Running from the Facts: "Roche clips" edition

Perhaps the alternative was a piece about fartlek performed at a relentlessly steady jog

This post was originally to serve as the usual irregularly scheduled roundup of recent running-media activity I’ve either noticed myself or been provoked into analyzing by schadenfreude-hungry readers. But because one of those items I was steered toward is a David Roche creation, I have, fittingly, expended close to 4,000 words on that poor fellow alone, forcing me to table some commentary about far more odious actors and stories until my next ether binge.

Roche has unfurled an article for Trail Runner titled “The Exciting Complexity of Threshold Training for Trail Running.” (Promises of complexity seem a like bad sell when offering practical advice, but styles differ.) The main idea: People who run up and down hills might sometimes be getting into anaerobic-threshold heart-rate territory, and the unexplored, revolutionary implications of this possibility deserve closer scrutiny. At least I think this is Roche’s thesis, even if it’s a weird concept to pitch as bold, being as it is entirely uncontroversial and even intuitive.

My interpretation of this thrust may be wrong, since I have difficulty extracting from Roche’s zig-zag prose exactly what he’s arguing for. This is not, I believe, because he purposefully obfuscates, but because his windy, deep-purple elaborations never seem to land on definitive statements; the editorial result of verbose wandering tends to be indistinguishable from willful misdirection. But such an interpretation is supported by this tweet, in which Roche observes that runners often train for races in addition to being occasional research subjects (!) and that when they do, they train at different intensities (!!). Again, this is about as profound as asserting that the longer you go without drinking water, the graver the effects of dehydration are bound to become—and not just in the lab, but in ultramarathon races.

Roche’s favorite subject is training theory. Such an approach, after all, permits all manner of unfalsifiable claims in the course of mostly pimping and piggybacking on the work of predecessors and contemporaries alike. He asserts on no evidence that training theory is ever-evolving, as this being true would fortuitously and automatically expand his own advisory authority.

Roche, to be sure, has done his homework, and this is evident despite his relentless hammy asides, which serve more as small, unpleasant jolts of electrical current to the mind than as alluring zingers; some people are better off not trying to be funny in print, and Roche is one of them. But his work is addled primarily by an undisguised intent to become, or at least be regarded as, a uniquely visionary coaching genius. He is perpetually in search of a solution to problems that either don’t exist or have been thoroughly and capably addressed by whole squadrons of wiser, less tendentious observers. And it doesn’t help his credibility on the scientific front that he—like every single one of his peers serving corporate-media interests, or simply trying to attract clients from within running’s noisy political leftist faction—has sacrificed his own intellect on the altar of Wokism.

In a Twitter thread last March, Roche made the remarkably stupid yet popular argument that allowing males with certain psychological afflictions to compete on female-only sports teams is more important than preserving the basic integrity of female sports.

David Roche @MountainRoche

Trans women are women. Trans men are men. Sports can be the difference between a fully realized identity and feeling alone in the world. Inclusion is about human rights because it is about identity and acceptance for people that have faced marginalization and discrimination.

That no one is complaining about transmales—that is, girls or women calling themselves boys or men—on boys’ and men’s teams by itself underscores the intellectual dishonesty behind this “movement.” No one worth listening to is “grossed out” by trans people; the disturbing qualities are the obvious unfairness to females of their sports being polluted with participants who don’t qualify for the uniforms they’re donning by any rational standard, and the documented viciousness of pro-trans types on social media.

In a subsequent tweet, Roche writes, "Legally and ethically, the burden of evidence should not be placed on a discriminated-against group." This remarkable, if unconscious, admission translates directly to "Use emotional reasoning as a substitute for scientific reasoning where necessary." Kind of like a trained lawyer would argue.

And, absurdly on basic biological grounds, Roche suggests that the null hypothesis (baseline assumption, usually a widely accepted position) when it comes to males “transitioning to females” is that, given ample time, the physical advantages of males will on average be wholly and exactly negated by testosterone blockade. And this assumes that Roche wouldn’t treat any of the many high-school transfemale athletes who aren’t even on T-blockers, and just suddenly “stopped being male,” as being in this allegedly equalized trans group. If he did that openly, the Wokish people would slam him because trans women are women! (“There Is No Such Thing As a Male Body,” despite being nearly six years old and the progressive laughability of Slate since then, remains one of the more proudly demented pieces anyone will ever read. Chase Strangio, a woman calling herself a man and with the dead caterpillar on her upper lip to prove it, now wields a great deal of influence as an ACLU attorney.)

