Hypothetical maximum - what do you think? (Read 1351 times)

People are SOOO fast to claim those faster are simply more talented. It is mentally easier, I guess, to chalk it up to talent you yourself don't have than acknowledge that maybe there is a fundamental difference in the dedication to preparation and training. Before you get up in arms at this comment, I will acknowledge that I used to be guilty of this all the time before I learned better. I used to be a decidedly average to even very slow runner. I ran for 4 years in junior high and thru middle high school anchoring the back of the team (and often just hoping I could beat a few of the girls). There was a kid the same age as me on my team that won almost every race. I marveled at his talent. Well, the summer before junior year, something made me decide I was going to do anything it took to be good. I ran and biked a couple times a day. I probably ran double during the summer what I had ever done before during the season. When cross country started, I ran a 2-minute PR in the 5K and finished within sight of the so-talented kid I admired. I made State, and at State I beat him. Senior year arrived, and we ran shoulder to shoulder the first few races. I trained my tail off. Then one race something amazing happened....when I surged half a mile from the finish, I saw him break. I pulled away and beat him. He never beat me again. I walked on in college, now a big feat (I was a 37-38min 10k runner at that point). For two years, I didn't advance much and again found myself anchoring the back of the team. Then junior year, I spent the winter cross country skiing 2 hours or more every single day. Come track season, I set a 2min 10K PR (mid-34). I repeated that training senior year and ran about the same times but brought my 5K down a few seconds to 16:13. Post college, I was free to train on my own. Within a year I ran my first marathon on 50-some mpw, a new high for me (2:53). Over subsequent years I progressively raised my mileage ever higher and did longer and longer workouts as my body slowly adapted. At age 28 I put together a strong 4 months of training and ran a 30:57 10K with a last 5K of 15:18. My point is that if you had asked me at any point during my teens or 20s how fast I could be, I would have said something a little faster than I was. I never would have dreamed I had the talent to run a 10k under 5min pace. Only by continuously working harder and harder and longer and longer did I eventually work myself right to the point where my body could no longer handle any more volume (105-120 mpw with 3 hard workouts). Does everybody have that kind of talent lurking inside? No. But few few people ever really put in the effort to try. Talent only becomes an issue when you approach the peak training load you can handle (which few people do). Some people, like the kid in my high school, are luck in that it takes less training to bring out their talent (he peaked in early high school and training in college was unable to make him much faster, though I don't think he trained with my passion). But for most of us, we have NO IDEA what our talent level is. I now think I was close, simply because I have reached the same training load and broken down twice now so I don't think I can go much higher.

And some people - read: faster runners, but rarely the fastest - are SOOO fast to claim they did it all through hard work, and talent or genetics or body type didn't have a darn thing to do with it.

Who claimed that?

... My point is that if you had asked me at any point during my teens or 20s how fast I could be, I would have said something a little faster than I was. I never would have dreamed I had the talent to run a 10k under 5min pace. Only by continuously working harder and harder and longer and longer did I eventually work myself right to the point where my body could no longer handle any more volume (105-120 mpw with 3 hard workouts). Does everybody have that kind of talent lurking inside? No. But few few people ever really put in the effort to try. Talent only becomes an issue when you approach the peak training load you can handle (which few people do)...

I don't think this could be said better. The rest of your story almost got me all choked up... I'm gonna get out my old copy of Ron Daws' "The Self-Made Olympian" and read it again.

If it is hard work to live then you just hope to run fast enough to make it to a training camps. Fitness is ingrained into the local culture so well, that they can go fairly deep in running and still manage to put out runners that will not be world class, but they certainly could feed a family for quite a while by running two or three races a year. Hell, if they wanted to run a race a week, they might feed the whole town. This is what happens when your sport is revered. But i would have to say, that is not talent, that is years of hard work. .

And those that dont? You dont think there are some Kenyans who work their asses off and run to the bus and run to school and just arent fast enough to go to the training camps? I am not saying that absolutely...working like they do from the time they are old enough to run has a lot to do with their success. That doesnt mean that among those who work equally hard there is equal potential. I do not buy that. I really dont think that if you took every human being on the planet and from birth groomed them to be a runner and all of them worked equally hard that they would have equal results. We are not that uniform. Hell, machines DESIGNED to be uniform with every part the same size and every angle and gear and fuel mix and oxygen mix aren't as uniform as you purport humans to be. Tightly controlled processes still yield product of varying results. Human production is not nearly so tightly controlled. The thread really didnt go where I was pointing, but where it ended up was more interesting I think.

