[hackingonempty]

Here's a random high school in Northern California. Everyone on the team is beating 16.7 seconds in the 100m. For the 1600m there are six kids with times under 4m30s and another seven with times under 4m40s, all in the last month.

https://www.athletic.net/team/770/track-and-field-outdoor/20...

* of course one mile is hardly comparable to the marathon that pros are able to sustain such speeds over...

[sethev]

Not sure that disproves the point :) Most people have never been anywhere close to competing with the top 6 athletes at a high school with ~2k students.

[hackingonempty]

There are thousands of these high schools all across the USA. The top high schoolers in California so far this year are doing 1600m in 4m7s.

https://www.athletic.net/TrackAndField/rankings/list/168546/...

[PaulDavisThe1st]

OK, so let's do the math. There's about 25k high schools in the USA. Let's suppose they all have a track team, and let's assume that they all have 5 team members who can break 04:30 for 1600m. Sure, at some schools that's too few, but at others it is too many.

That gives us 125k high schoolers in the USA who can break 04:30 for 1600m. There are about 18M high school students. So of just the high school population alone, about 0.7% of them can do this.

Assuming there are the 4x as many adults that can do this as there are high school students, that gives us slightly less than 0.2% of the total US population capable of this.

I rest my case.

[hackingonempty]

We just have different ideas of what constitutes "mere mortals." 1 in 150 high school students or even 1 in 500 from the general population doesn't sound super human to me at all. Talented, yes but not god like.

[maxerickson]

What do you want most to mean here?

[hyperpape]

Unless kids have gotten a lot faster in the past 25 years, I think that's a lot better than a typical 2000 person high school.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

How many kids at the school?