Agree of disagree: Paul Chelmo, "The 5000m is all in the mind. It's only about 75 percent fitness. The rest is mental.

I think it may be true of someone with incredible talent like Paul Chelimo,

not so much for most people and probably a lot of pros

This is mostly a matter of semantics. Having the requisite fitness is a necessary but not sufficient condition for success @ 5000m or other distances too. See Fernando Mamede, who may have been more talented than Carlos Lopes but he seemed to lack the courage or poise or tenacity of Lopes. So Paul Chelimo, if he were smarter or more articulate or whatever, might say that the difference among the top competitors in the world at 5000m is mostly in the mind (I am not suggesting that is necessarily true) but that might be a reasonably accurate paraphrase of what he intended to convey, as Paul surely knows that if he did not run for 5 months and only trained his mind, he could not make the US team.

I think I could agree. I'm sure everyone here has run a big PR too soon after another race for it to all (or even mostly) be fitness gains. I'm sure everyone has also had a race where they were just checked out by 3k and their performance didn't reflect their performance at all. At the pro level, you always hear athletes saying "I had to keep telling myself I belong here with these guys and I can compete with them" etc.

Tbh, I think that may be the reason BTC sets up their time trials the way they do. If you go through 3k feeling really rough, or barely underestimate your fitness, you can die hard the last 2k. If you hit 3k feeling great and can ratchet it down, you're gonna feel like you're flying for the rest of the race. You may leave 1 or 2 seconds out on the track compared to a Joe Klecker 12:54 type race, but the chance of blowing up is like 10% compared to 99%.

The fitter and more talented you are, the more mental it is.

Relative to the 3k or 10k I think the 5k is more mentally challenging. It feels like the sweet spot of pace and distance where you spend the most time pushing extreme acidosis and just hurting in general.

25% mental is hilariously exaggerated of course

According to DN, the 5000 is 90% mental and 10% physical which is interesting to compare it to this.

Ten percent is mental desire, toughness and want.

Thirty percent, 200m speed.

Sixty-percent, a combination of anaerobic & aerobic fitness.

All these guys lining up in the olympic 5000m final can usually run somewhere under 13:00, even if they hadn't yet.

It's very hard to out fitness someone in these races and run away with it, instead, you have to be mentally tough and smart. Knowing you belong and you can close with these guys, and being smart enough to know how to run a tactical race could both be considered parts of the mental game.

"Mind is everything. Muscles-pieces of rubber. All that I am, I am because of my mind." -Paavo Nurmi

"Always, if you can win mentally, you can win physically as well"

-Haile Gebrselassie

So he is saying that Jakob is massively stronger mentally than he is. Works for me, Mr. "Finish in Lane 4"

Classic Rojo. 😎

All else being equal, it is mental. But all else is never equal. I also think it's fair to say that the longer you have to ponder, strategize, question yourself, etc., the more a race requires mental strength in addition to physical. This would of course also mean that the 10k is even more mental than the 5k, marathon more than the 10k, and so on. But the short term intensity of the mental requirement may be much higher for a short race than a longer, even if the sum of the mental contribution is much larger for the latter.

Consider how much the mental component is limited to yourself vs. competitive tactics/strategy/psychology against competitors. The toughness element of holding out in the last 10k of a marathon is very different from the psychological/tactical component of the last 1500 of a 5k (again, both components can easily show up in the opposite situations, they are just more common in the former configuration).

This is an event that needs to be run on pure hate.

Paul Chelmo!

I'm closer to Chelimo's view. 5k is short enough that you can gut out a good time even if you're not fit. It's hard, but you know you're not going to be out there for very long. When you get to the HM and marathon, any lack of fitness will expose you to the point where even finishing will be an issue.

Firstly, his statement is self-contradictory. It can't be all in the mind if it's only 25 percent in the mind.

Secondly, the 5000m is no more or less "mental" than any other event.

Some people will anecdotally say that they think the 5000m is the hardest event to get right, while others will say it's much easier than just about any other distance event.

Personally, I think it's one of the less psychologically demanding events. It's at an intensity slightly lower than vo2 max - so you can relax somewhat - yet it's also over fairly quickly.

I think the 10k is far harder. In terms of physical intensity, it's not that different from the 5k (both are above threshold but below vo2 max), yet the 10k lasts for way longer - as does the pain.

However, part of me also thinks - the longer an event becomes, the more psychologically demanding it becomes. It's much easier to override the body's pain signals when you know they'll only persist for another 3-5 minutes. It's much harder to do so when you've got to push through for an hour or more.

When you're as talented and such a natural like Chelimo, sure. For most others, the 5000m takes a lot of hard work great mix of high mileage, consistent speed, and racing instincts.

Yes. Because I can tell you. I'm 63, I was injured for about 3 years. Last year I ran between 2-10 mile per week coming off the injury and I was a teacher and had not mindset or energy to do anything but go to school and go home to bed.

I retired, I am slowly upping my mileage and I can tell you that I used to run 3 minutes per mile faster for 5K.

No matter what my mindset I can't run faster.

Pros at any level love to down play their nature talent and talk about how hard they work/ mentally tough they are. What a dumb quote by Paul. It’s much more physical than mental.

At his peak, Bob Kennedy had a quote along the lines of:

"9 1/2 laps of the 5000 is pure hell and pain. I just have to get the other 3 laps there to be where I want to be and run fast."

*This is paraphrased from memory so may be slightly different but it covers his concept of the 5k at the time.