Biggest Bullshit Lie You've Ever Heard About Running Times or Workouts

How could that guy not even realize that his 400 meter pace is slower than his 800 pace, thats just simple math.

Back in the early '70s, my frosh year in college, a X-C teammate of mine, in the adjacent dorm, asked me if I knew a guy in his dorm who went to my high school. I said, yes, he was our 'equipment manager' in track our senior year.....ooops! He told my friend and others in his dorm that he 'dipped below 2 in the 880 his senior year, but wanted to concentrate on his studies in college and wasn't going to run'....

Anybody from the early 80's, remember a Columbian guy, going by Carlos Goudoy, living in LA, who passed himself off as a 210 marathoner? I would see his pictures in magazines on the front row of major marathons with a low bib number. He talked his way into alot of banquets, freebies and vip treatment at major races in the 'running boom' of the early 80's, leading up to the '84 Olympics in L.A. I raced the guy on numerous occasions. He could legitimately run around 5 min pace for a 10k or around 1:10 for a 1/2 marathon and between 225 adn 230 for the marathon......but that is hardly the 'world class status' that he was 'selling' to promoters, sponsors, etc....and in those days, 'people were buying it'. I wonder what happened to him?

in college, we had a sprinter on our track team who said he ran 5:32 for a 1.5 mile time trial at football practice as a high schooler. when i asked him what his fastest mile time was, he said 4:25. i let him know that on the way to his 1.5 mile time, even if he came through the mile in a pr, he would still have to run the next 800m in a little over a minute. his only reply was "i did it at football practice." we argued this so many times but he always stuck by his story. this same guy could run around 53 or so for the 400m and said he would run sub 44 by his senior year. unfortunately, he was academically ineligible because he passed a whopping zero hours. go figure.

another amazing running accolade was by the art teacher at the school i teach at. we were sitting in the teachers lounge eating some pizza and talking about our old high school days. he said he wrestled in high school and to cut weight, he would run everywhere: to the store, to school, etc. he then said he back then could run a mile "in a little over four minutes." i just kind of smiled and told him that was pretty fast and he responded, "well, i probably could have run it in less than four minutes."

Back in 81, I was in the Royal Air Force over here in the UK, and there was this chap smoking on fags claiming he was going to start running. He said that if he trained hard enough he would break 2:10 for the marathon. Some bloke named Steve. What an arse!!

haha, guy at work swears that he ran a 12:30 5k in 7th grade. I even went along with it and tried to see if he meant maybe a two mile, but he was for real serious. I even told him the worl d record (12:37, right?) and he still stuck to his story, haha.

blaznbison24 wrote:

another amazing running accolade was by the art teacher at the school i teach at...

Did he win a lot of anecdotes for his efforts?

midwest runner wrote:

this kid i knew who had a 1600m PR from high school of about 4:26 told me that he ran 5x1200m once in hs at 4:10 pace, but he couldnt just say they were in 3:07 or whatever, just that they were in 4:10 pace. it was just odd.

Just noticed this ... found it funny ... it appears that this could actually be completely truthful ... 4:10 pace for 5x1200??? He probably meant 4:10 for 1200 pace.

Thats a reasonable workout for a 4:26 high school miler with not very well developed aerobic capacity. Could be on a measured trail too. 4:10 = 5:34 mile pace

When I was in HS and around 4:26 mile shape, I would run 5x 980m in around 3:15-3:20 on a measured trail ... which would be equivalent to about 5x 1200 in 4:05 (on the trail) ... so 4:10s are plausible

Have been in shape to do them in 2:45-2:50s since then ;)

When I was in college and home for the summer, I had a 2 mile loop thru the neighborhood that I would run, anywhere from 1 to 5 times, depending on my workout, etc., My brother and other serious runners, would keep 'course records' for this hilly loop. the 2 mile record was 9:58 by an Irish 'national class' marathoner-friend of mine. My neighbor, I'll call him jogger-joe would jog the loop with us once in a while. (he'd do one loop, while we were doing many more). One day he had just finished the loop and was standing on his driveway cooling off, and told me that he just broke the record on the 2 mile loop. He said he just clocked (9:46). He showed it to me on his wrist watch-stop watch. I didn't call him a liar, (as I did yard work and chores for the guy and needed the income, lol); but I think he must have started or stopped his watch early!

