Do David Roche's clients read?

Hiring a coach who lies about his achievements and deletes inconvenient content merely makes you a dupe. Defending one makes you a cultist

I’ve had my most all-around exasperating week in years. I had one core duty, which should and would have been an honor to perform, and was unable to fulfill it.

While I was legitimately beset by technical, climactic, and procedural problems not of my own making, responding to these more like a mashup of Lieutenant Dan and Beetle Bailey than like Batman or even Forrest Gump made everything worse. I need either a better set of backup systems for when my tiny life becomes more obstacle-strewn or a greater willingness to rely on my existing ones. Or better yet, a 64-ounce cherry-cyanide slushie, perpetually stored in a small bedside fridge at a palatable 34 °F.

When I returned yesterday after less than two days away from Gmail to an inbox loaded with over a dozen unopened newsletters from my various usual sources, I trashed them all unread in irritation as if I’d never voluntarily signed up for them, muttering “Why do any of these people bother when they know fighting is hopeless?” as I did so. It had taken me about a day to extricate myself, or in this case be passively extricated, from the media rage-cycle and marvel at its raw stench. I’m sure I’ll again be lobbing kerosene-soaked rubber dicks into the same cultural infernos myself soon.

I did rekindle my too-long-dormant habit of reading books, both a gratifying escape and reminder that I and most other people who assemble words for fun or profit really shouldn’t bother; while the publishing world is more ridiculous now than ever, riddled with half-literate, infighting and falsehood-spouting Wokesters, the average person who has gone by the title of “writer” and even eked out a living as such is and always will be a shambling hack compared to virtuosos like Cormac McCarthy.

David Roche is by far the most flagrant hack in the current dolorous mix of paid running scribes. A backchannel consensus suggests that he combines the excoriating insecurities and inexplicable entitlement of Lindsay Crouse with the banal ersatz-liberal hypocrisy of Erin Strout and Alison Wade while being far worse a writer than all of them.

My (and my occasional guest poster’s) criticism of Mr. Roche has focused on how little he knows, how ineffectively he transmits whatever it is he’s substituting for legitimate scientific or other information, the lack of supervision of his work by the titular editor of Trail Runner, his invertebrate psycho-morphology, his “current thing” version of science advocacy, and the fact that his ultimate boss is an absentee publisher who refuses to prop up this shrinking enterprise (Trail Runner printed its last holdable issue this spring) with fact-checkers or copy editors in addition to clearly not caring what the editors-in-chief of any of his moribund offerings do or don’t do.

And while Roche, Trail Runner editor-in-chief Zoe Rom, and whoever’s in charge of Women’s Running are aware of the guillotine eternally hanging over their heads as Outside, Inc. CEO Robin Thurston attempts to transform the erstwhile media company entirely into a tech company for rich people with fake climate concerns, this is no excuse for submitting or approving intentionally shoddy work. At least have some damn pride…

Or maybe a little less of it. To my knowledge, before his November 15 column, Roche hadn’t flat-out lied about any of his own accomplishments. That changed this week, when he officially became a potential target of a Derek Murphy investigation.

Roche’s persistent linguistic infelicities are unkind to the forebrain, but they also provide a crude bulwark against how wrongheaded some of the stuff he writes really is.

Roche appears to be asserting here that a perfect training plan might somehow cause an advanced athlete to lose fitness. On the other hand, he could instead be claiming that whatever an advanced athlete does in the twelve weeks before a race is unlikely to make a big difference. That too would be a marvelously, blatantly ignorant statement to make.

But because Roche writes like a drunken sorority sister playing hopscotch, it’s not clear exactly which bad idea he’s proposing. Maybe he should have stuck with the law, where confusing readers is often the point (though typically achieved without Roche’s stylistic and other abuses).

Roche also decided to tell the world in this article that his fantasies about his own abilities scale perfectly with reality.

