[twawaaay]

I think you might be looking wrong at how big an accomplishment it is to be in top 3 or 4% of random sample of people in a field where a lot of people do it recreationally.

All running events I took part look more or less like this -- there is a line of a dozen or two dozen "serious" people and then there is hundreds or thousands of people that are just doing it for fun.

If you put a random sample of drivers on a track, the person that is half percentile from the top result would still be an amateur with poor result by any possible standard.

Or, think in terms of Settlers of Catan. If you've red any strategy tutorial on how you should properly play it to win the game you are probably in the top 0.1% of players. Does it make you special? Does it make you a professional player? Most certainly not...

I think it is true for a lot of fields, including running, that if you are trying at all, putting any effort, you immediately jump to top percent or two of all participants.

[notacoward]

Why do you assume it's me who's looking at it wrong? Your own PR is "no big accomplishment" by your own standard, despite having worked hard to get it. Does that seem sensible to you? Would you not have taken offense if I had been the one to dismiss it with a hand-wave? You're not even being consistent here.

A lot of people will run a 5K recreationally, but that's much less true of a 10K. Just completing the distance puts them in a pretty high percentile relative to the general population. I know a lot of dedicated runners, people who have been running three to six times a week for years, who nonetheless have never run a 10K in under 45:00 and never will. Many of them have never even submitted an official time. They're not unfit. They're not obese. They're not doing it for fun, either. They're dedicated and often quite competitive; they're just not fast, and many of them couldn't be even with the utmost dedication.

That's why age-grading exists, and it's based on more science than you seem to know. Even elites lose alveolar density and joint flexibility as they age. That's why all of the world records are held by young people, who also dominate all of the top events. Believe it or not, being over 40 is a thing. It's a significant percentage of the population right there, never mind the younger folks who also range from the disabled through the genuinely lazy to those who are actually super-fit but specialize in other activities or just aren't hyper-competitive enough to devote their time to HIIT and other speed-specific training methods.

> the person that is half percentile from the top result would still be an amateur with poor result

That is simply not true, and it's strong evidence that it's you who lack perspective. Being within half a percentile of the top is an excellent result practically by definition. "Hanging with the elites" is a ridiculous cutoff. Even the person in the middle of the pack for any of those races I cited is a "well conditioned athlete" by any sane set of definitions. In any room of a hundred random people, they'd stand a good chance of being the fittest one there. Moving goalposts to exclude them seems a bit disingenous.

[sn9]

You're ignoring that he's talking about performance given a certain baseline training volume while you're talking about performance regardless of training history.

It's two very different populations.

This is like someone saying a reliable way of making six figures in the US is to study CS and become a developer and you're responding with the average income across the human population as evidence for why this isn't a good strategy.

[notacoward]

> performance given a certain baseline training volume

That would make the argument pretty circular, because of course those two tiny slivers of the population have high overlap. I was trying to assume good faith, despite the venue, and clearly that was a mistake.