Obama VS Alexi Pappas

Giant Johnson wrote:

If the president told me that I was born to run, I'd be completely and utterly stoked. Why Ms. Papas felt she needed to find something negative about that and then devote an entire article to praising herself and all her hard work, is beyond me.

She's the next Lauren Fleshman. She reminds of her quite a bit.

I had never heard of Alexi Pappas, but enjoyed her account of the conversation. My impression is that she just doesn't want to say she has extraordinary talent. It would feel to her like she was bragging. To those of us who worked damned hard but couldn't be elite ever, it feels a bit insulting, but I doubt she knows that.

The president, meanwhile, is much more informed than I would ever have expected. At some point he obviously wanted to know about that, found out an answer and remembered it.

george, come up with something better than a weak 1990 noakes study.

your personal inferences of this study are wrong as well.

'running performance is the best predictor of running capability' .really?

wow, strong work tim (this study got laughed) out of serious journals.

Your nature-given talent sets the bar for how high you can go ... your training will determine how close you can get to this potential limit.

This is middle-school stuff guys, maybe that is why airhead keeps talking about her middle-school self?

One time a teammate and I were having a discussion about talent vs. training ... our coach happened upon us at this moment ... he asked us what we were talking about and said, "Talent and training are at opposite poles, no?"

We were 15 and that summed it up for me. Never thought about it again.

Pappas created this thread and she keeps it going. It's as stupid and idiotic as obama's super ego.

I bet Dubya doesn't have a clue what lactic acid is.

egun wrote:

george, come up with something better than a weak 1990 noakes study.

your personal inferences of this study are wrong as well.

'running performance is the best predictor of running capability' .really?

wow, strong work tim (this study got laughed) out of serious journals.

Well, consider the source. There is a reason why real coaches (and knowledgeable others) don't take this site seriously, Renato excepted.

If you really think VO2max is a meaningless indicator of performance:

(1) Write down the names of all the sub-2:08 marathoners with a VO2max less than 50 ml/kg/min.

(2) Write down all the athletes that have averaged FASTER than their VO2max for longer than 10 minutes.

You get a blank page, of course.

Using how fast you can run for 10 minutes (which is approximately VO2max) to project how fast you can run for 2+ hours in analogous to using your 400 meter speed to project 5K time (so Wariner should have been able to run a 11:30 5K).

But, particularly when a respected study shows some individuals (statistical outliers) are able to improve their aerobic capacity by upwards of 50%, that is not a meaningless indicator. You need the engine, which is what VO2max measures, and if you don't have the engine, you are not going to be a world-beater no matter what you do in training. All the other indicators and training indicate how close to your maximum output you can maintain...but you are not going to exceed your MAXIMUM aerobic capacity.

Here's an example showing why people say it's meaningless:

Runner A has VO2max of 65.

Runner B has VO2max of 70.

Who wins in a 10K?

What are there times?

What is the probability you get this right?

Runner A has a 5K time of 14:30.

Runner B has a 5K time of 14:45.

Repeat.

i too saw pappas race early in high school, and it was obvious she had extraordinary natural talent. to me, she looked talented enough to rise to the top of the high school ranks, and i was confused when she didn't. but i didn't know her interest had drifted away. so that explains it. but, back then, just watching her run--she jumped out at you if you had an eye for talent. obvious.

same with brett gotcher in high school--he had the body to run fast and long.

there is extraordinary, natural talent; and it puts you in a rare group. but getting to the very top of that rare group requires extraordinary work and the capacity to resist injury.

If Pappas ran sub-5 as a freshman, she had more than "a few drops" of talent. Moer like gallons. Of course, Cain has a Lake Superior of it, so Alexi feels like the underdog.

Considering how fast she ran from the very start with no training, she has barely progressed. To me, that shows that she doesn't work hard at all. She might think that she works hard, but the results don't show it. She coasted on pure talent then and coasts on pure talent now. She is being extremely disrespectful to runners of lesser talent who work a lot harder than she can even imagine. Alexi has had every imaginable advantage throughout her life, and the only thing that explains her less than world class results is her less than world class training.

This is a trick question. In the picture at the top of the article, she has the build of a talented runner for sure. The problem is that she is running the steeple! This proves that she isn't all that talented. The steeple is an event where untalented runners hide out. I figured the people of LRC would know that.

rekrunner wrote:

Looks like several of you didn't read the whole article.

This experienced forced Alexi to think a little more about the topic, and at the end she concluded, that both Obama and she were probably right:

"I have improved with every season through some wild combination of hard work, patience, support, belief … and also a few drops of the natural talent that Mr. Obama pointed to. "

"I don’t know if a finishing kick comes down to being born gifted, working hard or belief. We can’t know. It is probably some combination of the three."

But now she has thought about talent, and will file it away:

"... since I can only control two of those things – hard work and belief – those are what I am going to spend my energy on."

Conceding "...also a few drops of natural talent" does NOT constitute much of an awakening." Pretty much no awakening, at all. Folks read the article just fine.

Among female athletes, there seems to be a dichotomy between the self-congratulatory types who applaud their every effort, patting themselves on the back with great flexibility (with reality) and alacrity, the Laurens, Alexis and Karas. On the other hand we have the Deenas, Mollys, Emmas, Shannons and Jennys, who just go out and get it done, day after day until they are on top, and who seem to be truly humble about their fortune and work harder, smarter and quietly.

I know which group I will always root for and count on in the clutch.

+1

Less attractive.

I was born with talent ( I ended up running 3:35 1500m in the 80's)

But many more were born with much more.

Read this about my early "talents" by author Malcolm Gladwell

http://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/2006/0806/0806/myth_prodigy.cfm

It takes a lot more than talent to be good

I was born with talent ( I ended up running 3:35 1500m in the 80's)

But many more were born with much more.

Read this about my early "talents" by author Malcolm Gladwell

http://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/2006/0806/0806/myth_prodigy.cfm

It takes a lot more than talent to be good

Higher Ground wrote:

Among female athletes, there seems to be a dichotomy between the self-congratulatory types who applaud their every effort, patting themselves on the back with great flexibility (with reality) and alacrity, the Laurens, Alexis and Karas. On the other hand we have the Deenas, Mollys, Emmas, Shannons and Jennys, who just go out and get it done, day after day until they are on top, and who seem to be truly humble about their fortune and work harder, smarter and quietly.

I know which group I will always root for and count on in the clutch.

nice post

messi wrote:

I agree with Obama that running is easier for talented efficient runners than untalented inefficient runners.

It is more to do with the efficiency than anything else. In my observations untalented runners often work harder than talented runners because it is NEVER effortless for them like it is for Alexi Pappas.

Obama was dead-on with this one.

http://gotracktownusa.com/inside_track/2015/01/alexi-pappas-president-said/

Yo, dawgs. My homie Obama just told Alexi, "check yo' privilege, sista". That's right. Alexi just got schooled by the President!