I called his bluff wrote:

guy told me that he ran 10 miles in 60 minutes, in the soft sand at the beach, every day, and had already qualified for the Olympic Team in the marathon. I told him that, 'that was not how the Olympic team was made', but through a trial. He claimed the Olympic Committe had already put him on the team. He had the whole Sports Connection Club in Santa Monica, believing him. (he worked in the pro shop). I wanted to run a workout with him to show him up as a fraud. He kept coming up with excuses: (he did his workouts at midnight, was one).

Maybe he was running for some 3rd world country ;)

That is the lie I would lay out. That I was an Olympic marathoner from some small ass country.

Famous in song and story is an unmetionable runner from Airzona who told the community college team that he was training with that he was attemtping to qualify for the olympics in the steeple. He was dropping names left and right about who he had been competing with.

The first day he showed up at practice we were doing quarter repeats. I swear to god the guy never broke 70 on any of them. He entered the first race of the year, an indoor mile in Flagstaff. I remember watching him as he almost got lapped inside the dome. Coach Mann was standing next to me when he said, "Does that guy even run?" I said, "He is training for the trials." Coach Mann's classic response was, "Jesus, that looks painful."

back in the early 70's, leading up to the '72 Olympics, there was some commercial that showed the Kenyan's working out, running some beastly hill in Kenya, called "Agony Hill". It became part of distance running legend back then. A year later, a guy walks on to our college X-C team with alot of big talk and 'self-professed' credentials. He had been out of the country for the past couple of years, training in Kenya and doing repeats on Agony Hill, with Kip Keino. After dropping out of a couple of early season X-C meets, the guy disappeared and supposedly transfered.

guy walked on to our college track team. told us he ran a 9:10 2 mile in a time trial in November. He only trained with us occasionally, on the easy days as he said his 'hard days' were faster than we were doing. He never ran a collegiate race with us, before disappearing after he got about 5th place in the intramural meet 2 mile, in around 10:20.

guy in the dorms, in college told us he ran a 4:15 mile in high school, back east, but wasn't going to run in college. (he was joining a frat, smoking and drinking). I checked the lists on the internet for his high school league for the 3 years he said he ran. (2000-2003)...no sign of his name or time anywhere. Big liar!

when I was bagging groceries one year, in the summer, a guy with a big gut who worked in the produce dept. and must have been about 35 years old, told me he ran the 2 mile in 9:45, when he was in high school. Sounded believable, but I was suspicious, because I told him, how my PR was 9:48 at that time, so it sounded like a 'one up you' type of thing. I asked him what his best mile was and he said he only ran the mile once and ran a 3:45. What a #@$#$ liar! I didn't waste my time 'talking track' with him anymore. (if I would have said my pr in the 2 mile was 7:22, he probably would have said his was 7:20).

Im a distance runner and when I was in High School I worked at this day camp. One time i was eating lunch with this guy who worked at the pool and did the chemicals. Somehow it came up that I ran distance and he told me he ran sprints in college. he musta been about 21/22. I asked him what he ran, and he said he ran the 100 a little bit under 10.0 and the 200 in the mid 19's. I knew that he would have been one of the top sprinters in the country at that point, and since I had never heard of a fast white guy named Rob, I just said, oh, wow.

bumper

Teacher didn't turn up for history class one day so we were all just sitting aorund talking.

One girl at one point randomnly asks me how far I could run in one go...

(she was a little irritating normally so decided to screw with her for a bit)

"240 miles...maybe 300."

"THat's really far!"

"not really"

and she believed it :P.

HAd one similiar to one from the first page, lad claimed he could run 31 minutes for 10k without much effort, to be fair to the lad he's a damn good runner, but only 16/17 and he's only just under 4 for the 1500, and not in the top 5 nationally for XC, when all the others faster than him haven't broken 31 for a 10k on the roads...

Ran a 5k this morning.....

About mile 1.5 a 225+lb man finally runs out of steam as I'm running 5:45/mile pace. I finished in high 17s and he came stumbling in around 20+ minutes. Afterwards he was talking shit to me. Saying that he was faster than me and all this. I did nothing to him to get him so worked up. Finally I just got sick of it and said "you are like 100 pounds bigger than me and will never run faster than me". He shoots back that he could have ran under 15 minutes today if he wasn't having hip problems. I basically laughed it off as it was about 85 degrees and humid and the winner ran like 16:40, so I thought it was a big bullshit lie that deserved to be stated.