I would propose to Roche and his ilk the following thought experiment: Imagine 100 randomly selected 17-year-old girls and 100 randomly selected 17-year-old boys in various stages of “transitioning to” females. In the manner of Squid Game, these two unwitting armies are suddenly commanded to fight a mass brawl to the death.

How many of even the most Wokish observers would bet on the girls’ side winning or battling to a draw in this macabre scenario, especially if their wagers were public and the stakes for losing significant? This “thought experiment” is really nothing more than a complex rhetorical question, the answer to which is “Absolutely no one with a properly functioning mind would bet on the girls.” [Note: In the newsletter edition of this post, I wrote “bet on the trans side winning” above. That’s contrary to the logic of the sentence, but in my own offense, I did have a 50/50 chance of getting it right.]

“Trans X are identical to X” remains a rabidly embraced non-sequitur and denial of logic itself, so much so that denying the claim or merely failing to actively support it continues to result in immediate ostracism by the political far left, whose control of Twitter and the media makes their numbers appear far higher than they actually are. For this reason, absent other evidence of poor thinking, I have been hesitant to dismiss anyone who publicly assumes anti-scientific positions on transfolk as a broadly anti-science goof. A coward, perhaps, but not always someone ignorant of the facts. And with few exceptions, the only men left allowed to write for corporate fitness rags are cowards, loons, or women in some frenetic combination.

But considering the number of observers who are not at all confused about the various things Wokish people claim to be, such as the African exercise physiologist Ross Tucker, people who make convenient exceptions to the need to root principles in rational thinking deserve little latitude anymore. If Roche has cheated on his commitment to evidence once—and I do credit him with being able to tell males from females, and appreciate at least some of the impact on athletics of the differences—then what’s to say he won’t do it again when he has to choose between popularity and reality? His hankering for popularity, remember, is nigh palpable. And despite these signs planted on lawns all over places like Boulder, anyone who opts for a genuine commitment to science today becomes a pariah, not a darling, of the left. Human genetics and reproductive biology are fields of science, too.

Roche’s observation that “The critical forecasts of trans women taking over sports have simply not happened, after many years of trans participation” also looks extremely stupid, less than a year later after he made it. Roche was already wrong then about the impact of transwomen on top-level sports, and he’s even more wrong today. Lia Thomas is hardly an exception to a clear rule being repeatedly and empathically reinforced throughout the sports world with every new addition of a formerly middling male athlete to a female sports roster. Worse still, that this would occur was trivially easy for anyone who thinks mechanistically to predict. People in the business of theorizing and hypothesis-formation do themselves no favors by falling on their faces like this, even if the media portrays these shams as acts of heroism and social progress.

Roche may be praiseworthy advocate in certain circles thanks to this output, but his thinking here is as scientific as that of a Pentecostal minister playing with venomous snakes in a tent in western Tennessee while drinking tainted moonshine mixed with Mountain Dew out of Walmart sippy-cups. (That was little paean to Mr. Roche; if I needed to make the joke at all, I should have stopped at “Pentecostal minister” or substituted a pizza reference. And this painful parenthetical aside is really getting the job done.)

Approximately contemporaneous with the publication of this article was an Instagram post by @trailrunnernation advertising a podcast in which “Dr. Megan Roche helps us all, men and women, understand the physiological differences that women have and how it might be an advantage.” Megan Roche is David’s wife and business partner, and is also an accomplished off-road runner as well as a medical doctor. But it seems that there is some disagreement between the two: Are female athletes merely as good as males who take testosterone blockers, or are female athletes literally better athletes than men, “transitioning” or otherwise?

