David and Megan Roche are classic sleazebags
And to the snowflakes: I'm no threat to their swindle, because anyone dumb enough to trust these two in the longer term is unreachable anyway
When I first started heckling David Roche for his confidently inane and obviously unedited bluster in Trail Runner Magazine, the stubborn humanist in me as usual whispered at me to be nice.
“He’s not a scammer,” its soothing, obviously intoxicated voice assured me. “He’s just a coddled and self-deluded moron—an unwitting product of nepotism and the ugly face it shows the world.”
Agreeing to agree with this skeptical interlocutor for the moment, I credited Mr. Roche—and by extension his coaching partner and wife (in that order) Megan—with giving bad but earnest advice. After all, most people are pretty dumb, while only about half (and rapidly rising) qualify as rip-off artists.
To keep this window of optimism cracked open, I had to ignore multiple symptoms of classic in-universe grifting on the part of the Roches. One of these was their relocating to Boulder, the nation’s epicenter of endurance-sport pipe-dreamers who often harbor a convenient propensity for dishonesty and shitbaggery in their non-perambulatory incarnations as well. Another was David Roche’s relentless references in his articles to his own coaching acumen, something a smart-headed, thinking-neuroned, brain-minded person would have known to avoid or at least mitigate. (For example, I never brag about or even mention having coached two Olympians, both “of color.”)
Still another symptom was his and Megan’s centering their social-media-driven efforts on having a brand, not on helping runners. This one is so standard today that it’s easy to forget it’s also a cardinal sign of an insincere advisor.
After Roche responded to my first round of criticism by whining about being attacked by “a hater” and by deleting an old tweet-thread, I realized I was wrong about him and revised my estimate of his character sharply downward. Yet I still wasn’t ready to call him and Megan full-on bullshitters.
After I had posted two or three times about David Roche and been joined here in hecklership by a silent (and unpaid; I’m the second coming of Bezos, folks) partner, I started getting messages from people with first-hand experience with one or both members of the “Some Work All Play” duo. These were almost all unflattering in exactly the ways I would have predicted, especially the ones from former Roche clients.
Still, I was and remain aware of the biases at work here, especially selection bias (most of my writing is highly critical, and the site draws regular readers who tend to agree with me on most things) and confirmation bias (I’m more likely to hear from the people who agree with me than others, especially in this era of stern, tight-lipped dicklessness). So even at that point I was still unwilling to commit to “Definitely intentional sleazebags as well as pussies.” (I sometimes hate that someone clearly taught me at an early age to be unduly kind to prickly prevaricators.)
I have shitcanned that whole artifice of flimsy reasoning. I’ve confirmed that “poaching” athletes already working with other coaches is part of the Roche skill set, and people familiar with the roots of their “coaching” in North Carolina and California have filled in some blanks that weren’t exactly blanks about how they operate and how truly happy they are to be around underneath all the contrived smiley-poos.
There’s hilarity in all of this. The Roches are committed to the dingbat brand they have built, which caters to low-IQ, hypersensitive college graduates who are unable to appreciate that they are 98 percent privilege and 2 percent drive and who default to Wokish politics as a subconscious result. These are (mostly) your dildo-shaped, slope-shouldered, lower-T males and your pear-shaped, pink-haired, and puke-prone females, along with anyone willing to pretend his or her genitals resemble different genitals or aren’t there at all. Crucially, almost all of these sad sacks come from well-off families, giving them the power to blithely ignore in utter arrogance any input that troubles their vibe.
This brand may survive, but it will become increasingly balkanized and silly-looking from the outside as the rest of the world, including other instinctively trusting liberals, arrive at the realization that Wokism is just what it looks like: A carnival of insincere and resentful barking and grifting disguised as a social-justice movement, with most of the grifting perpetrated by already well-off white people. As sick a far-flung joke as American society has seen in my lifetime.
David Roche’s latest Trail Runner article adheres to this theme. It’s a rhetorical duet with Riley Brady, a lesbian and accomplished long-distance runner who occasionally calls herself “non-binary.” (This is a thing.)
