2. No, thousands of American HSers today CANNOT or WILL NOT ever run sub-4:00 miles, unless widespread genetic modification occurs.
1. You need to think of the Sahlmans and Youngs more as pre-eminent 2-milers and 5K runners first, milers second. That's where their collective and individual talent really shines historically. Yes, Colin raced the 4th fastest prep mile ever this year, as well as low 1:48 in the 800, but if he had given the same attention to the longer distances this Spring, he could have likely challenged Verzbicas' two-mile record while breaking Rupp's 5K mark. Meanwhile, Aaron ran 8:01.7 indoors (right about an 8:40 two mile)- one of the fastest indoor marks ever and arguably superior to his 4:01 mile outdoors. Meanwhile, Lex ran the 2nd fastest prep 5K ever this Spring in 13:43, and Leo would have arguably finished a second or few ahead had he been healthy and entered in the same race. And Aaron, Lex, and Leo still have a year of HS left.
All that on the reported 60-65 mile regimen Brosnan has these kids on. Yes, I'd say their core four (plus Nico) are that talented individually.
2. Peach Pit, we've covered the mile question already in my previous post on the topic. No, there isn't a single '4-minute mile' gene on the human DNA strand just waiting to be activated in thousands of American schoolboys if only they were just steered into and properly trained as distance runners for a few years. Multiple nature and nuture factors are necessary for 4-minute mile achievement, including under-valued talents like mental toughness, bio-mechanical efficiency, ability to recover from sustained pounding for months and years on end, ability to focus on a single goal to the exclusion of practically everything else for years, a financially and emotionally supportive household, superior coaching, safe and conducive training places, etc. etc. etc. The odds of all of this happening in conjunction with a remarkable innate talent for stride length + turnover rate are very low...so low that still just a handful have ever accomplished sub-4:00 in the U.S.
Even if you got geometrically more kids in the U.S. to take miling seriously, I doubt if you'd more than double the number of four-minute milers each year. Look at East Africa. Combine Ethiopia, Kenya, and Tanzania and you have about 200 million people. War-torn and economically disadvantaged, no doubt. But talk about a talent base and motivation! Where a single Diamond League 1500 or international marathon win could to a year's salary or much, much more! And how many combined legitimate 18-years and under sub-4:00 (using the 1500 time equivalent) milers do they have? Maybe 30-40? Or how about Japan and its 125 million relatively rabid marathon fans? Maybe 10?
Using your logic, there could be thousands of 26 ft and 52 ft HS long jumpers every year, or 7'3'' high jumpers, if only enough basketballers and footballers were enticed into track and field. Thousands of 20.2 boys 200 guys, or 52.0 400 girls. Thousands of 18' and 14' pole vaulters. But guess what? Having attended an inner city school myself back in the day, just about every baller also gave sprinting and jumping a whirl too, for bragging rights if nothing else. But after a few semesters of P.E. or a few track seasons, those who could pretty much did instead of the reverse.
Perhaps the only factor that will increase the number of HS milers from say 0-2 each year to 5+ is advanced shoe technology. On another recent post, I compared the progression in high school performance (both boys and girls) across every widely contested HS event across the last three decades, using Athletic.net statistics. What became immediately evident was that- while marginal yet uneven progress could be seen in such events as the sprints, little was clearly evident in other events save for the girls pole vault (as it is still a relatively new event). The outliers? The 800s, mile/1600s, and 3200s. The longer event, the more remarkable the progress (I wasn't able to access comprehensive national data prior to 2000, save for California State, but there similar trends also emerge).
This is accurate. People often seem to forget that HS track is the #2 sport for boys and #1 for girls in terms of participation. If you add boys and girls together it is more than football I believe. Of course there are some talented kids in each school that dont participate and its also human nature for coaches to feel like the one who got away could have been great(whether they could have been or not). Its fun and/or frustrating to project a kid could have run 1:48 when he runs a 2:03 with little training but that doesnt mean he could.
The other thing I think a lot of this stems from is an annoying inferiority complex that lots of track people/posters here seem to have. Like track athletes suck and all the other sports are better which is generally also not true. Most of the fastest people end up self-selecting for track either in summer track/AAU or middle school or whenever. If you are the fastest kid in the class at some point someone will probably tell you to run track. At least in our state there isnt really a competing sport in the spring- there arent a lot of lax or baseball/softball people who would be superstars. If soccer conflicts with track then there could be some siphoning off there I think it is like that in some states.
Also these hypotheticals are fun to argue about but the reality is that there already a million hs kids a year doing track and like someone else said if other people dont want to do it its all good the amount of talent that is already there is pretty incredible. Especially compared to when I was in HS lol.
Also another unrelated PSA(just relating to my inferiority complex idea slightly)- Remember the majority of college football programs lose money it is also a non revenue sport(obv not including power 5).
Where I'm from the better basketball players play AAU all year, soccer players play on clubs and football coaches have their kids train all year round- most of these athletes never go out for track, not just in the schools I've taught but in most of NYC.