Maybe that’s not the claim and the description of the podcast—which is white supremacist, by the way, because, in merely trying to attract male listeners, it explicitly and violently excludes the gender-nonbinary—is just shaky. I wouldn’t know; I don’t do many podcasts, even those acclaimed by trustworthy sources as being good. I think the sound of human voices has come to bother me simply because I expect most spoken words to reek of nonsense, ignorance, and hostility toward established concepts of logic and common sense. Kind of like how some people can’t stand the sound of babies crying, except to me, you’re all big-ass babies with thicker vocal cords and deeper voices of need and woe. Yap, yap, yap.

(That reminds me: This week’s episode of Jesse Singal’s and Katie Herzog’s Blocked and Reported podcast deals largely with a truly draconian proposal by Texas Republicans to remove transgender kids who have received puberty blockers from their parents’ custody on the categorical grounds that these parents have been abusive. It might surprise some people to learn that some, probably most, of these families enjoy homes characterized by warmth and stability. While disproportionately ugly right-wing bills are a predictable consequence any movement as diseased and intentionally corrupt as Wokism, ideally, people like Greg Abbott and Ken Paxton wouldn’t be dreaming up these tyrannical [to borrow Singal’s accurate phrasing] schemes. There are kids, by definition already troubled ones, in the middle of this mayhem. And no matter how beset troubled a home like this may be, I have known very, very few parents who don’t fiercely love and want what is best for their children. Most really loathsome bills like this one die quick and unpretentious deaths even on the floors of Christopathic state legislatures, but the effort alone is disgusting.)

Back to the present. Roche starts “The Exciting Complexity of Threshold Training for Trail Running” by “casually” positioning himself as a scientific insider with a reference to what happens at scientific conferences, few of which have happened in the flesh in the past couple of years. Roche has a law degree and an undergraduate degree in environmental science. I am not the type to argue that people can’t become experts in fields outside their areas of formal study, but I am the type to distinguish smart, earnest people who qualify as intellectuals from smart pseudo-intellectuals who work backward from desired conclusions, and even Justin Trudeau may not have Roche beaten here.

Then, capitalizing on a recently published PDF about threshold training by former elite Norwegian runner and current medical doctor Marius Bakken, Roche says that this kind of training is now a source of borderline sexual excitement across the running community. To repeat myself: Roche says that because running uphill is hard, trail runners who run uphill a lot might be doing more higher-intensity training than they believe, including the kind that qualifies as threshold running and improves lactate clearance.

Roche, again, is all about theory, and granularly at that. Projecting his having gotten excited about Bakken’s document onto everyone else, he declares, “At this specific moment in theory evolution, the training intensity that is getting the most attention is threshold.” Not at this moment, at this specific moment. This is what a lazy high-school student does when pattering out an essay at the last minute to reach a certain word count. Yet Roche is the opposite of intellectually lazy, even if his compass is wanting.

In fact, it’s possible to think about more than one type of running training at a time, and most coaches I know never stop thinking about threshold runs, or tempo runs, or lactate-threshold runs. People often assign the label improperly or even randomly, but tempo running has been around for a very long time. Notice that the first of those links takes you to an article I wrote over two decades ago for Running Times, one Runner’s World has now placed behind its own paywall. The second link takes you to a blog post I wrote in November 2018 about that article’s repackaging by “the Editors of Runner’s World,” and the third link takes you to the archived, original Running Times version. If the sage editors of Runner’s World have deemed a piece that old about tempo/threshold runs worthy of a paywall, then maybe that article is all anyone needs to know on the subject, and the evolution of training theory has entered a quiescent period.

Also, Roche is prone to authoring pieces that would merely be mediocre and booting them into downtown Sucksville by lading them with overarching, guru-like, open-ended claims, an issue separate from his over-reliance on arcane quips. Like this:

I think trail running can flip the entire application of threshold training upside down.

Roche is not being glib here, I don’t think; he believes this. His fuzziness of focus notwithstanding, Roche urges his readers to consider that when they run uphill continuously—and are therefore working harder than when running on level ground or skydiving—that this might add up to a lot more of what he calls Zone 2 training than easier running. I have run both up hills and on flat terrain, and I have to agree with Roche; gravity makes an undeniable difference, and the faster you try to move, the more your heart responds by beating faster. NASA operates its entire space program using essentially the same principles.

