hopeandchange wrote:
How to change this?
Abolish school buses, pesticides, Xboxes, Gameboys, myspace, facebook, McDonalds, laptops, and the NFL & the NBA.
terps wrote:
Personally, I think most American high school coaches, and, taken one step further, college coaches, look to the short sighted local idiotic events, dual meets against your "rivals," as some type of stepping stone to American distance running manhood, when really they have been setting the athletes back, and in the way of development, for many years. ...
So it's really ex-runners with a warped localized competitive ego creating more American nobodies, year after year, decade after decade, as they collect that extra 3-5 grand on top of their teaching salaries. Every once in a while, as in soccer, somebody suceeds despite the high school coaching.
Here we go again. So....., the story goes, if we just changed the system, the freaking system man, and had our kids growing up in an ideal running environment like East Africa has (ya know, with the AIDS and malaria and other diseases, the extreme poverty, the famines, the wars, the strife, and the terrible government, etc, etc), then we too would be producing 18 y.o.'s that run 1:44 indoors and win world champs, and runners like geb and bekele who run 26:17-22 for 10k, and we would be dominating world cross every year, and have women like Defar who can finish distance races nearly as fast a them men, etc, etc. Yup. Talent has NOOOOOOTHING to do with it. It's the system and our environment that are to blame. Talent Schmalent.