David Roche and Zoe Rom are fulminating retards who, despite their unfortunate visibility, are the ones who represent a small, ugly part of the running community

Why do so many trail and ultramarathon runners seek out coaching at all, let alone grossly overpay scammers who have no idea what they're talking about?

On Monday, I wrote about how Malcolm Gladwell exemplifies the high-profile, self-stroking media shitlib of 2023. Gladwell’s insistence on both spouting bullshit and refusing to entertain criticism has made him look increasingly arrogant and clueless at the same time, a combination that assures a cascade of blistering ridicule.

Toward the end of the post, I gave an example of this phenomenon in the distance-running world by linking to a three-and-a-half-year-old blog entry and comment thread on a site dedicated to following very-long-distance running. In short, some weirdos were upset that I had criticized scammer-coach David Roche and his undeniable rhetorical and analytical ineptitude, so they decided to punish the website owner for merely providing a link to what I wrote rather than engage it.

In early 2020, I was not yet used to what fundamental pussies libtards are when it comes to life in general. They just won’t deal with anything resembling uncomfortable realities, including challenges to their most cherished and respected imbecile-gurus. So they tell people to shut up instead, and charmingly, they’re almost always the ones who are wrong.

I refuse to adapt to a climate in which people like the Roches and every other swindler in operation can just lie and flee from their critics while cultivating online armies of boisterously censorious shitheads. That’s just a given. But apart from standing by defensible principles, it is impossible for me, and I hope many others, to not stand in awe of what a monumental idiot David Roche is and the kind of shameless moron someone has to be to support him.

One of the comments made in that attempt to punish Ultrarunner Podcast’s Eric Schranz came from a “Zoë.” This is presumably Zoe Rom, then just a random whiny dumbass but now the openly indolent and brain-damaged editor-in-chief of Trail Runner. This comment read:

It’s pretty disappointing to see this ad hominem attack on David shared. Any attempt at an argument is undermined by how overtly personal and petty that piece is. The trail community is better than this, and I hope we can all move away from bad-faith attempts to undermine someone just because they share a different perspective. He’s a fantastic writer and coach who writes about difficult topics with nuance and compassion. I’m grateful for his impact on my life, and our community every day.

First of all, Zoë doesn’t understand what an ad hominem is. An ad hominem argument is an attack (often cleverly veiled) that substitutes for a logical argument, not an overly nasty argument, and Zoë admits in her second sentence that my article included the latter. She also calls my article a bad-faith attempt to undermine Roche, even though any competent reader can follow the chains of reasoning in my criticisms.

Also, Zoë engages in the usual retard’s ploy of pretending that what I was marauding was not a river of half-comprehensible bullshit but merely “a different perspective.” Does Zoë not understand that science—David Roche’s stated bailiwick—is not supposed to be about exploring random perspectives, even when assembled in passable, adult-level English?

Moreover, Zoë—in pretending to be the arbiter of who is and is not a member of the trail-running community, a laughably arrogant claim in itself—is insistent on merely shutting down conversations she doesn’t like: “It’s disappointing to see this shared…I’m hoping we can all move away…”

This is the thing that makes Zoe Rom an absolute cunt. She can’t help being a perhaps creatively inbred (she’s from Arkansas) mouth-breather and somewhat insulated from her mental deficiencies by being from a well-off family, but she can help being a censorious cunt. She can start by following some of my suggestions, the first of which is to write “Do Not Tell Others How to Communicate, YOU WEAK CUNT!” on the insides of both her eyelids in a color like neon yellow or blaze orange.

But maybe the funniest thing Zoë says here is that David Roche is a fantastic writer.

Is Rom qualified to make such a judgment? As someone who has since taken a serious editorial job, let’s hope so. But Rom is also a writer. Here’s the opening paragraph from a typical example of her published work:

On Thursday, Trail Runner published an article by Roche titled “A New Study Challenges Conventional Wisdom on Protein Consumption.” Here’s a tiny bite of it.

Roche doesn’t know how to construct a basic bulleted list, and Rom—also blind to the value of parallel structure—can’t see what’s wrong with a badly botched one. So glaring errors like these infest like almost literally every article Trail Runner publishes and then some, with the potential possibility of some exceptions. DO NOT EVER SHARE THEM, ANYWHERE—NOT EVEN IN HELL— IF YOU HAVE A HUMAN SOUL.

That Roche never draws firm conclusions in his articles is partly masked by the fact that he has no idea what he’s talking about and wouldn’t be able to put his impressions of scientific research into readable language even if the receptive portion of his brain were more competent than the expressive portion.

A new study published on December 19 in Cell Reports Medicine led by Jorn Trommelen challenges conventional wisdom, and it could disrupt how we think about protein consumption…

Or maybe not. There are still a ton of unanswered questions, and this study will face a lot of critical analysis from experts, particularly in relation to past research. I am far from a nutrition expert and may need some important context, facts, implications, or criticisms. Most pressingly, breakthroughs like this need to be replicated, and we are not there yet. Plus, there are tons of unanswered questions. 

Anyone who defends either of this people is welcome to do so, but for Pete’s fucking sake, anyone who keeps the Roches in business by paying them for their wisdom, and has the nerve to defend it in the pussified manner people like the cult members do, deserves to go broke. Holy egad shit are these people dumb.

I also wonder why so many trail runners seek out coaching in the first place, as suggested by this recent Reddit thread about the Roches and Jason Koop, a coach who has also apparently recognized and pointed out what ethics-free clowns the Roches are. The best of the best of them are self-coached, and it’s unclear to me why someone would shell out hundreds of dollars a month or even a grand in this sub-sport just to stand a chance of….what? Cracking the top thirty at the Western States Endurance Run?

I suspect that this is because the kind of trail runner the Roches and Zoe Rom consider a trail runner is shitlib and thus programmed to both rely on hand-holding and implicitly trust people with certain academic degrees even when the owners of these degrees are conspicuously ignorant in the areas in which they claim to be experts. And I would further submit that trail runners like Rom, the Roches, and their blinkered and angry defenders are the ones who represent exceptions in the trail-running community as a whole, counting people who don’t give a shit about what hypersensitive, low-IQ, narcissistic, half-literate chickenshits “think” or are hilariously willing to pay for.

Ho ho ho. More to come over the weirdly long weekend!