David Roche GOES HOME DEVASTATED from Western States

Maybe but will there be a Roche kid sighting on the podium? Because Dr Meg is postpartum...

Another big race another W for Swap at the big alta. What can’t David and Megan do?

Wow. That’s basically the Sierre-Zinal of Bay Area trail races.

I know this is way beyond beating a dead horse at this point (though I suppose the continued existence and length of this, and the original thread, is proof of this place’s endorsement of exercises in deceased equestrian percussion), but on the newest Boulder Boys podcast they were talking about Matt Daniels signing up for the Mammoth 200, and how after the race he should try to train for a fast mile before the close of the year just to establish a standard for impressive running range.

Daniels said if you gave him 6 months of focused training, put him on a windless, sea level track, and he had a perfect race, he thinks he might be able to break 4:05.

Keep in mind Daniels actually has a sub 4 minute mile to his name, pre super spikes.

So if you’re new here and wondering why the continued bagging on Roche, a lot of it stems from his still not walked back claim to have been in “14:00 5k and 4 flat mile shape” at altitude, no less, concurrently with his admittedly impressive fitness before his first Leadville win.

There was some good bagging on the UTMB organization for their carbon offset charges too, Moi doing Moi things, a good episode all around.

Megs can fall back on the “heart issues” and David can fall back on his “plantar tendon” injury. Both of them are delusional for thinking they have a chance, but it’s good form to set up your excuses early…

They're both signed up for Crown King Scramble next weekend...

I’m pretty sure all the Boulder Boys besides Moi were trained by David. And Drew is still.

Dude, I'll go easy on you since it seems like you really believe what you're saying is true. It's not.

Go find a quote where David said he could run a sub-4 minute mile and come back and give us a link to the quote or a podcast. You won't. He never said it.

At one point he said he was going to train so that he'd hopefully have sub-4 fitness by the time he got to a future start line, but not once did he say he achieved it. It's one of the lies that the two or three idiot MAGAs on this thread keep telling to fire themselves and everyone up. They know who they are, and you have been duped by them.

You can try all you want, he doesn't say he could run sub-4. Like I said earlier, it was a goal to have that kind of fitness on the start line. Straight out of the playbook, the MAGA bros of letsrun have blown nothing into some huge pretend issue for your faux outrage.

But tough weekend for the insane anti-Roche bros. Golden Ticket for Lauren Puretz at Chianti, which is a cool story for a 42 year old full-time doctor who is coached by Megan. Plus SWAP runners sweeping the 50k races at Big Alta. Will wait for an imaginative new reason from the MAGA bros why David and Megan are bad ultra coaches...

He didn’t say what he said guys. Case closed. Let’s pack it up and go home.

Maybe try doing an internet search for ad hominem fallacy.

You talk about Trump a lot my man

Lol

Whether or not he deliberately avoided actually saying that he reached the goals, he phrased it so that any reasonable reader would reach that conclusion.

Saying “these were my goals” and then “the goals that I listed didn’t actually take that much volume” is absolutely implying that they were reached.

If someone told you “my goal for this weekend was to clean the floors in my house” and then texted you later on and said “you know, it didnt actually take much vacuuming to achieve my goals”, you’d think they were really weird if they later denied ever saying they cleaned their floors.

David is really weird.

I took the LSAT probably around the same time Roche did. A good portion of the test back then was based on formal logic, necessary and sufficient conditions and all that jazz.

So when a person makes a claim that certain things are needed (i.e. necessary) to achieve a specific goal, and proceeds to achieve that goal, it is logically sound to conclude that those necessary conditions have been satisfied.

Or, in his own words: “I’d need to be capable of running a 13:xx 5k at altitude, or around sub-4 min mile fitness.”

By then breaking the Leadville course record, the logical conclusion is that he was indeed in that shape (or at least believed himself to be). People doubting that reality are not putting words in his mouth, they are refuting the logically implied claim he made.

And as far as it goes, I don’t think his claim is fundamentally flawed. There obviously IS a requisite/necessary speed to be able to run 15:26 at Leadville. Or as was discussed a few weeks ago in the aftermath of Molly Seidel’s Black Canyon performance, a necessary marathon ability to be at the pointy end of women’s ultra fields in 2026. But questioning whether that requisite speed is 4:00 for a mile, absent any evidence supporting his ability to actually run that time, does not make one a foaming at the mouth MAGA witch hunter.

And, as you and others have pointed out, he and Megan coach lots of really good athletes. His emphasis on top end speed is clearly something that is working for their athletes. But having to couch the importance of that aspect of your training philosophy in ridiculous claims like the 4 min mile understandably draws the ire of a lot of folks, especially when such hyperbole/inauthenticity forms a pattern behavior.

Which is what made Matt Daniels treatment of the subject such a contrast. A guy who also coaches for a living, who also performs at an extremely high level in the ultra space, and who has actually run under 4 minutes for a mile, had a much more measured appraisal of his potential ability in the mile. You can guess which of the two, in my opinion, comes off as more genuine.

All that said, as much as I know we love extremes around here, I think it’s possible to both be turned off by his hyperbole and myriad other strange behaviors and also not think Tara Dower or Drew Holmen must have Stockholm Syndrome to be coached by him.

Live and let live, and all that. Or live and let live, and occasionally jump on LetsRun and re-stir the very over-stirred pot.

You must be new here, that was far too much logic in one post. But seriously, very well put. The most polarizing of personalities are generally quite adept at speaking from both sides of their mouth, always with a touch of plausible deniability.

"At this point, the sub-4 / sub-14 discussion feels less like a factual dispute and more like an argument about a model.

'Capable of' is standard coaching shorthand for theoretical or estimated fitness. It’s not a statement that a performance happened (or will happen), just a way of describing what a training block might translate to under ideal conditions.

What’s interesting is how that theoretical capacity has been turned into something like a concrete event—argued over as if it were a race result that needs to be verified or debunked.

Baudrillard wrote about how simulations can detach from their original referent and start to circulate independently. That’s what this feels like: an idea of fitness becoming more real, in discussion, than anything that actually occurred.

You’re no longer arguing about what happened, but about a fantasia of it that mostly exists in the thread."

to be fair, he never really said he was going to shock the world and win western states either. if you go back, and read very carefully, he clearly laid out his plans to drift back to 7th or 8th place, have a mental breakdown, and drop at forest hill.