The Goldilocks syndrome: the ersatz overachiever vs. the accomplished layabout

Picture a couple of guys in their mid- to late 20s with marathon bests of 2:17:00

One of them has run 13:20 and 28:30 on the track and 1:04:30 for a half-marathon. He does about 70 miles a week with occasional trips upward of 80 and never exceeds 20 miles in training because long runs, in his view, are "hella boring." He works part-time at a gym and is considering becoming a personal trainer, while his longtime girlfriend is a quasi-socialite and grad student who brings enough family dough to the arrangement to keep the couple more than comfortable.

The other runner entered college with a best 3200-meter time barely under 10:00. By the time he graduated summa cum laude from a D-III university, he'd managed to parlay being the team workhorse into running 30:15 for 10,000 meters and place in the top 15 at cross-country nationals. Having moved on to law school and reached his third year there, he's finding a way to log 120- to 140-mile weeks with hard, regular workouts that would make this guy proud. He managed to get his 10K time down to 29:33 about a month before popping his 2:17:00, and has never run under 1:06:00 for a half.

The first runner admits in interviews, "I don't take running super-seriously. People always tell me I have a ton of ability but I just have a lot of other stuff going on that commands my attention."

The second runner, when asked about his progress, shrugs. "It's all about the work," he says. "I never had any talent in high school for running, or frankly for anything. There's probably 500 guys in the NCAA right now who could run 2:17 in a couple years, but very few will even try."

Chances are pretty good that the first guy's words will get under your skin more than the second, but you'll find yourself balking at both self-appraisals. This is because our culture somehow simultaneously demonizes immodesty and unfounded modesty. The first guy in this scenario -- and you should know by this point that I manufactured both of them completely from whole cloth -- is obviously unusually talented, and you probably find yourself wondering what he could do with a real marathoner's work ethic. The second guy is plainly making the most of his talents, but for a variety of reasons it would be a stretch to believe his claim about the number of men who could duplicate his performances.

The way the world works now, with very few elite athletes even in a marginal sport like marathon running able to fully hide from the media, if you're such a person and attempt explain your opinion of your own worth ethic and talent level to a reporter or blogger or some random interloper at the track, chances are you're going to be maligned no matter what you say by a bizarre but persistent segment of the population. You'll either someone who's not giving it everything he should based on a stellar 10K at Payton Jordan some years back, or someone who needs to pack up the endless 20-mile days and get a real job if he doesn't believe he has the engine and drivetrain to run 2:08 someday. The only way to be who and what you are is to try to avoid people asking you certain questions, and in the Internet age that just makes you reticent. Or arrogant. Or a Luddite. Ot a doper.

Realistically, and leaving aside how blatantly pointless it is to try to figure out how fast anyone "could" be or what fraction of the citizenry "ought" to be able to run a given time, everyone at the elite level is a rare breed. Watch a high-school cross-country race sometime -- not a Foot Locker meet, just an ordinary invitational with races going on all day long. You will quickly find that a lot of people are not cut out to ever run remotely fast. Some people, male or female, could never run 20:00 for 5K with the most Herculean effort imaginable. They could get their resting heart rates down to 35 and have a phenomenal level of fitness by any metric -- except the one that counts the most, in competition.

If you are watching someone run the Olympic Trials Marathon, you are observing a person who has an unusual level of durability, an above-average level of competitiveness, and a rare level of running economy combined with a nice complement of mitochondrial density in the right places. That's it. Each of us is tempted to deny being talented at running, and to point at That Person Over There as an exemplar of real ability. I have always done this, too, because I've spent a lot of years interacting with runners a lot faster than I ever was and it becomes second nature to think of oneself as an example of a glorified pedestrian marathoner. And while I maintain that most of the guys who were beating me in high school could have run faster than 2:24 had they worked at it, the truth is that it's almost as arrogant to accuse these people of not trying as it would be to pretend I was anything noteworthy at that level. Because a lot of fast-ish people I know did try to keep it up through college, or after college, and for some reason couldn't make running stick. If nothing else I was always very injury-resistant and it would be silly to discount this as at least a meta aspect of "talent."

I hope I did a decent job with this. The flow came very naturally, as always, but I busted my ass all the same. Even though I typed the whole thing out on a whim after about seventeen toots of USP-grade cocaine. Maybe. Someone out there is grossly outperforming me at blogging this very second, and I'm OK with that, so suck it.