So, this whole “are athletes born or made?” thing. It’s a classic, right? For ages, I kinda leaned towards the “born” side. You see these kids on TV, or even in the park, just… flowing. Like they popped out of the womb with a ball at their feet or wings on their heels. Effortless.
My Own Little Experiment
But then I started to, you know, actually pay attention. Not just be amazed by the flashy stuff. I started to wonder what was going on behind the scenes. And, a few years back, I decided to get serious about my own fitness. Nothing crazy, just wanted to see if I could push myself. Thought I’d try to get into running, proper running, not just jogging for the bus.
Man, was that an eye-opener. It was tough. Really tough. Some days I felt great, like I could go forever. Other days, getting out the door was a battle. And I saw other folks at it. Some were naturals, sure, gliding along. But then there were others, huffing and puffing, clearly struggling, but they were out there. Day after day. Grinding.
This whole experience, it got me thinking. And it really brought back a memory, something from a completely different part of my life, but it sort of clicked, you know?
Thinking Back to an Old Job
I used to work at this small company, a tech place. We had this project land on our desks. A real beast. Honestly, everyone whispered it was a dead end, that it would take some kind of miracle worker to even make a dent in it. We had this one guy there, let’s call him Alex. Super smart. The kind of guy who just “got” things instantly. If anyone was “born” for complex problem-solving, it was him. He’d glance at the specs, make a few pronouncements, and then, poof, he was onto the next shiny thing. He was our “natural talent.”
But weeks turned into months, and that monster project? Still a monster. Still stuck. Alex would float by, offer a cryptic suggestion, and float away again. Progress was zero.
Then there was this other chap. Let’s call him Ben. Ben was… well, Ben was just Ben. Quiet. Kept to himself mostly. Definitely not the guy you’d pick out of a lineup as a coding genius. He wasn’t flashy. He just showed up, every day. You’d see him there, surrounded by notes, muttering to himself, trying one thing, then another. Lots of coffee. Lots of staring at the screen. Most of us, if we were honest, probably thought he was wasting his time. Bless him for trying, but you know…
Alex, the “genius,” had long since declared the project uninteresting and moved on to architecting some grand, theoretical new system that never actually got built. But Ben? Ben was still there. Pecking away. And slowly, incredibly slowly, bits of that monster project started to flicker to life. It wasn’t pretty. Some of his solutions were, let’s say, unconventional. But they worked.
I remember the day he finally showed the whole thing working. The bosses were stunned. They asked him, “Ben, how on earth did you crack it?” He just kind of shrugged, looked a bit embarrassed, and said something like, “Oh, I just kept trying different things, I guess. It took a while.”
So, Born or Made?
So now, when I hear that “athletes born or made” question, I think of Ben. Was he “born” to solve that impossible tech problem? Not a chance. He didn’t have that instant, flashy brilliance Alex had. But did he make himself the person who could solve it? Absolutely. Through sheer, stubborn persistence. Through all those hours no one else was watching.
And my running? I was no “born” runner. Every step beyond the first mile felt “made.” Made with effort, with sweat, with showing up when I didn’t want to. Some folks I saw out there, they were clearly fighting their own battles, maybe not “born” runners either, but they were making themselves runners, one painful step at a time.
It just makes you think, doesn’t it? How much of what we call “natural talent” is actually just the tip of an iceberg? The part we see after countless hours of “making” that we don’t see. That quiet grind.
I never did run a marathon, by the way. My left knee decided it had other plans for retirement. But the whole thing, watching Ben, trying to push myself, it taught me something. It’s rarely just one or the other, is it? And the “made” part? That’s a whole lot messier and tougher than it looks from the sidelines. A bit like that old project. A bit like life, really.