One other thing just to show how far things have come which most people know anyway but people talk about no sub 4 for 30 years etc. The 3200 comparison from now to the early 90s is even more drastic- well there is no comparison but I should go look up old TFnews from when i was in college 90-94 that was the middle of the low point and there were a couple years when the leading 3200 time in the country! was like 9:05. In that range anyway. Made some progress since then lol just keep getting better
1. I'm fine with saying some people are better at different distances. I think more generally, there could be high schoolers running in the 8:20s or 13:30s who just don't have the genetics to break 4 in high school. I mean, LV only ran 3:59 (though I'm sure he could've gone a bit faster). I think those performances are as good as a sub-4 though, and my point is more that there are a lot more kids with those kind of genetics than we think. Galen Rupp's another good example, he didn't break 4 till his senior year of college, but had run 27:30s by his sophomore year.
2. I don't think I ever said there's a single 4-minute mile gene, I think I just said there are people with the genetics to run sub-4. You actually mention a lot of stuff here that's kinda my point. The NP kids, along with being really talented, have financially and emotionally supportive households, superior coaching, safe training places, and fast teammates. That coaching/family stuff also brings stuff like good diets, sleep schedules, strength training, and recovery. A good coach can get the kids to focus more on the small things (or things that most high schoolers omit), like good eating and recovery, and a supportive family can help fulfill those. My point is that there are a lot of high schoolers who don't do (or have) those things, and they end up not breaking 4 because of it. Furthermore, there are a lot of kids who do have all of those things, but don't run track for whatever reason. I said it in another post, but everyone has a story of some soccer kid coming out for a meet and running a 1:5x 800 off of nothing but soccer training, but they don't stick around because they enjoy soccer. It even happened to NP this year (after I made that post lmao). They convinced a soccer kid to come out for track and he ran 1:54. If that kid had been running on the track team since freshman year, there's a good chance he'd be a 1:49 guy.
So I'll say it again, if you were able to get every kid training like Jakob has been since elementary school, we'd see way more sub-4 milers. That's the main claim. I'm not saying it's realistic, or that it's gonna ever happen. Simply that if you could create the right environmental conditions, there are at the very least hundreds of kids who would be able to break 4 by the end of high school. There's also a ton of kids, maybe 80+% that would burn out, get injured, quit, or never even break 6 by the end of high school. But if Hocker, Teare, and Kessler got Ingebrigtsen training from age 9, I'd bet they'd all break 3:50 by the end of HS. If the Youngs, the Sahlmans, Martin, Burns, Fisher, etc got that training, I think we'd see a lot of them well under 3:55.
I'm a little hesitant to say it's the shoes that created 5 guys under 4 this year, just because we only saw 1 under 4 last year, and he might be the most talented miler we've ever seen. 2020 saw 1, and 2019 saw 0. I like to chock it up a bit more to better competition, better access to good training/info, and guys like NP setting a high standard.
Peach Pit wrote:
if they start running in high school, it's already too late.
There's a whole lot of people who could be great runners but they don't enjoy running, or do another sport
First of all, it’s probably better for a kid to do other sports before high school - there is very little correlation b/t age you start running a success level achievement. And how on earth is any kid who does not enjoy running going to do the work to run sub 4 at any time much less in high school. I guess there are 12 Einstein’s in every high school if only they liked math.
BS wrote:
First of all, it’s probably better for a kid to do other sports before high school - there is very little correlation b/t age you start running a success level achievement. And how on earth is any kid who does not enjoy running going to do the work to run sub 4 at any time much less in high school. I guess there are 12 Einstein’s in every high school if only they liked math.
Well they can't do the work to run sub-4, because they don't enjoy running. That was kinda my point. And I mean, there are people who have gotten Cs in high school and gone on to do great things. Still, someone like Kessler didn't start running seriously till like his junior year, and he could have just stuck with climbing since he was already world class at that. I'd bet that there's another Kessler out there who just never went out for track. Or, a Kessler whos friends all went out for soccer, so he did too.
And idk abt there being little correlation b/w when you start running and your success level. I thought a lot of Africans said a lot of their success came from running to and from school every day from a young age. Jakob Ingebrigtsen has been training since age 9 and he's done well for himself. Sure, people like Fisher and Rupp played soccer into high school, but that's way more than most kids do today at all.
Arthur Lydiard told almost every runner he met that they could break 4. He probably was right--provided the runners did the training. If you took high school distance runners who run 30-40 miles a week and made them do pure Lydiard training (100 plus miles a week for most of the year) for 5-6 years, there would be a lot of sub-4 guys. . . . Talent is everywhere. The odds that the most talented runners even try the sport are low. The odds that those who do stick with it and put in the training are low. . . Think of rowing. Do we really think that the most talented genetic rowers even try the sport? Of course not. Track is the same way. Probably every sport except soccer (and basketball in the US) does not really maximize the talent available.
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