It is simply a fact that everyone associated with the Roche cult is annoying beyond conventional belief
My friends, you picked the wrong corner of the wrong sport if a nonstop shower of meaningful accolades is your primary animating force
David and Megan Roche are narcissistic clowns, and for now a married couple, who operate a coaching business called “Some Work, All Play” that is specifically aimed at attracting and retaining clients who also require constant inflationary ego-stroking to merely function. David is the literary face of the enterprise and knows as little as it’s possible to know about running training while making it the center of his life. The two of them appeal to people who have been unknowingly groomed to erroneously believe they are far more intelligent and morally unimpeachable than they are. It confuses many of them that they did not automatically blossom into world-class athletes and coaches, although they have no idea how grotesque they are in these and other areas.
It’s hard to decide which is more unlikely based on their public output: David’s law degree from Columbia or Megan’s medical degree from Stanford. Megan doesn’t seem as flat-out stupid as David, but if that’s true it only means she has intentionally debased herself to an even greater extent than her naturally water-headed partner to push the ideas and associate with the people she has.
Both are almost certainly nepo-babies, which isn’t something people can help but presents as untrammeled obnoxiousness in those who cannot or will not acknowledge it and simply pretend they’re better—smarter and more naturally deserving—than others based on nothing other than ascribed social status.
I was not surprised to learn that Megan Roche is affiliated with the Aspen Institute. Matt Taibbi offered a profile of the organization in a bookmarkable post about the many organizations involved in formal censorship of American voices, often in conjunction with planning mass-scale public deceits.
The Aspen Institute even helped plan the classifying of the true Hunter Biden laptop story as “disinformation,” which they were able to do because the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which participates in grotesque summits held by these kinds of shithole organizations, was aware of the laptop’s whereabouts at the time and knew the information would inevitably be published.
I don’t know if this means that the Roches receive money from the Aspen Institute, although that, along with family money, would explain how a doctor and a lawyer can set up shop in an expensive town and apparently make do by operating a coaching mill. But the whole vibe fits. David Roche is practically illiterate and has proposed a stream of ideas reflecting the social mayhem orgs like Aspen are into enacting.
I’ll keep posting this tweet until David explains why, after I pointed it out, he deleted it and elected to allow his soy-powered online army of devoted cult members to make noises here and there apparently designed to put me in my place. Instead, this only confirmed that Roche attracts some of the most ridiculous characters in the already wacky discipline of mountain, ultra, and trail running (MUT), the collective popularity of which Nancy Hobbs routinely lies about.
I admit I come from a time and place where even runners who were constitutive egomaniacs had a hard time getting themselves noticed. And most runners I know, including some really good ones, are appreciative of positive ink but are naturally introverted—especially the off-roaders. With no Internet and especially no social media, there was really no path toward effective self-glorification—one neatly coupled to the ability to block dissenting voices and in the process establish both maximal ignorance and maximal gutlessness.
And it doesn’t help that most affluent people born after 1982 or so are, owing to factors beyond their immediate control, fifth-degree snowflakes. As Devid Friedlander has just reminded us*, “Millennials and Gen Z’s have grown up with mobile tech and social media and know nothing different.”
Still, there is no letting any of these dorks off the hook, because a lot of the stuff the really stupid ones push is actively destructive to the sport and in many cases to human thriving overall.
Actually, mask mandates and everything else this idiot supports—note that just last month Mr. Levitt was bitching about mask mandates going away—are very much evocative of Nazi Germany. He seems to not understand that the lesson of the Holocaust was not that Germans can be evil to Jews but that groups of people can be evil to other groups of people. It grows tiresome to watch people use the Holocaust as an all-purpose deflection at a time when the U.S. Government, which happens to rich in Jews, is operating a censorship-and-surveillance state.