As clumsily worded as most of Roche’s output is, in this case the bizzarro verbiage appears to be intentional. If he’s run a single trail half-marathon in 1:11, why not just say that instead of implying he’s run a number of them between 1:11 and 1:16?

Because he almost certainly hasn’t.

On September 25, he ran a trail half in 1:15:51. The course is considered "easy for trail running standards" and includes 820’ of gain—not flat, but not that bad. In 2015, he ran 1:15:25 on a course including 2,100’ feet of gain, assuming the route hasn't changed. He’s credited with a 1:13:02 from an April race in Westminister that was probably measured with a mule or not at all.

Here’s his UltraSignup profile, and here are all the results Athlinks shows for everyone named David Roche born in 1988. Do you see any 1:11 trail halves anywhere?

Elite track runner Garrett Heath (7:37, 3,000 meters, 13:16 5,000 meters) and elite trail/mountain runner Joe Gray (28:18 10,000 meters) have run 1:13 to win national-championship half-marathons on courses that were probably as accurately measured as such races get. In his latest article, David Roche is essentially positioning himself as the equal of these two hosses.

Also note Roche bragging that he could run a road half-marathon in 1:07 and change or faster. He’s therefore saying he could give female American record-holder Emily Sisson (1:07:11) a race or maybe dust her ass cleanly.

According to his Athlinks profile, Roche ran quite a few road races in his early twenties. with his best efforts around 15:15 for 5K, 31:30 for 10K and 51:56 for 10 miles. Could he blow those performances away at age 34 or 35? I’d say his chops indicate that he has the potential to run sub-1:08 and remain true to the limits of his boast, but that the window of opportunity is closing fast. And having put it out there that he could, I believe that Roche is obligated to race a road half-marathon this coming year at sea level and prove his point. After all, wouldn’t that put more heft behind his articles, ignoring the fact that many of these are mutually contradictory?

I’m kidding; it doesn’t matter what he says or how he says it, as there’s no way the people who get angry at my criticism of this fellow actually read what he writes. They just somehow enjoy that he does it, perhaps because he tries to mask his deceits by effusively thanking anyone who offers him praise, however obviously blind or generic, and by playing the equally blind forever-happiness advocate in return.

I came to terms a while ago with the attitude of the putzes who complain wherever Eric Schranz shares anything I write on his site. I initially gave these people credit for simply not understanding that Roche and his wife are herky-jerkying a thin line between being opportunists—concierge-coaches for douchebags, who have deep pockets and kooky needs—and being outright scammers, wielding graduate degrees instead of palm-reading credentials and serving a mostly different clientele but indistinguishable on a practical level from the crystals-crew. But now I understand that they mostly get it but don’t want the metascam perturbed because they want to feel connected to something grand and transforming. They’re as insecure as he is. Some of them are also making money in the same basic way, peddling “high-tech” nonsense like bespoke bloodwork analyses at uncritical consumers.

This is no state secret, but runners who race primarily on trails or in ultras, and often win or place high, usually limit themselves to just these environments so that they can better stand out despite not being anywhere close to world-class or national-class athletes. There are a few exceptions, but in the main, people who run chiefly for their egos and have a tiny bit of talent can shine in prolonged niche sufferfests.

I’m a perfect example of someone who absolutely sucked and attracted howls of laughter everywhere I competed because I “run” like a duck that decided to cure its hemorrhoids with a blowtorch the night before the race, and I still got second in a 50K national championship. While more people today are willing to wobble along at 6:00 pace for three hours to pick up a few hundred bucks, things haven’t changed all that much.

(None of this is a knock on people who happen to enjoy running on trails or doing trail races. I used to do most of my running on dirt or grass even when training for marathons. I’m talking solely about the hardware-chasers.)

This is also why you see the “nonbinary” nonsense popping up more in off-road events. With mediocre aerobic talents touted as world-beaters, every knock-kneed jogger thinks he or she isn’t far behind, hence demands from screeching weirdos for even more MUT categories to generate even more trophies. Alas, there will always be unfilled gaps in the process of distributing accolades to the emotionally needy.

