just the facts ma'am wrote:This is possible, but stop for a second and think about what kind of talent your brother must have been in order to achieve this. 2:01 with no training in casual shoes! [blah blah blah] ...and you've got a possible sub-1:50 guy on just 1.5 years of training.
Guy runs 2:01 on minimal training: easy to believe.
Guy who runs 2:01 on minimal training must automatically be capable of running sub-1:50: not so much.
My personal experience: I ran 2:01 in my first season of running, at age 15, running maybe 15 miles per week tops for a few months. (And the splits were 63.x/57.x, so I think I could have gone faster!)
I trained hard for the next 13 years, but I never got faster than 1:51, and that was as a senior in university.
Interestingly, the summer I was 19 I spent eight weeks working up north in a lumber camp, where I did no running whatsoever. When I got back to the city, I hopped in a workout with my buddies and was surprised that I felt pretty good. So I hopped into an allcomers meet after 1.5 weeks of running and two workouts, and ran 2:01.
Moral of my long-winded story: I found that I had enough natural ability to always run in the 2:00-2:02 range no matter how much training I'd been doing (as long as I was reasonably active and not 30 pounds overweight). That didn't mean I had unworldly talent -- like I said, I never got faster than 1:51 despite a lot of trying -- it's just what my baseline was. So I don't have any trouble believing that the brother of a 1:53 high-school runner would be able to gut out a 2:01 on minimal training.
Oh, and just so my post is vaguely relevant to the OP: in college, we needed an extra man to fill out our 4x800 team indoors. We heard there was a varsity soccer player who had run in high school, so we got him to come out. He ran 1:58 indoors after a month of training.