Running is far more dependent on talent than it is on coaching

My high school basketball would comment on why he didn't try recruiting the guys 6'6" or taller. "You could lock them up in a gym and they still wouldn't learn how to shoot."

It's the same with runners. Either you have the talent to excel or you don't.

Talent is having the speed and strength to comfortably set a pace that is overwhelming for other people. Both of those abilities are 100% genetic and can be measured by 400 speed and results in XC or longer distances.

There are a wide range of effective workouts so the other factor is dedication on the part of the runner.

Success is a combination of talent, good work ethic and a good coach.

Talent is undeniably required to succeed at the top echelons of the sport. It sets the ceiling.

Discipline is necessary to have a shot at reaching the above ceiling.

A good coach is necessary to develop the athlete's talent by tailoring the program to the athlete, inculcate discipline, motivate, inspire, encourage and get out of the way when necessary.

Talent for any given ability is required but not sufficient.

I think you’d be surprised how many HS kids train with a strategy, whether with or without a coach, that is inferior to what you wrote out.

Brosnan did an elite job coaching the elite NB kids. I don’t know why anyone argues about that. At the same time, all of the elite coaches have a majority of their runners they coach who don’t become elite at their level. Do all the NAU, BYU, OSU, and Colorado runners become all American? Not even close, to state the obvious.

No way.

Suppose a talent like Nico Young doesn't work very hard. Just 20 mpw with one weekly tempo run and one weekly time trial. The rest are all easy miles.

Now have Brosnan coach 100 random high school freshman boys who really want to run a fast mile or 5K. Out of those 100, how many of them would beat a 20 mpw Nico by their senior year? One? Maybe two at most?

That is definition is too broad to say who has or doesn't have "talent".

My point is there are many talents that are needed and only the most elite have all of them (whatever they all are).

You and I have conversed on this subject many many times. You feel that you didn't have the "talent" to run with the top guys at your school (SDSU)... I was slower than you in HS and could not hold a candle to those top guys when I was in HS but in college I could... ( and I'll add I didn't have great 400 speed and at the beginning did not have the strength to comfortably set a pace that was overwhelming for other people - whatever comfortable means).

Talent for running comes in many shapes and sizes.... it includes a higher VO2 max, some amount of leg speed but also includes having a work ethic (desire), the ability and willingness to suffer and the ability to stay health (and 100+ other things). There is no exact definition for talent.

Bottom line ... coaching is an important element for success too.

What was your experience as a runner in HS? Did you really need to have a coach motivate you to run?

I never said I didn't have the motivation in HS... I ran my butt off just wasn't any good.

We can go round and round about this (and have)... your experience forms your perception and my experience forms mine... they are different.

Did I not have talent in HS and suddenly got it in college?

Talent is not easily defined. (which was a point in my original post)

My experience shows coaching and "talent" are both key elements.

Sorry Aztec... I see you weren't responding to me. Never mind

Talent means at least two different things.

1. Ability to run fast without any structured training. If a kid runs fast in a PE class or a fitness test without any prior history of training, he has talent.

2. Ability to respond to training. If you give the same workouts to two kids, and one of them improves faster than the other, then that kid has talent.

We did not have a track/XC coach. I focused on other sports and running was an afterthought. There were no facilities nor was there any interest from both the administrators or the parents. Basketball and soccer ruled the roost. I was good at neither. Perhaps a good coach would have motivated me to dedicate myself to running.

really i thought letsrun was of the 1st, 2nd and 3rd guys?

I somewhat agree with you.

However, you would be surprised at how bad many high school coaches are. Most high schools throughout the country would probably have someone like Nico Young running the 100m and 200m in track because he was their best sprinter and could score at their Conference meet.

I have coached a few extremely talented runners who had other people pushing them towards other sports or events. I also know several schools whose distance runners never run outside of the track season and barely run enough during the season to have the endurance to be able to run a 400m.

I never worked with a coach. Perhaps it would have been useful, not necessarily for faster results, but to avoid injuries. In general, though, my feeling is that the issue might not be coach or not. Rather, I think on most fields where ideal outcome requires a deep understanding of the specific circumstances, not only using the same formulas for every situation, very few can actually do that well. I am in biomedical sciences and very rarely do I come across scientist who are not just asking the same questions as everyone else.

Yes, in my case that's how it was. He took me under his wing. In two years he took me from a 14 min. 3200 to a 10 min. 3200. Not every young boy or girl knows where they might excel. This is why schools hire athletic directors and coaches. Kids need guidance. And more importantly, Kids really, really need to have good mentors who also just happen to be good coaches. For most kids it's a positive life changing experience.

Said as a retired coach. And I'm not trying to "toot my own horn." I could draw a circle 50 miles in circumference centered around the high school I retired from. All of the xc and track coaches that could fit in that circle were there for their kids, not for the few thousand dollar stipend that, if you did the math, was less than minimum wage.

Maybe your coach was only involved for the money? Maybe your coach only lasted for a few years, until realizing the time spent coaching wasn't worth the pay.

Short term; yes. (and if you added it up, talent is probably a bigger chunk of the success pie than coaching).

However, bad coaching/bad habits - that a good coach would fix - can severely limit an athlete's long term success.

I'll give an example from where I'm from; there's a young woman (early 20s) whose only been running for a couple of years. At the start of this year, she won a bunch of local races off very limited training (got her 5k time down to low-17s).

She's since built her mileage up, under the guise of a coach, and does 3 hard workouts a week and all her easy runs at 4:30/km or faster (7 min/miles or faster).

As a result, she has completely regressed, and she's now struggling to run within a minute of her 5k time.

A good coach would recognise her regression and see that she's obviously not recovering from the hard workouts, as a result of pushing the pace on her easy days (and possibly working too hard in workouts).

But this has been going on for months, and no such change has been made.

I agree that the training to teach elite status in distance running is fairly generic, but I respectfully disagree with the above statement. There are plenty of ways to fail at coaching at the elite level that have nothing to do with programming. You have to be able to handle, encourage, and even occasionally coddle athletes along the way. Not everyone can do that.

In addition, a good coach has to know when to back off and rest an athlete. That’s not always obvious or easy.

To call that coach “lucky” is to undersell it.

Idiotic take.

Yes, to get to the very top you have to be lucky. But there are many more of us trying to take reasonably athletic kids and turn them into runners. The kid who runs in the 16s as a freshman is going to be motivated and seek out opportunities to improve. There are a lot more of us taking kids who run in the 18s and 19s (or slower) and convincing them that this is worthwhile. Those kids need good long-term development and a coach who can convince them that it's worth it to get off the couch every day.

Exactly. I was a fatass 13-year-old who ran over 30 minutes for my first 5k (I ran in the high 20s the rest of that season, so this wasn't some strange outlier). My first season of track, my end-of-season goal was to break 3 in the 800. I took last in a lot of races. There's no way I would have stuck with it if I didn't have a coach who made me feel like I mattered.

I ended up going to state multiple times and running sub-15 in the 5k and sub-4 in the 1500 in college.