As I am presently between semi-explicable Twitter bans, I posted this, this, and this to give Roche a chance to formally not respond to these issues; he hasn’t blocked me like he has Lize Brittin, but he’s either muted me or is consciously ignoring me. Either way, his public silence means that I can officially call him a liar now.

As usual, almost every line in this article is begging to be held face down in a pillow and driven expertly from behind with long, bold piston-like thrusts of the most frighteningly purple, veiny, and bloated phallus in Boulder, which looks roughly like a discolored jalapeno pepper. (See how grating too many porn references are, David?)

Similarly, starting the base-building process with poor speed is like trying to chop down a tree with an unsharpened ax. You’re about to take 1,000 swings – better make them count.

So, apart from the fact that anyone given a thousand swings of an ax at the same tree can in fact afford to botch a few, Roche says that runners should possess good speed before working on endurance, even though he’s written elsewhere about how much he hates interval training. Why? I’ve no clue; apparently, some words formed in Roche’s head and demanded to be spilled into the burgeoning production, and there they sit.

Roche adds this toward the end, pretending playing the nice guy lets him off the hook for being a dissembling, dictionary-abusing ignoramus: “You are loved and you are enough, just as you are, always.”

Wrong. Sometimes you’re a jerk and a blowhard just as you are and should respond to pressures compelling you to do something about this, always, rather than pretend everyone else is the problem and recruit a squadron of other invertebrates to whine, whine, whine rather than face a whole host of nasty facts.

I’m going to keep swatting at this crap until the budget allowing for its publication finally dries up. And I will keep returning to the ideas below because it baffles me that anyone ever thought this kind of attempted industry-wide editorial coup would play smoothly.

Even were Rom sincere about her distaste for whatever today’s Caucasian male runners have to say, she can’t possibly expect people to just back off and say, “Okay, fine, you’re in charge now.” Those of us who contributed to the public running conversation for twenty-plus years have different ideas about that, and this would be true even of the coup-people weren’t spouting absolute absurdities like “women and men are interchangeable.”

The deal is, if you pick a fight with your betters, don’t expect to win by pure bullying, social-media manipulation, and a functional takeover of certain neglected publishing platforms. Some of us are not constituted to gracefully accept condescension from anti-science liars, anti-woman “feminists,” and anti-intellectual cowards. This at one time was a nakedly uncontroversial stance.

I hope that Thurston, intent at last notice on turning Outside, Inc. into an NFT cryptocurrency marketplace, is enjoying the ruckus created by that wunderkind in dirty socks and cargo shorts who just blew about 800 trillion dollars of other people’s money after giving almost that much to the DNC. (What kind of idiots put their trust in a dumpy vegan in soiled clothing, expecting him not to be looking for a way to steal from them? I love it. Easy marks aplenty!) Thurston lives in the same Boulder neighborhood as restauranteur Kendall Musk, Elon’s even-more-gerbilesque brother, and perennial city council member and chucklehead Bob Yates, another overfed lawyer who spams people, engages in coercion, and occasionally has to recuse himself from voting sessions because he’s on so many different official payrolls.

Many Boulder neighborhoods could use a nice booming uncontrolled three-day riot ending in at least one burning, blackened human head being carried aloft on a makeshift pike by bone-weary malcontents; the one these greed-heads occupy is perhaps chief among them.

But more urgently, someone in the indolent Outside, Inc. operational chain can surely do better than this. Quit complaining about white guys because the choice ones don’t want to bang you; quit advertising yourself as something you’re not; do your editing job like you deserve to be called an editor, no matter your specific stances. Because while I may be peevish in my approach, there is nothing else but that to criticize.

These people suck. Roche is a joke and so are the dildotic soldiers in his mini-militia of life-spoiled bellyachers. If none of these people want this pointed out, they can try harder not to look stupid by generating and cheering on transparent foolishness.