An Allie Ostrander-S.W.A.P. allegiance was practically inevitable once Ostrander was suspended for a doping offense
Every unethical path in trail running—paths with more money-trees growing alongside them than I ever imagined—ultimately leads to David and Megan Roche
On April 28, distance runner Allie Ostrander began serving a four-month doping-related suspension from track and field. She kept this news to herself until her ban was about to end and this delaying of the inevitable was no longer possible, thereby destroying whatever credibility she might have gained by stepping forward four months earlier to admit she was sidelined and explaining why she had a masking agent in her system.
In an August post about Ostrander’s “Sure, I’ll agree to serve a ban that’s 99 percent over” move, I suggested that the she had already dented her own credibility in late February—a month before she peed hot for spironolactone, a drug that ironically enhances peeing—by shifting her energies to trail running, and had used an especially heavy hammer to make that dent in aligning herself with Kilian Jornet.
From that post:
For all of Ostrander’s often heart-wrenching problems, she managed to stay out of official trouble until she decided to switch solely to trails and became connected to a suspicious figure—one admired by proudly unethical clowns like the Roches of the coaching swindle “Some Work, All Play”…
It is therefore not surprising that an admiration for Jornet is no longer the only or most obvious link between Ostrander and the Roches. In a November 25 YouTube video, Ostrander disclosed that she was now working with the Roches (specifically David) and preparing for the 2024 USATF Cross Country Championships on January 20.
David and Megan Roche are pure dirtbags and essentially cult leaders; Megan’s association with the Aspen Institute alone identifies her as soulless and diabolical, while the determinedly pissy S.W.A.P. cult members eager to support and be associated with this operation are self-deluded, hypersensitive shitlibs—slogan-slinging hypocrites who are frankly unaware what a combination of flaming narcissism, high-decibel ignorance, and a total lack of accountability looks like to relatively normal and ethical people.
But even before these two preening control-freaks bumbled their way into “coaching” equally ridiculous near-clones of themselves—self-absorbed whiners of privilege whose advanced degrees, when present, are clearly more often the result of family connections than intellectual prowess—trail running was already a mess of doping.
In July 2015, ultramarathoner and wilderness advocate Ian Torrence wrote a piece for iRunFar titled “Performance Enhancing Drugs In Ultramarathons” in which Torrence opined that “we can be fairly certain that PED use is occurring in every ultramarathon in the U.S. due to medical necessity. However, PED use alone isn’t the problem; dishonest intent, taking drugs when they aren’t needed, is the key issue at hand.”
In August of the following year, after fifth-place Ultra Trail Mont-Blanc finisher Gonzalo Callisto tested positive for erythropoietin (EPO), endurance podcaster and photographer Ian Corless noted with charmingly naive dismay how rapidly the in-house scuttlebutt over this “surprising” solecism was fading.
“When It Comes to Anti-Doping, Trail Running Is Still a Wild West,” declared the headline of a story in Trail Runner Magazine the next month. If you click on that one, you’ll see that the alleged editor of Trail Runner, do-nothing retardress and S.W.A.P. cult member Zoe Rom, decided to repurpose the piece in April 2022 without noticing or caring that articles that start with sentences such as “Last December, disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong won California’s Woodside Ramble 35K” are not evergreen.
From that 2016/2022 piece:
Through a pilot study called QUARTZ, ITRA [the International Trail Running Association] monitors blood values—which can detect both health problems and inconsistencies that may indicate doping—of the elite MUT athletes who have volunteered to take part, which include [professional mountain, ultra, and trail runner Sage] Canaday.
That November, Canaday himself helpfully chimed in with a reminder that doping is wrong, although the Cornell University graduate was careful to note that war, hunger, and pestilence are certainly more urgent problems to consider. He didn’t mention, however, that he had volunteered for the QUARTZ monitoring system.
It turns out Canaday needn’t have bothered. While the ITRA boasted about the number of athletes it “tested” in 2018 and 2019, it turns out QUARTZ was never an effort to catch dopers. On February 14, Tayte Pollmann wrote a piece for the American Trail Running Association (ATRA) titled “Call for Clean Sport: A Conversation in Trail Running” that clarified what QUARTZ actually is: “a health screening service that is often misinterpreted as a drug testing program.”
I was pretty into the piece until I got to this (oomphasis mine):
I give space for conversation with several of our sport’s greatest legends, Joseph Gray, Camille Herron, Sage Canaday, and Tim Tollefson who specifically address doping issues in our sport and share their personal experiences with drug testing or how cheaters have impacted their careers.
Really? So the sport is dirty as hell, with the ITRA people who were supposedly helping to clean it up actually doing nothing but greasing the wheels for even more cheating, and Pollmann decides to give some the sport’s top names an automatic pass? That says a lot right there.
The piece also referred to a January 17 Trail Runner story by Brian Metzler mentioning that the men’s and women’s winners of the 2022 Sierra-Zinal trail race in Switzerland, Kenyans Mark Kangogo and Esther Chesang, had both turned out to be dopers.
Metzler proposes that larger MUT prize-money purses have generated greater incentives for off-roaders to use banned substances, but I think this is a relatively tiny fraction of the picture that affects only a few marquee MUT events. The overriding driver for cheating in these disciplines is the rampant and undisguised egomania that has come to pervade the environment and turned me from a someone who cared about the sport to someone who prefers to lob stones at what’s left of the beshitted cathedral.
