talentless wrote:
I hang around with a ton of middle-aged runners who picked up running in their 30s-40s after years of no obvious athletic ability and avoiding sports in high school, but tired of being totally winded climbing stairs and fearing their mortality. Pretty much everyone manages to safely BQ eventually if they keep up reasonably consistent training on Daniels or Pfitz schedules. That right there is ~68% already, and that's true of the guys who started with couch-to-5K and were utterly delighted the first time they broke 30 minutes.
Avoiding sports in high school is not an evidence of no athletic talent. They probably lack explosiveness, agility, coordination or brute force. None of them is required for distance running. In fact, being a slow sprinter in youth is often a sign of success as a middle aged hobby jogger. (Extreme slow twitch type.)
If they have BQ'ed, the chances are they are at least in the top two-thirds in natural talent for distance running, and probably many of them are in the top half. "No natural talent" means the least talented person who is physically capable of running. This is not necessarily the kid who was slowest in the mile test in a PE class. That kid might be more trainable than the second slowest kid. So we really don't know who the least talented is. But the chances are they don't come anything close to BQ no matter what training they do. 50% AG might still be hard to reach for those people.