Running "Intelligence"

Today Jake Pollack, Akiva, and I ran the Germantown Half Marathon. It was a really cool experience, and I made it to the finish alive, but it really got me thinking about how the winners can just run and run and run at basically 5-minute-mile paces and live to tell the story.

I still don't know how they do that, but I have come up with ways to explain their running through a psychologist with an intelligence theories, as well as a psychologist who could not reason their ability through intelligence

The key psychologist who can explain movement prowess through intelligence is Howard Gardener. Though L.L. Thurstone also split intelligence into categories (even though these were eventually still labeled "general intelligence" after correlating in tests), he only considered capacity for different thinking abilities within the mind, like verbal comprehension, memory, and inductive reasoning. Other psychologists who do not explain running "intelligence" include Sternberg, Cattell, and Spearman. Gardener's theory, on the other hand, was upheld as explaining different types of intelligence (and NOT labeled as "generalized intelligence"), for it showed that other abilities are "equally important to our human adaptability." Therefore, according to Gardener, movement is a type of intelligence.

According to Gardener, the runners at the race today were "intelligent." They were skilled at moving their bodies the right way. However, some of them may have been (another Gardener term) idiot savants for they might not be intelligent in other ways, but running and forms of exercise may be their "island of brilliance."

I am not moving at all anymore for 3 days by the way.