To be more charitable, Roche may be saying that if trail runners want to become fitter, they might want to verify that the sustained uphill running they do is properly threshold-like, but not enough to ruin them:

Climbing is a gift that can turn trail runners into threshold monsters, sometimes without even realizing it. But it can also be a curse, turning them into sloggers with a massive aerobic engine that can’t overcome nervous/endocrine system fatigue and muscular/mechanical inefficiency.

Okay. So much for being nonbinary. But amid all of the self-referential attempted humblebragging, it’s hard to find any applicable advice in this article and in all its technical jargon, which has no appreciable in-context role. How can you tell whether your uphill maybe-threshold-running has you unknowingly in the best shape of your life or whether it’s burning you to a crisp? Wait until you’re fucked, or not, I guess.

Were this article a bicycle wheel, it would have four distinct corners surrounding baroque but flimsy spokes. It could be better—maybe even good—without at least a third of the words it includes and without the breathless pretense by the author at being running’s answer to Thomas Edison or George Washington Carver. I bet that Roche would not write like this if writing to a client rather than for an audience.

Instead of arguing that trail runners might unknowingly be performing threshold workouts while running at erratic paces on twisty and rolling terrain, which is inane —consider that “tempo run” is the common ancestor of “threshold run” and related terms—why not just suggest that trail runners do threshold workouts on the same surfaces as everyone else while reserving training their technical skills and so on for other days? Is that too simple, or too easy to suggest without writing a whole new article?

Zooming back a bit from the specifics, my favorite part of the piece is Roche warning against rip-off artists (“anyone who says that there is a one-size-fits-all answer is about to ask for your credit card number”) while himself linking to his own paywalled article for Trail Runner—one inspired, like the one I’m reviewing, by Bakken’s freely available PDF. That paywalling is presumably a decision by the members of the “editorial” and “managerial” staffs at Outside, Inc., not Roche himself, but it’s still funny, and it underscores the marketing challenges corporate publications are facing and will ideally fail to overcome, inspiring their unmitigated collapse, dozens of layoffs, and a subsequent farrago of dismal new Substacks. How are they supposed to attract paying readers when figures like Bakken—and this guy has consistently been gold since I started paying attention—are sharing their undiluted expertise for free?

Roche doesn't qualify as a rip-off artist because, as I said, he clearly believes at least some or most of his own nonsense. If he coaches people whose bailiwick is hours-long races over varied terrain, which are always difficult, then it’s unlikely he gets much useful feedback he can use to streamline or reformulate his ideas, as a coach of track or road runners can more easily do. He can go on endlessly linking himself and his theories to great promise while offering no suggestion in all of his meandering that he has done anything besides read a lot and talk to his own reflection. He has some running chops, and at least he focuses on running physiology, an admirable and vanishing trait in running publications. But that doesn’t relieve him of the obligation to connect the dots he scatters around with these “What if this all comes together (in the form of a calzone! Yum!!), and what if I totally rock??” articles.

Here’s one way to look at Roche’s lens on coaching, science, theory, whatever. After Roche tweeted out notice of his article, Sage Clifton Read Canaday jumped in:

Sage Canaday @SageCanaday

@MountainRoche In my 22 yrs of running (& over a decade of coaching) i have never heard of a “3 zone training” theory. I don’t think there is much productive evolution that is going on…if anything people need to get back to the basics and simplify their training. That and dedication/hard work

What ensues is Canaday pointing out a number of coaches who have relied on five-pace training with their athletes, and Roche—despite having just emphasized the importance of real-world training vis-a-vis theory—batting all of that aside with versions of “But theory!” and “Well, if those dinosaurs you mentioned were around now, they would surely agree with me” (a contention I reject with explosive, mostly peaceful prejudice).

Also, arguing over how many training zones is the right number to work with is perfect territory for Roche, because it’s all mental masturbation that goes seamlessly from the last triumphant stroke of one wank-session to the first bold, rubbery tug of the next. It reminds me of this instant classic, actually.

