What percentage of males in their prime could break 10 minutes in the the 2-mile after 5 years of training?

lrc tip: don't use those symbols that indicate less than or more than

Just another moran wrote:

Just another moran wrote:

There are a lot of baseless opinions and worthless anecdotes on this thread, so I might as well add in my own, equally worthless two cents.

My 3200m background: barely broke 11 as HS freshman, barely broke 10 as HS sophomore, ran 9:10 as HS senior. I was a horrible athlete until I trained consistently for several years. On my middle school xc team, I was never better than the 9th or 10th runner in my xc team class (about a 300 kid class, so 150 males). Once in high school, I trained consistently while others didn't, and I improved a lot more than they did.

I think that claims of >50% are ambitious, but

Got cut off

....but

See the thing is you were not a horrible athlete compared to 98% of people. ie, those who will never break 10.

Just another moran wrote:

Just another moran wrote:

Got cut off

....but

Last try

...but

Thanks, agip ( I hope)

....but less than 5% is also too low. I believe that a lot of the disagreement on this thread comes from people making different assumptions about what our sample population looks like. Are these 20-30 y.o. males who have lived active lifestyles, played other sports, etc.? Or have they been couch potatoes for their whole lives? If you extend the timeframe from 5 years to a lifetime, the percentage goes way up. Take only a slightly above average person, give him an active childhood, and train him without interruption from about age 12 to age 30, and he will have a decent shot at sub 10. On the other hand, if this person does nothing his whole life and does 5 years of training starting from "zero" fitness at age 25, he will have much lower odds.

I would put the range at 5-30%, depending on where our population starts from.

SEXC runner wrote:

I've read though this whole board and I honestly think that 85% of people could physically break 10 minutes. However only 50% of them have the mental capacity- about 43% could definitely go under ten . I myself am a high school senior 9:16 last season and I think a lot more people could break ten. I just think the average population doesn't try hard enough. If everyone put in more effort the average 5k would go down to about 16:30.

This is stupid. I ran all four years of HS, running up to 60/70 miles a week, and my PRs were 2:07/4:57/11:06/17:00 3mi.

Could I have had better coaching? Probably, I'm sure I could have.

Would I still have run sub-10? Who knows but maybe not. I just wasn't that good, training hard or not.

Comparing your own huge increases doesn't mean the same applies to everyone else. Some people DO try hard but the fact of the matter is they still aren't very good, due to genetics or some other reason.