If this seems unlikely, consider a Letsrun forum thread about the desperately anchorless Ostrander’s decision to be guided by David Roche. I hesitate to link to dynamic pages with user-generated content, and I am especially reluctant to link to the Letsrun forum because of the owners’ longstanding penchant for aggressively capricious post-pruning. Right now, the thread stands at three-plus pages, and I have created static mirrors of these (page 1, page 2, page 3, page 4) in case anything disappears. But these pages are barely readable, so for now I’ll work with the native link to the first page of the thread.
You can see that the thread is clearly populated by S.W.A.P. cult members and others who are convinced that the Roches have “created” champions and medalists, when in fact all they’ve done is attract a few people with established motors and turn them loose, always ready to blame externalities or their athletes themselves when their athletes flop, get hurt, or wash out owing to chronic neglect.
Ostrander and Grayson Murphy were both outstanding collegiate runners on the track, and in fact the two have remarkably similar personal bests (and more importantly, similarly high Instagram follower-numbers):
It’s notable that while these track times are sufficient to allow either athlete to excel in MUT even on a bad day, they’re also now a far cry from what’s needed to make international teams. These women want to win. Nothing wrong with that, until you wind up with unabashedly demoralized handlers. And there’s nothing wrong with that, either, in the view of sufficiently demoralized dopers and motormouths.
I do not take part in Letsrun forum threads for a number of reasons, chief among them being I would use my own name while almost no one else would, and given what I would be likely to post, it’s evident how that would go in a sea of anonymous imbeciles, stealth-harridans, and cultists. But someone in the thread linked to one of my posts about a typical undecipherable David Roche Trail Runner article—amusingly enough, one that consisted mainly not of my work but of a guest-demolition of one of Roche’s frequent forays into a highly private, ever-malleable, anything-goes version of scientific training theory.
The only response to this so far: “Reading that just makes me think Kevin needs to get back on his medication ASAP.” Not only is this a standard non-answer on its face, but it also shows that this analyst didn’t actually read “my” post, and the brand of snark is telling because the S.W.A.P. cultists are purportedly all about not disrupting anyone’s mental health—in fact, the very first words in Ostrander’s Instagram profile (after “she/her”) are “Runner and mental-health advocate.”
The blind props for the Roches by S.W.A.P. cultists and their noncontributory parries of reality in the thread are interspersed with droll observations from normies about what a showboating poser David Roche is and suggestions that his methods are awash in not science but “toxic positivity.” That’s close; the Roches aren’t “positive” at all, but they are without a doubt toxic.
If I’m insane in the membranes, this deficit has left me curiously able to do what the Roches and their bevy of shitlib acolytes cannot: Tell a human male from a human female.
From David Roche’s Instagram account on June 22, 2020:
Transgender women are men posing as women. Everyone knows this, including all of the anti-female-spaces, anti-science S.W.A.P. cultists feigning otherwise. And Roche was and remains dead wrong about the lasting effects of male puberty.
Beyond that, a body that produces sperm cells is male. A body that produces egg cells is female. All human bodies produce one type of gamete or the other. [Note: This section has been edited.] So much for Megan Roche’s degree from Stanford University Medical School, although her and David’s toxic wrongativity about all things covid should be sufficient on its own to establish in any cogent mind that the woman is some combination of liar and ignoramus and a menace to the medical profession (or at least to its pre-2020 manifestation).
This Instagram post is reminiscent of a Twitter thread David Roche made in March 2021 and immediately deleted as soon as I debunked it over a year later, refusing to admit to his chicanery and instead dismissing me to his audience of cult members as a hater.
Someone should remind this fellow that while he was slowly maturing throughout the early part of this century into the absolute pinnacle of hollow virtue-signaling nonsense he is today, and unconsciously preparing to one day unleash the power of anti-masculine neuroticism and unfocused one-way jabbering, I was doing a lot of the same things he was trying to do and doing them with oceans more earnestness, skill, and comprehension. So he can take his craven smack-talking and crawl back under his momma’s-boy rock.
The Roches’ capture of the one-woman struggle-bus named Allie Ostrander should be bleakly entertaining. And I’ll have more to say about this, but I’m advised this post is too long for e-mail. That’s good, because if e-mail recipients are forced to read the Web version, I will probably have cleaned up most of the typos this version surely boasts by the time this happens.
But before I sign off, another thing that jumped out at me from the Letsrun thread:
They produce champions and could probably charge 1,000.00 a month like Jason Koop if they wanted to.
I’ll assume that it’s true that people exist who for whatever reason shell out $12,000 a year for trail-running coaching. I am completely unable to figure out why this is. But it does tell me that plenty of trail runners would dope even without any prize money, because anyone able to pay this much for coaching wouldn’t notice even a sizable chunk of prize money per MUT standards. This is pure, unadulterated ego gratification at work, and anyone who thinks that most folks already at this stage of bizarre commitment would be fazed by rules about performance-enhancing drugs is badly deluded.
And keep in mind if you think I am being too hard on David Roche that he thinks an appropriate tempo-run pace for a three-hour marathoner—who covers ground at 6:52 per mile—is 6:00 pace to 6:30 pace, which would span such a runner’s 4-mile to half-marathon race pace. If that alone isn’t sufficient to convince you how much of an idiot he is, you’re probably a current S.W.A.P. cult member or in danger of becoming one if you wander too close to Boulder, Colorado, home to some of the most clueless shitlibs in the country.
