The fallacy of striking distance
I came up with title of this post during my run this afternoon. As cool as I think it sounds, it does not represent a formal logical fallacy, but it does pinpoint a common and sometimes grave error in reasoning.
People have proposed all sorts of explanations for the longstanding habit of a lot of poor and struggling Americans to vote for people whose policy ideas and demonstrable personal histories establish, beyond any doubt whatsoever, that the last thing these politicians care about is the well-being of poor people. The apparent nadir of this, for now, is that the man who is now the president-elect of the United States spent over a year on the campaign trail promising to repeal the Affordable Care Act, a piece of legislation that has been a literal lifesaver for a great many people in rural, working class or just plain impoverished America. Indeed, there is and long has been a strong inverse correlation between voting for candidates who preach "personal responsibility" and having one's life largely subsidized by the government. Two months ago, Trump won 15 the top 20 states in terms of the value of their ACA, or "Obamacare," subsidies.
While it's tempting to chalk all of this up to the basic ignorance of the rubes, a lot of whom evidently really don't know that the ACA and "Obamacare" are one and the same, I believe that there's more to it than that. A lot of poor and struggling Americans seem to believe that they are merely one great idea away from being millionaires themselves. Their desperate desire to have their fortunes change miraculously for the better has led a good many of them to gradually move from daydreaming about unlikely financial success to actually thinking that this is not merely likely, but inevitable. This surely explains why so many Trump voters want to believe that he's a brilliant self-made businessman rather than a trust-fund imbecile who can barely string a sentence together and lies as if the sheer act of it gives him multiple orgasms.
Okay, that was more than enough politics for one post here or even a month's worth of them. But there is a running tie-in here, and it has to do with the relative incompetence and even recklessness with which non-elite but far-better-than-average runners typically set and approach competitive goals. They simply fail to respond to available data and evidence and go with their gut, or their heart, or their fever-dreams, because these things represent a preferable psychological state to reality -- but the comfort entails a cost to longer-term sanity.
Say you're a 26-year-old male who's been running seriously for a couple of years and have run times ranging from about 16:30 for 5K to 2:45:00 for the marathon. You've probably been told by knowledgeable people that you are unusually talented, which is true. You've improved from 21:30 in your first painful 5K off 20 miles a week for two months and a 3:20 marathon a few months later off 30 miles a week to your times of today, the product of about 50-60 miles a week maintained for about a year and a smattering of speedwork. At this rate, you reason, your rate of improvement will carry you into the Olympic Trials in the event of your choosing, be it the 5,000m, the 10,000m or the marathon. That is, because you've seen your 5K time drop by five minutes (from 21:30 to 16:30) and your marathon time by 35 minutes (from 3:20:00 to 2:45:00) in two years, you figure four more years, when you'll be at your physical running peak, will allow you to drop into 13:30 and 2:15 territory.
There is a certain superficial numerical logic to this, but it is functionally illogical. With almost no exceptions, truly elite runners reach elite status in a comparatively short time after beginning even semi-serious training. Someone with the innate engine and drivetrain to run 13:30 and 2:15:00 (and in between, around 28:30 and 1:04:00) is almost certainly going to be in 14:30 and mid-2:20s territory after a year or so of regular racing and consistent training -- even 40- to 50-mile weeks. Obviously this is open to argument, but I invite anyone to find a real exception to this loose rule.
Still, it is common to see people of generally sound mind thinking that if they only work a little harder for a few more years, and everything goes right, and they revamp their diets and do enough yoga and get more sleep and do the right magical stretches, they can improve by improbable amounts. It's interesting, and telling, to see how many runners appear to believe that their ultimate potential in the marathon happens to fall in the range of whatever the U.S. Olympic Trials standard happens to be for their gender at the time. I could point you to a good many blogs right now whose authors have been at it for a number of years and want to run 2:19 marathons despite 2:50-ish PRs, or 2:45 marathons despite 3:10-ish PRs.
I ran my first marathon in Atlanta in 1994 in 2:39:37 -- 6:06 pace. I decided then that trying to attain the then-Olympic Trials standard of 2:22:00 was not unreasonable. Yes, 2:39:37 is a far cry from 2:22:00 (over 40 seconds a mile, in fact) but I has also run 15:25 for 5K on the road, was only 24, and knew I hadn't run a very good marathon that day and that the course was a slow one anyway.
Over the next 6 1/2 years, I gradually eased my PR down to 2:33:08 (1995), 2:30:52 (1997), 2:26:52 (1999) and 2:24:17 (2001). I was probably in the best marathon shape of my life in the spring of 2003, when I ran 5:29 pace for 20 miles alone at the end of a 120-mile week. Three weeks later, duly tapered and focused, I was as ready as ever to run 5:25 pace for 26.2 miles, but everything needed to go almost perfectly for that to happen, and it didn't. It was a hot day in Boston and I stepped off the course at 12K to cut my losses. As it happened, although I ran most of my lifetime PRs three years later at age 34, I never took another healthy and serious shot at 2:22:00.
When I was a 14:58 5K runner, I "knew" I'd never run 14:30. When I ran 2:24:17, even allowing for the fact that I lost maybe a minute to a minute-fifteen to a series of three portable toilet adventures. I "knew" "I was unlikely to run under 2:20. I had been logging regular 100-mile weeks for years and therefore understood that huge performance jumps were essentially impossible. Was I guilty of selling myself short? I really doubt it. In fact, I maintain that men and women like me -- those who train like world-class marathoners but were never close to world class, only solid local-yokel-caliber runners -- know exquisitely the gulf that exists between a 2:10 guy and a 2:24 guy, or between a 2:25 woman and a 2:40 woman. You almost have to have this understanding in order to both stay sane and remain fully in the game at that point.
When I look back on this, as well as the panoply of things I did right as well as the countless mistakes I made and setbacks of my own design, I figure that I was at least chasing an attainable goal. While there is no law against dreaming big, you will be a lot happier as a runner if you get regular, positive feedback that implies that you are not waiting for the athletic equivalent of the one great idea that poor people believe will turn their whole lives around.