Runners incapable of thinking for themselves should probably avoid enlisting dolts and scammers as surrogate thinkers
If you don't choose allies wisely in this sport, you're constructing a low performance ceiling over your head
On March 30, Runner’s World published an article titled “Are Runners Making Any NIL Money?” Written by Sarah Lorge Butler, the piece explores how collegiate athletes are taking advantage of the new “name, image, likeness” (NIL) provision allowing NCAA athletes to make money in ways unrelated—in theory—to how they perform in their sport.
One Duke University runner, Emily Cole, is on course to earn over $150,000 this year—yes, 150 large—just from deals based on her sizable TikTok and Instagram followings (200,000 and 110,000 respectively, before the RW piece hit the Web). Although this is positively obscene, it’s also a perfect expression of what is strongly valued in the human-monkey free market. Cole is a 9:48 steeplechaser, but this isn’t why she’s making six figures from image- and video-based media.
Grayson Murphy is an accomplished distance runner who graduated from the University of Utah five years ago as a five-time All-American despite coming to collegiate running as a walk-on four years earlier at a different school. At the beginning of 2020, she began working with David Roche, a transparently empty-headed blowhard who knows as little about running as it is possible to know while focusing on little else.
Roche and his wife Megan—and the regulars can skip this—operate a Boulder-based coaching swindle called “Some Work, All Play,” the entire success of which is predicated on a combination of professional credentials, grandiose promises, and blunt-force ego-stroking. (Megan Roche has an M.D. from Stanford, David Roche a law degree from Columbia; based on how clueless both of them look on the Internet, both were presumably legacy admissions to their respective graduate schools, especially David.)
Murphy is still working with Roche, who three years ago observed of his then-new client, “Grayson is just a wonderful person. One of the best athletes in human history. Seriously.” On Sunday, Murphy won a half-marathon in 1:10:34.
The day the RW article hit the Web, Murphy tweeted:
This opens the door to all manner of hilarity.
The first humorous element lies in something that should have been especially obvious to Murphy, who holds a master’s degree in civil engineering and was in college fairly recently: Do you really expect an NCAA athlete and soon-to-graduate senior to be perfectly responsive to every message? The RW article emphasizes precisely how busy Emily Cole is.
The second lies in the fact that Murphy is even focusing on this kind of crap in the first place. What are her expectations as a competitive runner, and how does reaching into the NCAA at her age and standing help? I have a good idea of what the Roches’ expectations as coaches and people are: to be treated as far smarter and more helpful as running coaches than they will ever be, because for whatever reason they’ve decided to combine their medical and law degrees to create this bogus but superficially flourishing enterprise.
The third and funniest part of this is that a client of David Roche has no reservations about getting her snark on—in a way that manages to be both cowardly and-self-entitled—about someone offering services in the distance-running sector. It was just over a year ago that I first critiqued one of Roche’s categorically abysmal articles for Trail Runner, an event a number of Roche’s fans found wholly unacceptable not only in practice but in principle.
Roche, aware that this was floating around the microscopic running community, responded by whining about an unnamed “hater” and not linking to the offending material. He also deleted a year-old Twitter thread he had dedicated to the theme “trans women are women.”
Non-denial denials, deleted threads, and demands of website operators to not share unflattering material are not signs of great confidence. But in the year since, I have determined that Roche is even more of a dimwit and a putz than I realized, and that most of his clients are alarmingly dumb. Every column he writes for Trail Runner reveals anew how little he knows about the sport and how incapable he is of integrating the concepts he unspools as glossary terms in any useful or coherent way.
I wish that the Roche cult members would recognize that I was not then and am not now trying to hurt the family business or dissuade anyone from finding them knowledgeable or sincere when anyone who is legitimately either can smell the stink of their horseshit from miles away. I am merely pointing out that anyone who hires him is a fool. Never have I claimed that being gullible as hell, being a pussy, or wasting money on people like the Roches should be illegal. So I really don’t understand all the grief.
But if that grief is legitimate, then shouldn’t someone be dressing down Grayson Murphy—“just a wonderful person”—for being so unfairly mean on the Internet? I mean, what gives her the right to moan about a successful businesswoman who doesn’t even have a college degree? What if Emily Cole finds out about this cruelty and experiences a fleeting episode of consternation, guilt, or even amusement?
One would think that Murphy’s coach, who is badly thrown by criticism of him online while doing his best to pretend it’s not out there, would admonish her against being so critical of other runners, especially women trying to eke out a living in a newly developed (if clearly very precarious) field. After all, we* wouldn’t want to see any of these dilapidated dingbats manifesting any inconsistencies or hypocrisies.
Whenever a Twitter post by a runner combines money and bitching, social terrorist Alison Desir is there to wipe her dirty ass on it.
Desir must not read much.
She is also is a loathsome grifter and is not looking to get anyone paid but herself. She is a stupid, ugly, racist little vandal who’s not only been getting away with her immoral act for years but profiting gaily from same, despite being nothing more than a fat ex-jogger who knows nothing about anything and allows dilapidated “journalists” to refer to her as an elite runner.
How the hell can anyone over the age of ten not understand that food intake, activity level, and body size are connected?
I’m really sick of people not even flinching at the garbage this worthless excuse for a human being cranks out on the daily. And I was fed up long ago with this constant focus on one, racial iniquities as an explainer of every broad and personal gripe, and two, the idea that white people are especially culpable.
Does Desir pay any attention to what some of the folks she calls “her people” have been up to lately?
I could go on and on and on in this very vein, and I don’t care how uncool it looks because this dismal pig needs to either shut her ample cake-hole about the evils of white people, acknowledge that “defund the police” (or “cripple the police,” as it has actually played out) has been ruinous to people of every skin color, or be willing to engage her detractors (she has a point about “whiteness” ultimately catalyzing some of the above mayhem). She doesn’t get to coast above all of this unscathed.
If Desir keeps being an asshole, she’ll get what she continues to deserve from at least one source. She’s been proving for years that she’s nothing more than a foul, egomaniacal retard, and everyone in the running community (average 2023 IQ: 76.4 and tumbling) pretends to not notice.
Returning to David Roche for a moment, last week, Trail Runner published the same article I ripped into last March without noting that it was a rerun and packaging the piece as a “Member Exclusive.” (There is in fact no such thing as a “Member Exclusive” anywhere within the Outside, Inc. network, because all a visitor needs to do to read any one of these is plug the URL into archive.ph and wait about a minute.)
Runners like Murphy with master’s degrees flock to outfits like the Roches’ because they inherently trust their similarly educated peers, no matter how organically unintelligent or fraudulent their presentation. It’s the same reason most Boulder residents watch CNN and MSNBC, and as a result behave in large numbers like they have hatchets planted deep in their skulls; well-off “liberals” must have the story right.
The same Beck of the Pack reader who last year began supplying sporadic reviews of Roche’s Trail Runner articles didn’t realize that last week’s piece was recycled and that I had already processed it, and sent me a review. I will post that as soon as I can stand the idea of returning to this writing interface and all that these excursions provoke.
(Supplementary reading: “Black female college athletes are center stage at this sports agency,” NBC News, December 14, 2022.)