Comment by nopinsight | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nopinsight | Hacker News Reader

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I'm curious. Do you mean it figuratively? I ask Claude Sonnet 3.7 Extended Thinking since it's usually reliable and the stats for running strongly suggest that for most competitions, the top percentile is closer to world-class athletes than the average person to top percentile athletes (possibly except Marathon).

*100m Sprint*:

1st percentile: ~18-20 seconds

50th percentile: ~14-15 seconds

99th percentile: ~11-11.5 seconds

Elite world-class: ~9.8-10.2 seconds

World record: 9.58 seconds (Usain Bolt, 2009)

*1-Mile Run*:

1st percentile: ~12-15 minutes

50th percentile: ~8-9 minutes

99th percentile: ~4:30-5:00 minutes

Elite world-class: ~3:45-3:55

World record: 3:43.13 (Hicham El Guerrouj, 1999)

*Marathon* (26.2 miles):

1st percentile: ~6+ hours

50th percentile: ~4:30-5:00 hours

99th percentile: ~3:00-3:15 hours

Elite world-class: ~2:05-2:10

World record: 2:00:35 (Kelvin Kiptum, 2023)*

They’re not talking about the results. They’re saying the gulf between the skill and strength required to go from 11s to 9s is larger than the gulf between 11s and 15s - that’s because it takes exponentially increasing effort for marginal gains as you approach world record times - it’s not a linear thing and thus looking at the output paints a really misleading picture on the relative difference in inputs

Verbatim quote: “The difference between me and an average Joe in strength technique and speed was still less than the difference between me and the Olympic level athletes that I occasionally competed (or worse, trained) with.”

I’m not disputing the gaps in technique, just to be clear.

Exactly this

Well the one mile and marathon stats pretty much prove OPs point

Only because he picked 50th percentile. If you'd sample 75th percentile I think for most sports it'll hold pretty true to the 80-20 rule for mastering something: 80% of the result comes from 20% of the investment, and to eek out the last 20% of result you'll have to invest 80% more effort / time / money. Especially the last few percentpoint gain require an inordinate amount extra.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43743198

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