The push to make “non-binary” a legitimate category in running events makes as much sense as making “elf,” “hobbit,” “wizard,” and “orc” legitimate categories, and adding the Mordor Track Club and the Mirkwood Distance Project to the list of officially registered USATF clubs. It’s peevish and asinine and something that people in charge should meet with comments like “I accept that you identify as you do and you’re welcome here, but we can’t offer imaginary categories at the expense of real ones.”
Another strike against the notion that Roche has any integrity is his baiting of people he refuses to interact with. How else to interpret this opener?
“Accepted and appreciated” doesn’t really go with “rejected and feared.”
And I have no idea who operates the Trail Runner Twitter account—it could be Zoe Rom, the operation’s editor-in-absentia, or it could be one of the Roches—but I’ve now been blocked by an entire publication.
Roche (one of them; there are now three) didn’t like this bit of fully justified snark by one Jennifer Vogel, who is most likely a cishet white male chauvinist, and blocked they/them, too.
I have speculated that one or both of the Roches might have professional licensure issues; it seems weird that a doctor and an attorney would be hell-bent on coaching an army of trail runners. But I’ve said it myself many times, including recently: The Roches are voracious egomaniacs, programmed from their childhoods in the same way. They can derive more feel-goods from the slavering compliments of illiterate or uncomprehending runners in their rickety tutelage than they ever could from their jobs. They need to be super-special, and that’s why everyone they work with is the same way. And it’s why all of them are pussies, blockers, “don’t you dare share that shit!” types, and psuedonymous drive-by tomato-tossers.
People who pay the Roches for “coaching” are not expecting or at least not demanding competitive results; they are joining a feel-good cult for upper-income-level types on self-actualization quests, in need of plugging personal holes that money or their careers or their marriages can’t.
There is a formal term for these people: Millennials.
A Beck of the Pack reader put it this way:
I had passed them off initially as being overzealous youths, eager to engage in a sport they had recently found. Reversing the needle, I now see what they were sewing from the start. If they didn’t have talent in the trail/ultra space, I wouldn’t put it past them to try any activity that might have landed them a YouTube channel. If they were more attractive, an OnlyFans account might suffice. David could still probably hold it as a side gig for homos without standards; Megan not so much. Although she’s been sticking her tongue out a lot in photos lately, so maybe she’s signaling to the femme lesbians in her sphere.
These amount to the same thing. The Roches need to be known for niche greatness (this is why David Roche is constantly imploring others that they’re okay just as they are; he dearly needs to believe this about himself and is nowhere close) and MUT—while becoming more and more competitive by the season up front—is the perfect medium for scoring people who need the same kind of ego-stroking, with whatever they accomplish in races not even a determinant of whether to retain the services of “Some Work, All Play.”
Look, there’s a market out there, and the Roches are serving its needs. I don’t care who dresses up as what or what kind of batshit notions they insist on maintaining about their stinky-meat. And if clients of the Roches are unable to discern that he knows nothing at all about applied running physiology, that’s their problem. But disrupting events and trying to silence people are not an acceptable add-on to the scam, and stealing runners from other coaches is a low move.
The post below suggests that Roche often flirts with insight without ever getting wet above the shins.
Here’s how I read this:
It was clear from the start that a lot of people recognized that we were full of shit. But by doubling down on our joke-version of “authenticity,” we gradually cultivated a cadre of sheer sycophants. When people called our bluff, we dismissed them on the basis of the software they use. We’re proud to be cunts!
I know a lot of gay people over 40, and I don’t think a single one of them wants any association with the Twitter brand of gender activism. These longtime muff-divers and knob-hounds shake their heads at what constitutes persecution in the minds of the Wokish—especially given that, unlike gay people, the Wokish have literally invented most of their own problems. (On second thought, slurs like “muff-diver” and “carpet-muncher” are no longer appropriate. When’s the last time anyone here saw an athletic woman under sixty rockin’ a wide-bush? The wide-bush ended around the time preppers were hoarding water in anticipation of Y2K.)
As for the Roches: Hey, those clowns can be as stubborn as they want as they add forlorn-faced others to the “happy” troupe. As you can see, that part I can empathize with; it is loved and respected no matter what.