if he's leading an active lifestyle, playing basketball, soccer, bike rides, etc., he's going to maintain a lot of fitness.
I once had a 10th grader PR in the 1600 off of 3 months of basketball, going from a 4:48 the previous spring to a 4:37. no training. just puberty and 3 months of basketball. He got down to around a 4:15 by the end of that track season. literally no training. just entered an indoor meet and dropped the time.
I can run around 29:30 for 10k. I keep training as usual--going through this track season and then XC. Grant immediately stops running but maintains an active lifestyle...hikes, casual bike rides, pickleball, basketball...whatever. But he is NOT actively training for any sort of endurance athletics. We meet a year from now on the San Juan Capistrano track. Is he smoking me? By how much?
Here is a post from Canova about a hypothetical scenario where Bekele is a 25 year old farmer who has never run. It feels somewhat relevant to this topic.
Clearly you don't know what means the Word "Talent". A person like Kenenisa not overweigth, at the age of 25 years, working as farmer (therefore, a manual job, where he needs to use energy), can easy run UNDER 15' in his first attempt on the distance. Forget the idea that, with his talent, he has to spend one year for running 15', and start to think that the natural aerobic ability of the best runner all-time can produce, with no training, a performance that, for example in Italy, put him about position one hundred in the seasonal lists. Don't do the mistake to think athletes of that level can reach their results because hard training only. In percentage, I give 80% to the natural talent, and 20% to their training, if carried out under a proper coach and in the proper way. Without speaking about top levels, several years ago I had some Italian athlete, not runner, who decided to start at 23 years of age, went to the Track of Sisport Fiat for being tested, and ran 3000m in 8'52". At 27 he ran 13'23" (5000) and 2:11:51 (Marathon), at 28 ran 28'01" (10000) and at 30, 61'07" (HM). One person every billion people on Earth can have Kenenisa's talent, and every comparison with normal people is a useless and stupid attempt.
Guys its only 3 minutes. You think he's only losing 3 minutes off his 10k PR if he doesn't train for a whole freaking year?? Cmon, be serious. If this is his first run back (besides warm up jog), OP is for sure winning
I will say if you gave Grant a month or so (maybe less), I think he's beating you.
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It all depends on what an "active lifestyle" consists of and how much weight he gains. If he takes in calories like he is still training he will gain at least 10+ pounds. That alone would slow him down considerably.
If he maintains close to his racing weight through his diet and spends a lot of time playing soccer, swimming, biking, basketball, etc. he should still be able to go sub-29.
There are guys out there who live an active lifestyle and have world class distance genetics but never train for distance.
They run a random 10k sometimes because they can tell it would be easy for them.
Have you ever heard of a guy who wasn’t training at all dropping a sub 30? I’m not saying it hasn’t happened, but if Grant fisher could then probably someone else would have done it by now.
You guys missed the most obvious, real world example: Michael Jordan.
He quit basketball to play minor league baseball for 1 season. He was away from the court for 17 months before returning to the NBA.
His very first game back he scored 19 points. The second game back he scored 27. His 4th game back he hit the winning shot to beat the Hawks. And the 5th game back was the famous double nickel game, where he dropped 55 on the Knicks in MSG.
17 months away from the game. And when he returned he wasn't just good enough to beat college guys. He was the best player in the NBA, as if he had never left.
There are guys out there who live an active lifestyle and have world class distance genetics but never train for distance.
They run a random 10k sometimes because they can tell it would be easy for them.
Have you ever heard of a guy who wasn’t training at all dropping a sub 30? I’m not saying it hasn’t happened, but if Grant fisher could then probably someone else would have done it by now.
There is a big, big difference between never having trained for running at all, compared to have a decade of running training and then take a year off.
There are guys out there who live an active lifestyle and have world class distance genetics but never train for distance.
They run a random 10k sometimes because they can tell it would be easy for them.
Have you ever heard of a guy who wasn’t training at all dropping a sub 30? I’m not saying it hasn’t happened, but if Grant fisher could then probably someone else would have done it by now.
There is a big, big difference between never having trained for running at all, compared to have a decade of running training and then take a year off.
That is true but there is also a huge difference between taking 2-3 months off and taking a year off. After all, for those who think Grant wins, how long would he have to take off before he loses?
Whenever I think about the effects of taking time off, I think of the story of Chris Barnicle, who qualified for Olympic marathon Trials by running 65 in a half, took two-three years off, and ran 3:45 at trials.
Chris Barnicle was, in another life, an excellent runner. In high school, he ran 8:50 for two miles (in 2004, when that was much faster than it is now); in
If it adds to the discussion, i was a 31 min 10k runner / 2h30 Marathoner that pratically did not run for an entire year in 2020 (not exactly because of covid but personal circumstances and challenges I faced). I did very little exercise, pretty much zero for the first six months, then played soccer once a week and occasional jogs, not even once a week and very easy.
My fitness level after that year off - i could maybe break 40 min for 10k but that would be very very hard. I know that because one of my first workouts when I came back was to try to run 20 min for 5 km, which I did but it was incredibly hard. 40 min / 10k would be like my 100% effort on a race and even so I am not sure i'd sustain it.
No way I would break 3h for a marathon. In fact after i am not sure i would have broken 4h.
if he's leading an active lifestyle, playing basketball, soccer, bike rides, etc., he's going to maintain a lot of fitness.
I once had a 10th grader PR in the 1600 off of 3 months of basketball, going from a 4:48 the previous spring to a 4:37. no training. just puberty and 3 months of basketball. He got down to around a 4:15 by the end of that track season. literally no training. just entered an indoor meet and dropped the time.
People on Letsrun have funny notions of what "average" means, but putting that aside, if Grant Fisher took 12 months off of formal training (but wasn't critically ill or injured or anything), I'd like the average male college distance runner's chances of beating Grant on Grant's first day back. By the time Grant had been back in training for a month, Grant definitely beats average Joe college runner and it isn't even remotely competitive. I think the odds tilt from average college runner to Grant somewhere within Grant's first 10 days back.
Whenever I think about the effects of taking time off, I think of the story of Chris Barnicle, who qualified for Olympic marathon Trials by running 65 in a half, took two-three years off, and ran 3:45 at trials.
This is what I meant in my previous post about Letsrun notions of "average." Does an "average collegiate runner" break 30 minutes? Under most normal notions of what "average" and "collegiate" mean, I don't think so. (Even if we limit it to D1 males who run the 10,000, I suspect "average" is probably slower than 30:00, especially if we mean the average performance of the average athlete rather than PR. No way that's sub 30.). Anyway, I still think average college guy beats Grant on Day 1, but Grant is pulling away in well under a month, probably under 2 weeks.
I raced Craig Virgin after he had taken about five years off from his last season and I beat him even though I was a no-talent scrub. He was just truly out of shape. But that was five years.
If Grant Fisher is eating well, lifting, doing core & weights, playing rec soccer and hiking and shooting hoops with his friends, he will still be able to run 29 flat in a year.
Think of it this way, after a month, he is still in sub-27 shape. After three months, he is "out of form" but still lean and fit. He can run 27:30. By six months, you are starting to see that he can't compete as a pro anymore, but he is still in the 28s. Then he sort of plateaus for a while at 29 flat.
Unless the NCAA kid is breaking 29, Grant is winning this. A year is just not enough time unless he eats like that guy from Fast Food Nation.
Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal is a 2001 book by Eric Schlosser. First serialized by Rolling Stone in 1999, the book has drawn comparisons to Upton Sinclair's 1906 muckraking novel The Jungle. The bo...
