If you're flying in the 8th grade, odds are you're not getting a lot faster.
The big kid I hung out with in elementary school, who was 5-9, was still 5-9 decades later. The kid who ran a 39 minute 10K in sixth grade ran a 41 minute 10K his sophomore year.
Every year a stable of what most consider highly talented distance runners leave high school for the ncaa and many are hardly heard from again. My son was a top recruit once upon a time and I kept up with the the other boys that were in his recruiting class around the country when they all entered the ncaa. I believe genetics play the biggest role in who is successful at the next level and I don't necessarily mean who's naturally fastest. The guys that make it are the ones whose body can handle the intense training without missing cycles due to injury. I've seen many 40-50 mile a week kids that were blazing fast in high school struggle to stay healthy once they started that 75+ mileage that is required to compete in D1. Some kids were much more prone to injury than others as their body just couldn't handle the intense training and mileage. I came to realize staying healthy so you can continue to make gains over each cycle was a talent in itself that some have and others don't.
I dnn't believe that anyone can just go out and run a sub 16 5 K cold without training until they have been honing their conditioning through swimming, lacrosse, soccer or some similar sport requiring a good lung capacity. If you read Jim Ryan's biography, he did not start off nearly that good and took awhile before he gained prominence He was arguably one of the most talented we ever had but he also trained incredibly hard. The Kenyan's also build up remarkable conditioning through years running to and fro school so I think this post is over-emphasizing genetics versus training environment.
Ryun allegedly ran a 5:38 time trial in the fall of his sophomore year, managed about an 11:00 for XC, had no exercise other than a paper route during the winter and then beat the returning state mile champion in the first meet of the track season. I’m guessing he had untreated asthma during that initial XC season.
And what people on this board don't understand is that even 5:38 is stupid fast for someone with no or very little training.
Talent means many things. The ability to perform well at something with little training. The ability to improve rapidly at something over time. The ability to train for said activity at a high level without consistently getting hurt.
You see various degrees of this talent or lack thereof take place in the transition between HS and College. You see good HS runners who consistently get hurt in College. You see good HS runners who were already running 70-80mi a week find no room for improvement.
Improvement does not happen linearly and not everyone has the same ceiling nor reaches near peak in the same amount of time.
Research is showing that the 10,000 hours thing is a myth. There is definitely a big difference between people's ability to develop athletic skills. I was in a running group with a guy who showed up after running a 19 and change 5k after training for about a year. We trained for the marathon together and both ran in the 2:50s. After that, this guy's 5k/10k times dropped like a stone. He ended up breaking 15 and 32 within 2 years. I was about 8 years older and a new master, but I still couldn't crack 36 and 17. This guy did not run 100 mpw or have some crazy gym routine. He did two hard workouts a week and a long run. Probably 60-70 mpw max. He just had talent.
Didn’t he have a relay split of 46 seconds? Any runner responds to training, but very few have the genetics to run 46.
TONS of guys have ran 46 4x4 legs TONS!
Not while also running a 339 1500m and running 100mpw... Now I don't place a ton of faith in relay splits and distance runners 400m in general being super accurate but there haven't been tons of 1500m guys with that type of speed. Some but not many. And no there aren't a lot of people cable of splitting a sub47 either. Probably less than 500 in the US at any given time.
Now it would be nice to know why some people are so much faster. What part of the genic code let's one person have 30% higher oxygen consumption while another consumes so much less. Think about why we have all those marathoners with 52s 400m speed(i.e. not ft dominate people) and yet only a half dozen kids in my high school could come close to that. Everyone (well almost) could run sub 60. A lot of us could run 56s. Very few of us ran sub 54. And only 1 was breaking 50.
I know this is letsrun and people come here just to argue, but….we should all be able to recognize that the following things are true and are NOT mutually exclusive.
talent exists. I watched German Fernandez run 4:33 after a running career of only 3 weeks.
Everyone has a maximum genetic potential, but most people never get close to it
The concept of high responder, low responder is absolutely real. Some people just can’t absorb and benefit from training the way others can. Along with that are two more keys to the talent puzzle: 1. The oft cited durability issue (see German Fernandez). 2. Not everyone gets into a system that addresses his or her particular training needs.
"Talent" just means they started out better for some unknown reason.
There's no reason to believe that reason is genetic. Whether they have a history of running doesn't matter; every kid grows up doing things that could be relevant. But nobody is born doing anything at all.
Genotypes relevant to running are so many, and so diverse, that it's near impossible to get a "winning hand" of genes. Kind of like pinochle but with 4x as many cards. You can get a good hand, but it can't turn into a great hand until you play the cards, and the way development works, the important cards have all been played by an early age.
"Talent" is a euphemism for not really knowing what those cards are yet. You know a kid figured out how to run fast, somehow, but that's about all.
everything has a substantial genetic contribution whether physical or psychological traits. its unlikely that any difference between a talented and untalented kid is unrelated to genes.
"I've seen many 40-50 mile a week kids that were blazing fast in high school struggle to stay healthy once they started that 75+ mileage that is required to compete in D1. Some kids were much more prone to injury than others as their body just couldn't handle the intense training and mileage. I came to realize staying healthy so you can continue to make gains over each cycle was a talent in itself that some have and others don't."
Great! Now every idiot who can run 100 mile weeks will be on here saying everyone can...
Differences in talent absolutely exist and not just at the elite vs. sub-elite level.
Several years ago, I was part of a large running club whose several dozen members were mostly 20 and 30-somethings with a few masters here and there. Some had previous track/XC experience but by and large, we were locally competitive hobbyjoggers who were aiming for a BQ/sub-3. So it was a decent sample size of reasonably dedicated runners in their prime running years.
The club met 3x a week (tempo, speed, long run) and all of the regulars more or less did the same workouts and ran in the 40-70ish mpw range. Yet the half-marathon times among the men ranged from the low 1 teens to the 1:30s. My 1:18 PR put me towards the faster end of the club, and there were plenty of guys running the same mileage and workouts as me with PRs 5-10 minutes slower. They just weren’t as talented (not that I was anything special). And I’ve met many adult runners who had even less talent than those guys; guys who’d constantly get hurt trying to run any level of respectable mileage.
On the other end of the spectrum, we’d occasionally get very talented guys who’d get too fast for the club after training with us for a few months and subsequently get scooped up by one of the local sub-elite post-collegiate groups. Often these were former college runners tapping into their old potential. However, there was this one guy who ran 37-low for 10K in his first race ever with no prior track/XC experience. Within a few months of joining the club, he was already destroying everyone in workouts. He eventually started training with a local college’s track team and went on to run a 3:51 1500m in his mid 30s. Probably the greatest example of a talented runner I’ve ever personally known (bearing in mind I didn’t run in HS or college). He could’ve been a sub-4 miler had he started earlier in life IMO.
I ran a 5 flat mile in PE/health my soph yr without any training, never ran track or did any running. After that the coach had me go out for track my jr yr in hs. Ended up running 153 800 hs, Talent vs training?
I know two former world class runners. Both ran eye-popping times with no training in 8th-9th grade when their PE coach made them run a mile. Both were the first time on a track.
Genetics are absolutely necessary at world level... both natural running genetics and high response to training genetics.
"Average" genetic athletes can move far past average with the right training, but not to world class level.