Is a threshold workout in the middle of zone 4 out of 5 in a five-tier system, or is it the low end of zone 3 in a three-tier system? Was Jesus consulted? It makes no difference because either way, you are aiming to maintain about 88 to 90 percent of your maximum heart rate in these sessions. (For the wonks out there, I know this involves various simplifications. For now, if you will, simmer your asses down.)

In the end, if it tickles your stinky-bits, you can carve up the effective heart-rate range of humans into 100 zones, one beat per minute apart. You could probably develop a whole coaching system around this idea: Century Pulse Endurance Grooming (tm)! But the only vital information about a steady-state effort is the relative intensity (percentage of heart-rate maximum) of a workout and how long it is sustained.

Put all of that into the context of a runner's total training volume, experience, and most important, regularly ask them if they're too tired. And they probably are; most trail runners I know are in assisted living by the age of fifty-six and rarely eat anything besides locally grown, cage-free swamp grass—do not position yourself right behind a pack of Boulder off-road aficionados on a morning run unless you have a face mask handy. (Also, when you let Boulder trail runners socialize with each other, they may wind up “danc(ing) until sunrise at wild, alcohol-fueled parties where random sexual couplings (are) encouraged.”)

Wanting to be viewed as an innovator is a common affliction for people who write about running and endurance sports, or really, anything. The gradual move to online-first and online-only publications, along with the advent of social media fifteen or so years ago, increased the sense of urgency among running insiders to capitalize quickly on newly popular concepts and imprint them with a personal brand. It’s only natural to want people to read your stuff, and framing it as the work of a pioneer or visionary is one way to garner attention.

When I was getting started as a freelancer in 1998—when one could still safely open a query letter to an unknown party with “Dear Sir or Madam,” though I myself already favored “HEY NOW!”—I too wanted to explore topics that seemed to require abundant exploration. And 24 years ago, I had an easier job of this than today’s yutz element, because a lot of topics really hadn’t been covered in running magazines (although pre-Google, it was harder to check whether this was the case). I also had the luxury of time; pre-Internet, people were willing to wait more than four hours for results and information, and not having to race to beat an online mob of bloggers and podcasters to the publication punch made for more deliberative sermons.

One of those “new” topics was marathon-pace runs. Another was eating disorders in male runners. And, not so different from Roche and his attempted hybridization of threshold runs and trail running, I came up with some chimeras of my own, for example, “tempo trials.” But I had reasons besides “this sounds good” to believe in the validity of these ideas and suggestions before foisting them on people. And I had numerous runners far faster than I was later tell me on the side that one or more of these articles had taught them something useful.

And while I’m sucking my own dick—which I am, albeit tentatively and with protesting neck and back muscles; though neither Shakespeare nor a credentialed science whiz, the stuff I and other long-departed hobbywriters produced makes today’s class of running pundits look like victims of chronic bath-salts poisoning—I’d like to see more stories like this one and this one, where a writer tags along with a Kenyan road-whore for weekend or trains with a couple of soon-to-be-Olympians for a couple of weeks. Considering how fanboyism has come to predominate journalism, I suspect the chance to experience what I did when putting together that story in Sarasota would present stratospheric levels of appeal to the 2022 jock-sniffer set. But for the Cook-Rowbury-Donohue piece, in addition to accidentally choosing the right place to live and possessing some established ability to chronicle events in a linear manner, to make the story what it was, I had to be able run the workouts of a 4:00/8:40 1,500m/3,000m runner, even if those times were out of my reach by age 38.

Pundits like Roche want the approval found in looking right more than they crave the inner satisfaction of settling on the side of nettlesome truths. That goes for both socially controversial and scientifically vague topics. As a result, everything they produce should be interpreted through the lens of a public-relations effort, not an earnest attempt to convey information. And if you are reading a piece in any of the Outside, Inc. suite of publications—Trail Runner, Women’s Running, Outside—you already know that you won’t see one word that counters today’s faux-progressive narratives. That’s not the fault of Roche or any other individual actors wanting to contribute today, but it’s the way things are. And the article I just dumped on is far better than the ones I’ll review next time.

Peace, love and doves, wrap it in a rubber, etc.

(Social share photo of a beaming Addie and Megan Roche courtesy of Instagram.)