Levitt and many others would argue, as people apparently will for another hundred years, that the Holocaust was a unique historical evil. It’s arguably not even the worst thing ever to happen to Jews, even omitting all of the fantastical bullshit in the Bible. I’d be happy to let people who apparently have never personally experienced antisemitism surf on that one indefinitely myself if it weren’t for the way “antisemitism” has been degraded along with every other term.
And that’s some trick. How are the rest of us white people supposed to escape cancellation?
A client of the Roches and friend of the blog named Grayson Murphy excelled at the recent World Mountain Running Championships in Austria, nabbing two medals (a gold and a bronze). For most runners I’ve met, this would be more than enough satisfaction. But not for Murphy, who was a collegiate All-American in cross-country and bounced around on the roads for a while before realizing she wasn’t ever going to win anything as a solid but 32:28 10,000-meter runner. (In 2022, 129 women from the U.S. alone broke 32:30 on the track).
Like anyone who finds their way into the Roche cult, Murphy requires a nonstop flood of external accolades for everything she does.
This World Athletics write-up wasn’t enough? It’s not surprising it wasn’t, as Murphy is incredibly self-entitled and imperious generally.
I was tempted to respond to the lower tweet with “If you’re so special, why are you doing “super small podcasts anyway?” But Murphy had already blocked my for retweeting this with a (probably rhetorical) question: “Does everyone associated with the Roche cult sign a formal contact specifying that they behave like obnoxious twats at every opportunity, or do obnoxious runners oblivious their own mindlessness with a yen for cheating connect organically?”
I don’t know that Murphy dopes, but I do know she is as desperate to win glory as she is to win or place high in races, is wrapped up with unethical liars desperate to promote the achievements of athletes as their own, and is excelling in a notoriously drug-soaked sub-enterprise of long-distance running. I suspect she is not eager to discuss this even with those who don’t sarcastically retweet her dingbat complaints.
Murphy is happy to cyberfellate the right folx, and she could also use an extra-large dose of Get the Fuck Over Yourself.
Sage Canaday is an accomplished MUT runner and a graduate of Cornell University. As a vegan, he’s not a fan of Roche’s nutritional advice, although I don’t know his perspectives on the rest of the bullshit the Roche’s unspool. He seems like a good dude, honestly.
Yet here, Canaday sees Murphy’s complaint about low-grade podcasters—people she’s actually worked with, for twat’s sake—and raises it to “You should be paid for your time, too!”
Canaday isn’t crazy. He’s just deluded. As an “equity guy” (and “an afacionado” of “randomly situated” quotation “marks”) he apparently believes people should be paid for doing things like talking to other attention-whores that don’t constitute work by any applicable standard. All of these dweebs probably think they should be able to charge for their Twitter wisdom, too. Christ is crying.
One piece of advice for all of these characters, especially the ones who aren’t even as good as I was as a local-yokel hackster: Forget about the publicity and trying to monetize mundane chatter. Forget about pretending you can achieve hero status by scampering around in the woods, however hard that might be. When you’re older and more beat up, you will look back on the best running experiences of your life as those in which you redefined your own limits—sometimes formally in terms of a new personal best, sometimes merely in striving like a flailing and inelegant bastard on a suboptimal day—and those in which you played an earnest and active role in helping someone become a more complete runner.
I’m convinced that even the narcissists—many of whom will have long given up meaningful running by the time they’re even forty—will come to realize this one day. But for now, my main concern is that shady morons of privilege like the Roches have the luxury of pushing destructive ideas and are affiliated with of an organization that lies to Americans from a position of intellectual superiority.
That’s not just offensive to normies for obvious reasons, it’s a real threat. If anyone I’ve mentioned in this thread were asked about the Hunter Biden affair, they would probably answer that it’s Russian disinformation, even though it’s now known that our demented and filthy president took at least $5 million in a single bribe from a Ukrainian source. And at a point where this is the least of Biden’s liabilities, the combination of ignorance, a quickness to control others’ lives, and catastrophic cowardice from these whiny assholes is a bit much. (But kind of funny, too.)