In high school, I began as a moderately promising freshman, running times in the mid-18's for 5k's. I broke one or two school freshman course records of a senior who was running in the 16's and was an all-stater. I resolved to follow in his footsteps, training as hard as I could and being an all-stater myself. It never happened.
My progression of times from the state meet shows everything. Our state has a notoriously difficult course and I was in a smaller-school classification:
Freshman: 18:43
Sophomore: 18:32
Junior: 18:23
Senior: 18:13
The progression is virtually a perfect line showing small but steady improvement. During this time, a few other younger runners on the team who had run similar times as freshmen and were putting similar effort into training leapfrogged me, becoming all-staters themselves. I tried to escalate my mileage to compensate, but would always bump into overtraining symptoms or overuse injuries. In many ways, I internalized the blame for my lack of "elite" status on myself. Was I just not working as hard?
Ten years later, I am now a coach of a middle school team and work closely with the high school team. On the girls high school team, there is a runner who reminds me so much of myself. She began her freshman year as a solid varsity contributor, with high hopes of becoming the next "elite" runner for the team. She trains harder than anyone else on the team. Fast-forward three years, and she is a little better. But the top three runners on the team are transplants from other sports who don't train year-round and don't put nearly the energy into the sport. They have seen larger improvements. The number one runner doesn't even truly like running, loafs in many practices, and will almost assuredly finish in the top five spots in the small-schools section of the state meet. However, her improvements have been greater than other runners on the team, and she was born an exceptional athlete to begin with.
Cue the phrase "trainability" from "The Sports Gene," the concept that different bodies will see vastly different improvements from the same training stimulus. I buy into it wholeheartedly. Recently, I have been rolling this idea around in my head a lot and I realized it violated a basic tenet of my founding beliefs about running--namely, that it was a meritocracy. I always inherently knew and accepted that we all are born with differing amounts of talent. But I always felt running would reward people equally in terms of improvement for their work--or at least almost equally.
I have realized that running never "made me a promise" that it was fair, and that my frustration is largely due to my own mistaken preconceptions being violated. I still love the sport and love coaching it. I also have to remind myself I was born well above the mean, and in many ways, am fortunate for the genes I have. But my ideas of what our sport is and why some people are successful and others aren't have been shifted irreversibly. It almost feels like finding out a dark secret about a family member you love dearly--you still love them, but as you grow up, you see they aren't perfect.
I don't know why I feel like posting this here, but I do. Thanks for reading.