Theoretically is it possible to go from 5:00 to 4:00 in 1 year?

no

In my opinion anyone capable of running a 4:00 one year from now could run a 5:00 without training, today. No one has that bad of a baseline AND that much potential.

The only exceptions are someone who is fresh out of a leg cast or something where there is a specific part of their body cannot handle it right now. If they are "healthy" they should be able to do it.

Not really, but I can think of ways that make it "work" in some way.

Imagine if someone like El G was instead a serious soccer player their whole life. Did lots of running up and down the field, some fast, some slow. Some soccer players could certainly transition to being good 400-1600 athletes. So maaaaaaaybe in a situation like that, with the best talent ever, it could work.

Centro is the only human capable of this feat

Yes, it is possible. Jim Ryun ran 5:38 in practice his first time as a sophomore. He ran 3:59 and 3:39 as a junior.

But in this scenario, a guy like El G coming from soccer would be capable of running like a 4:20 just off of soccer training, so I guess that fails your test.

It is a bit more than a year but yeah he was super close.

it really doesn’t take that long to build vo2max. 12-18 months of 80mpw gets you pretty close. Most of us though can’t start doing those in the first months of training like Ryun.

And a lot of people forget how hard it is to race properly. Image you have some 18 year old Ryun level talent and he goes out for a mile time trial. Dude is likely to do some 60/70/80/90 type race. Give him a month of training and some pace work and he runs 4:30…

If there's a high schooler who can run 4:20 with very little aerobic base and only soccer conditioning then I'm shocked we haven't seen sub 3:40 already, so many high schoolers train distance for years (albeit usually on low, <50 mpw training) and never break 4:40.

Theoretically one could go from 5:00 to 4:00 in a matter of minutes. An elite 5K guy who has never run an official mile race could just jog a 5:00 mile and then immediately run a 4:00 afterward. They would successfully lower their PR from 5:00 it 4:00 in 4 minutes plus however much time it took to get to the starting line and start mile #2.

Very fit soccer players have lots of aerobic conditioning. Everyone knows a kid who did nothing but soccer and ran a 17 minute 5k. I wouldn't be surprised if there's some 16 min kids on soccer teams out there. Now, in this crazy hypothetical, it's an extremely talented runner that's never trained for running, they only play soccer, and maybe they do it professionally into adulthood.

Is it possible? Yes. Are you going to do it? No

Of course not. You would be going from a time that is mediocre for a HS freshman to being in the top 1-3 in the country.

re the soccer/hoops fit guy theory, there is a paradox. i think we are trained up and fit and competitive and can quickly get you a 4:20-445 guy or 17-18m XC if you need one for your teams. out of the box. but that's for being fit as opposed to raw. so once you extract that quick initial growth for the first meets from track training, we turn into the equivalent of veteran track kids who need hard work to improve much more. cause we already showed up from practices and games fit and with some speed work.

and also, definitionally, most soccer kids won't be >5 and playing select or varsity. so we won't meet the initial condition. the sport exposes kids who either can't get back on defense or can't create separation on offense.

some kid from off the street who shows up in HS running 5 has years of work to be anywhere near 4, if they ever get below 4:30 even. it's a talent thing. if you show up that slow but healthy you will chip maybe 10s a year. if you're not sub 5 as a HS fish i'm not sure 4 ever happens.

i mean, i think the prompt is basically thinking of like 4:30 or so. you could take a raw kid and with some work get them down 4:30-40. but 4, the slope starts going higher and higher, it takes more work to chisel less time, and only so many in the world are up to it. and they usually have been seen as talented for years. i don't buy you start with a meh 5 kid and make a 4 out of anyone.

sole exception i can think of is you take some "medical" high performer who was in a cast or had surgery or something, told not to run at all, atrophied, were running sub 4 before the incident, come out of medical out of shape and perhaps peg legged and running over 5, manage to get through some early basic fitness work without complications, then try ramping back up. and i am not even sure if they all get back to 4 in a year.

but to me that is the only sort of athlete who could dwindle nominally down to 5 just out of a cast, then rebuild back to a fast number in a year.

5 to sub 420 in one year would be exceptional and would be a sign that sub 4 might be possible in a few years. 5 to sub 4 isn't happening - it might be possible for one of the most talented individuals on earth who also happens to have some sort of athletic background (4 years of high level soccer, a 400/800 champion just now moving up).

i don't buy your premise. a kid with some mid-distance talent is gonna be <5 out of the box in HS. you say converted sprinter. i could run you well under 5 in HS, as could the other guy i know who stepped up from sprints to be an 800 specialist and made state.

no, to me most kids who can only run a 5 are gonna be like the skinny pace metronome types who are meant to run a 5k and not a 100. and there is only so much burst to extract, their value is gonna be running 5m miles over and over in XC and college.

and i could also see where you could take joe schmo starting with over 5 but really more like 6 or 7 with that fitness profile. you'd be lucky to get them under 5 ever. or if ever under 5, to get much towards 4. because they aren't in shape and aren't naturally fast.

no, if you grabbed some talented 800 guy, they'd be well under 5. and then they like everyone would have to work and work over years to maybe ever approach 4.

A lot of the time you hear about people having crazy running improvements, there is some reason in-between like they were injured when they first ran, then had a year of solid training then ran again. Or the first race was not taken seriously, then they train super hard and drop a ton of time. I think 3 years of professional level training could get a decent amount of people there.

I think it would be possible though, because saying it would be impossible sounds quite ignorant. But it's highly improbable. You would have to be able to adapt to a pretty high level training plan early on and not get injured. Going from 5 min to 4 min would also mean you are able to drop your 5k time from around 17:30 to 14:00 in a year, which sounds much more unlikely.