[mar225]

Amazingly he basically trained on his lunch hour while studying to be a physician when preparing to run the sub 4 mile. And then went on to be a distinguished medical researcher. He had such a positive influence on running and medicine. If there ever was an athlete that deserved the moniker role model it was him.

[oh_sigh]

Sometimes I wonder how much genetics can explain things like this. Obviously, lettuce has never run a 4 minute mile, but how big is the variance in factors enabling ostensibly normally developed humans to perform impressive feats like this?

[griffinkelly]

Read Sports Gene by David Epstein. He discusses a lot of the genetics vs. developing one's body specifically for a sport, with a large focus on distance running.

[0xcde4c3db]

From what I've skimmed genes and gene expression seem to play a huge role (e.g. [1] [2]), but it shows the signs of being a multidimensional space where researchers are far from finished even figuring out what the dimensions actually are. Some of the popular press has mutated this into the notion of generic "exercise super-responders" and "exercise non-responders", but as usual they seem to be dumbing it down to the point of saying something almost the opposite of what the research actually supports.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2886694/

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2682667/