My favorite rags-to-athletic-riches story is Reid Coolsaet, a Canadian ultrarunner from near where I grew up who’s a few years younger than me. As a high-schooler, he was mediocre. In university, he started to improve—and didn’t stop. Starting in 1998, when he turned 19, his annual 5K bests were: 15:56, 15:16, 14:39, 14:28, 14:12, 13:53, 13:31, 13:23. By that time, in 2005, he was representing Canada at the world track and field championships, and he went on to run (and place in the top 30) in two Olympic marathons.
I’ve always loved Reid’s success because of how unlikely it seemed, given his humble start. But a new study suggests that I may have been misjudging him, and falling into a common trap in my assumptions about what’s “typical” for athletes who ascend to the highest levels of the sport. Published in the journal Sports Medicine by a team led by Arne Güllich of the University of Technology Kaiserslautern in Germany, the new review argues that athletes who succeed in junior age categories are, for the most part, completely different from those who succeed in adult competition. For anyone coming…
