A new way to demonstrate the bottomless inanity of David Roche
A different style of love letter to the "Some Work All Play" cult for brainless trust-funders
Rather than review another wandering advice column by David Roche by simply dumping on it, I’ve graciously done what no one at Trail Runner is willing to do and streamlined a recent example of his work. The idea was merely to prod the piece in the direction of enhanced readability, not improve its content.
This proved little more than an exercise in garbage compaction. “A Day-By-Day Training Guide For Race Weeks And Tapers” is standard Roche: semi-random combinations of scientific and physiology terms with no useful or even identifiable core message, aimed at people who do not or cannot read but for some reason enjoy getting and even paying for “information” from neurotic posers who center a coaching scam on feigned kindness.
I tried to reformat this piece the way a low-level AI program would perform the same task. I removed the word salad and preserved only the portions of text that purport to pertain to tapering or resting for a competitive running event. I focused only on extracting the article’s essential elements, striving to remain agnostic to the inherent truth value of specific claims and presenting conflicting or incoherent material as seamlessly as if this were standard practice. That is, I tried to avoid internal sneering or excessive acknowledgments of the article’s and author’s shortcomings.
If any of Roche’s metaphors were helpful, I’d have converted them into concrete statements to retain them in some way. And if his jokes were funny, I’d have kept those, too. For self-evident reasons, none of this was necessary.
A Day-By-Day Training Guide For Race Weeks And Tapers
It’s easy to micromanage and overcomplicate things heading into a race. Here’s how to worsen this tendency.
Tapering for a goal race and resting up for non-goal race are different situations demanding different strategies. Nevertheless, I’m pretending they’re the same thing and giving blanket advice for both situations. It’s bad advice for either situation. but the people who retweet my columns do not read them, much less heed what’s in them. And I still get paid.
Disclaimer: It’s impossible to determine what kind of rest or taper works in any one runner owing to the sheer number of factors in play. So, if my advice doesn’t work for you, that’s on you. But if one of “my” runners succeeds, or someone reading this does, then I credit myself with a brilliantly surgical approach and pretend to file away whatever I wrote to do for future use. (This is how my lovely wife Megan and I get clients; it only works on dummies, but look how many dummies live in Boulder alone.)
Let’s dig into the carefully refined science.
First, do a long run between seven and ten days from your race and make it last anywhere between 90 and 150 minutes. Maybe include some tempo running. Also, avoid muscle damage. Science supports this focused approach.
Six days out, don’t do another final long run. Do something shorter than a long run, maybe with strides. For example, one of my heroes ran 22 miles six days before an important race.
Five days out, take a rest day. This can include walking, a sauna, and staying active within reason.
Four days out, theories vary. This once confused me; not anymore. Run six to ten miles—including some intense work, but not too much—and make it your last serious pre-race workout. Experiment.
Three days out, eliminate sources of life stress and start tapering from caffeine so that overloading on caffeine on race day will make more of a difference. The science, which varies, supports this. If you feel springy, you can waste this energy by running somewhat hard.
Two days out, eat. A 70-kg person should consume anywhere between 560 and 1,260 grams of carbohydrate in the final day and a half before the race, along with 70 to 280 grams on race morning. This is clearly an enormous range; science supports this, too.
One day out, fully engage your aerobic system, restfully. Also, the night before a race is a really good time to briefly quit caffeine.
On race day, run smart. Above all, trust whatever you’ve done, because I can use my nonexistent cache of data to prove that whatever you did works if I suggested it, and doesn’t if I didn’t.
Remember: If I can take credit for your success despite having the mind of a salamander, I will if you let me. On the other hand, if you messed up, then you should have listened better to my random suggestions. N=1 for most simple values of N between 0 and 2, especially integers.
The Roches recently had Kara Goucher as a guest on their podcast. Goucher, in theory, doesn’t need to do this, and if she had any capacity for discrimination, she would reject speaking invitations from grifters and plainly insincere people like these two. But she doesn’t care, because she’ll do anything to promote herself and her new book, which will include selectively honest disclosures.
In a past lifetime, I would have been interested in this book. And if most humans still made mostly legitimate noises in their public dispatches instead of trying to impress people and hit the right cultural notes, I still might be, especially if I thought Goucher was really a “tell-all” type, which she’s not, instead of one more post-athletic-retirement money-hound, which she is.
To further her promotional aim, Goucher will go on other useless podcasts hosted by other mush-minded people, because this is what most of running has become—a plethora of pointless sites operated by people superfluous to running, and dingbat-led podcasts that exist mainly to support other dingbat podcasters. Almost all of these people lie or have serious moral or mental deficiencies, which is why they are “covering” running instead of a real sport.
I don’t think Goucher is a bad person for doing any of this. She’s literally thoughtless at times, as is anyone who gives the rampant cheater and hyperinflated gasbag Latoya Snell support. I don’t think she does this fully aware of Snell’s destructive ways; she might just be dumb. (Then again, Lauren Fleshman also supports Snell, and Fleshman is a worthless turd who hasn’t told the truth about anything in years.) Worse, she’s a hypocrite in calling herself a doping opponent yet refusing to acknowledge Shelby Houlihan is a cheater. So are the rest of the elvish people associated with the Bowerman Track Club.
This is an issue of a former runner trying to make a living in an already marginal sport that, thanks to too many cretinous figures to name, is slipping closer to the bottom of the crapper every day. It’s unlikely it can be rehabbed; it’s been too poisoned by Wokish nonsense and will always remain a target of resentful white women with liberal leanings and big asses.
So if someone finally engaged the flusher with an irritated slap and sent track and field straight back to full amateur status, almost no one would care, because high-school and college running could remain just as important and viable under these vastly improved conditions.
Unless you’re a college coach, it’s hard to earnestly eke out a living solely as a distance-running communicator. (It’s also unclear why anyone would even want to do such a thing in the first place, given the range of genuine sports available for following, but whatever.) So, rather than piss off and do something else with their professional lives, a coterie of startlingly ignorant Gen Z joggers, harried old maids, and gluttonous Instagram clowns have decided to eke out dishonest livings instead.
New rules to abide by in this “sport” include: Men are women; Nike and its sweatshops ain’t so bad; black racists are heroes, while “whiteness” sucks and morons of color are geniuses; doping is great (Jerry and Shalane > AlSal), cheating is finishing; obesity is healthy; ugly is lovely; blocking and gaslighting are courageous moral stands; childish babbling is serious discourse; calling a woman a woman is misgendering when the woman is mentally ill.
Alarmingly, the average IQ of Americans who identify as distance runners—a class which shares falling but still-significant overlap with regular runners—dropped to an all-time low of 78.3 in 2022, a review of the Web has found. This is down from 96.7 in 2015, 103.7 in 2001, 114.6 in 1987, and 128.3 in 1952; the sport is expected to fail by 2031 for lack of basic mental wattage at the organizational level. Most people will be dead by then anyway.
And even setting aside these problems, running doesn’t lend itself to the same kind of coverage real sports do, and invites the presence of drama, hangers-on, and sleaze-artists. That’s an essay topic in itself, though.
As a result of these issues, most of my future writing about competitive running, if I can stand writing about it at all for much longer, will focus on high-school and collegiate “athletes.” Most observations I make about professional running and its chief publicists will malign the whole dilapidated and diseased train of self-interested crotch-tuggers, and pussified, self-dealing blatherheads. A lot of people have it coming.