Who claimed that?

If that isn't what's being claimed - then what's the discussion about? Because I know nobody is saying that elite athletes don't work hard - and its seemingly being implied that that's what's being said. I read this thread 14 times and I still can't figure it out. I suspect that mostly people are saying the same things and not realizing it. I can't believe anybody sincerely denies the enormous role natural talent plays in success - not just in running, but in any human activity. You don't get to be Mozart or Michael Jordan or Meb (like the alliteration?) through hard work alone. You need a gift. A talent. I can't believe anybody sincerely believes that hard work isn't important in success - not just in running, but in any human activity. You don't get to be Mozart or MJ or Meb without hard work, either. I'm assuming everybody agrees with those two statements put together. So I'm not even sure what people are talking about. What I think is that people are looking at it through their own biases and seeing stuff that isn't really being said. I think slower runners who work hard are annoyed because THEY know they work hard, but are limited by their abilities; I think faster runners are annoyed because despite their natural abilities, they still have to work hard, too. There's a bottom line here that just can't be denied by anybody with a functioning brain: talent alone will only get you so far. Hard work alone will only get you so far. Nobody succeeds at high levels in any endeavor without both. Is it even possible to disagree with that?

But I think the point some people have been trying to make in this thread is that as athletes talent is something we should spend zero percent of our time worrying about. Convincing yourself that natural talent is not a factor actually can have very positive effects on your results. Because if you eliminate talent from the equation you're left with the only thing you actually can control; the work.

I agree with this about 80%. The 80% I agree with is because one thing I know is that most of us - if we're willing to work hard enough - can probably do a hella lot more than we think we can. I'll bet with enough incentive or drive or discipline, I could run that sub-3:00 marathon someday. The 20% comes from knowing that you can take this a little too far. I can convince myself that talent isn't a factor all day long, I can work harder than anyone in the universe ... but I'm still not running a 2:15. Thinking I could is the sort of delusional thinking that gets you sent to a place with rubber walls and funny jackets. And if you ignore reality that much, you're going to get really frustrated, with whatever you're doing. And that's just no fun. Dare to dream. But have a little common sense, too.

You can't control talent, and you can't tell what your talent is before you get there. Work, now that you can control. So it is absolutely useless to think or worry about your talent. All you can do is work progressively harder, and set progressively higher yet attainable goals. I did not set my goal at a 31min 10K when I was a 34min 10K runner. When I was a 31:50 10K runner, I thought sub-31 in the long term (and it took 2.5 years to get there). Goals have to be challenging yet attainable. This is true in every setting, not just running. One of the biggest mistakes I made in running was setting a sub-2:22 goal when I was a 2:29 runner. I blew many opportunities to progressively lower my PR with this all-or-nothing goal to get into the Trials. In the end, I was probably in 2:24-2:25 shape in 2003 and 2:21-2:22 shape in 2006 yet never ran to that potential either time....in 2003 I overtrained and did not finish the race after running 2:22 pace for 10 miles. In 2006 I got injured a month out (in my sub-31 10K) and ran-to-finish a 2:28. At this point I don't know if I'll ever be in shape again to approach those times and it would sure be nice to have a 2:24-2:25 on my record now. Inappropriate, over-reaching goal-setting. And yes, I do hear people blame talent and wave off the work component all the time. I can't count the number of people I know who run 20-30mpw and claim they just aren't talented enough to run faster. Barring being too injury-prone to run more than 20-30mpw, all they are doing is making excuses so they don't have to try (see my tag line always at the bottom of my posts). Someone earlier in the thread said someone who has run 3hrs and then 2:20 or something to that effect would have the perspective to comment. I've been a 3hr+ runner and a mid-2:20 runner. Both experiences are still fresh in my mind and it gives an interesting perspective. I ALWAYS thought I trained hard (until the last two years here), yet once your body is in shape and you are doing what it takes to be a 2:20-something runner somehow it is a whole different type of fatigue. You can put yourself through so much more and somehow recover to do it again the next day. It's like when I'd run an early-season 5k, before I was really peaked, and finish feeling like I could do it again yet I could go no faster at the time....then a couple months later I'd run another 5k and was able to push myself so hard that I was trashed for 4 days. It's not that the perceived effort is different (you're working just as hard), it's that your body will take more workload and recover...so you can get more work in even though it may feel roughly similar. For me, I was quite amazed often that I could still run the day after a hard workout, months earlier I never would have recovered in time.