Mundus Vult Decipi wrote:
Avocados Number wrote:I appreciate your point, but do you really believe that it's "unrealistic" or mere "fantasy" for a 25-year-old 1500-meter runner, having dropped over nine seconds from her PR at the age of 24, to believe that she may be able to drop another five or six seconds within the next three or four years? Does that really seem like an "impossible goal" to you?
Am I missing something here? I thought her goals were to break 4:00 and medal in the 1500 in 2012. Whether Erin can break 4:00 is arguable, whether she will medal in 2012 is not debatable. She will never medal in a major championship. I don't have a horse in this race (and certainly admired Donahue's college career) but she will lucky to make the US team in 2012 let alone medal in the Olympics.
From Nearman's article:
"Said Donohue: 'I expressed to Coach Cook my goals for the next four years [running under 4:00 in the 1,500 and being in contention for a medal for the 2012 Olympics] and my willingness to work harder to reach them. He told me that I'm not talented enough to run that fast and that he doesn't want to work toward goals [that] he believes are unattainable. He told me officially on Monday, Jan. 19, that he would not coach me anymore. And I agreed that he probably shouldn't be my coach if he thinks I can't get much better.'
"Cook, who has made friends and foes with his directness, countered: 'The fact [is] that Erin does not make it with Shannon. It is not Shannon's fault. [Shannon] is a really nice person. Erin needs to know she is only as good as she is. There will be not 4:00. That is a dream.'"
Her goals, then, are running under 4:00 and "being in contention for a medal." And Cook's response is that 4:00 is just a "dream" that will never happen. Maybe it won't happen, but I don't see how Cook can possibly know that. A few years ago, she was a fairly good and very talented middle-distance runner and javelin thrower. Now, she's a full-time runner who has already run 4:05 while still carrying close to 145 pounds on her javelin-throwing frame. I don't know what her chances are of running 4:00 sometime in the next four years, but I'd rate them higher than I would have rated, for example, Meb's chances of winning a silver medal at the 2004 Olympic Games.
I'm certainly not one of those starry-eyed individuals who claim that anything is possible if you only believe, but so much success in this sport is apparent only when you're looking in the rear-view mirror. I remember watching an awkward-looking runner from Providence College get outkicked by his teammate in a college cross-country meet one fall, and thinking that he was a tough little guy who tried hard but simply lacked talent. A few months later, that awkward-looking runner with no kick, John Treacy, won his first world cross-country championship. I remember watching a good-natured, stubby-legged little runner from Bowdoin College getting clobbered in a 10K road race by a speedier runner with real track credentials, and thinking that the little runner from Bowdoin was simply being left behind in the rapidly-improving sport of women's distance running. A few years later, the stubby-legged little runner from Bowdoin, Joan Benoit, won the Olympic marathon. I can think of so many similar examples. I'm confident that many of us on this website can remember coaches and others who told us that we would never be good enough to win a varsity letter, or qualify for the Olympic trials, or some other goal. They didn't know anything more than we did. They were just playing the odds.