Quote Originally Posted by Myst View Post
OK another example then I suspect a runner girl I know is SLI. She would train pretty irregularly and be very good anyway, especially in the marathon (again)... and would win some country-wide races in long hilly trail runs. She did go train with a coach for a while when she was told she was so talented* she should get better. She did want to be good and competent (SLI motivation?) I guess, but she had trouble staying regular with the monotonous training for longer than a couple months at a time. In her training log she'd typically describe how much she felt out of breath in crazy tempo runs and stuff like that lol. Interestingly enough, it would be a strong motivating factor for her to go do training if she could do it with friends. One day she did finally run the goal time she had set for the marathon and then she never tried another one. (She did continue with the hill races.) I have no idea where she could've got if she had continued with it more seriously, actually. On the other hand, maybe her body did like the "natural breaks" (mainly in winter btw) and rebuild itself and be ready to step it up more in the next hard cycle? I don't know, but this worked for her better than continuous (and overdone!) training worked for some other people I've known, lol. All in all, I don't know how an SLI gets to Olympic level in competition but I'm sure it's possible fine in their own way if they are motivated for it.

*: Oh, that was a weird thing too, she'd always just say no she's not talented, she's just thin.
she probably got motivated via superego or something, like emotional pressure, which is probably why she didn't want to keep up on it once she had satisfied people's demands etc. it was never really about winning for her I'm guessing and more about meeting some social dynamic she felt she obligated to