David Roche GOES HOME DEVASTATED from Western States

Dominant rebounder is all you need to know. That is a workhorse trait. Slackers need not apply.

Me me me, I,I, I, me, all about me…

how vulnerable I am, how ashamed I am, how people are mean to me, how I failed, me me me

Even Megan sometimes try to calm him, but he has to say the extra word. Can’t listen.. he will also interrupt her just to make sure you know how hurt he is.

yes he is hurt, fine, but f…g grow up

how much caffeine did david take during the race? i know for a fact that can make you really anxious.

The SWAP podcast! With David Roche. Our guest today is,

David Roche.

David! How are you doing today? Catch is up from the last time you were on the pod, that being last week,

Well David,

I thought it was bad before. Listening to the latest episode, David’s Messiah syndrome is so much worse.

Among many examples is his description of walking back through the crowd of “hundreds” of his followers at Foresthill, gifts being given to him, fans stopping to encourage and say hello, just wanting to be there for him, with him in the moment. Megan says it took him hours to walk that short distance because the crowds were so deep

It’s obvious these two see themselves as the main characters and the rest of us are meant to stand in awe and worship.

Other gems in the episode: David is white knuckling life. How so? You’re literally paid to participate in your hobby. Or David was worn down from parenting. What? You have literal childcare and housekeeping. Kilian, with three kids and a published record of sometimes working out at night because he’s on Dad duty during the day, says hello.

and he must be dumber than all who DNF'd before him?

This guy failed very publicly and is obviously having a difficult time processing and accepting it. For f-sake, at this point why keep piling on?

Naw, that's not at all how he spoke. Think about the term passive aggressive and then apply it to humble bragging here. Out of one side of his mouth he was saying F you guys I'm going to win, shooters shoot, and so on. It was manufactured humility. I'm standing on the shoulders of giants, but then he says I'm going to be those giant shoulders the next people stand on. Its exhausting. They're exhausting.

He's an amazing talent, a hard worker, incredibly smart. But it seems they've falling into the social media influencer tornado. They spend so much time online discussing themselves, reading about themselves, interacting with people to discuss themselves and what they've said that they have this false sense of worth and dependence and think the entire universe revolves around them. "Enough about me, let's talk about me."

I was disappointed in the SWAP post race podcast. He never really went into why his legs felt sore or heavy other than saying it was expected of Western States.

A big question I had was his taper and travel. Based on Strava and social media it seemed like most athletes were in Tahoe at least a week ahead. Interestingly, Hans Troyer did way less work in his final week than David, despite having David as a coach.

My favorite part is when Megan encourages him to make little fake explosion noises to process his immense pain. Sounded like how you would coach a child to get over a temper tantrum.

He said he felt amazing up until mile 34 and thought a fast pace suited his strengths.

Where is the debrief video??? No secrets, David.

Clearly it didn't though? Just based on the outcome of the day. It's pretty easy to go out too hard for the first third of a race and say the pace felt amazing, but if you end up DNFing I think you need to at least consider the possibility that you overestimated your fitness and paced the race poorly in any sort of honest assessment of your day. Especially when you say you didn't get an acute injury during the race.

In fairness to David, he's likely WAY, WAY too close to the race right now to make that sort of honest assessment. Maybe he'll get there, but when his takeaways in the interim are along the lines of the race went poorly because 1) I'm too smart, 2) I love my family too much, 3) I heat trained too well, and 4) I'm way too busy and successful ("white knuckling life"), I just don't have any confidence that he'll get there. It doesn't help that Megan, who is ostensibly his coach (let's dig into that another time, because I think it is clear that David does whatever he feels like in training and no one is reeling him in. His discussion around the training sessions that lead to his knee injury this cycle are proof of that. Yet another thing in their SWAP world that feels super inauthentic and fake when he says that she's "the best coach in the world"), is telling him things like he could have still gotten 9th in the race.

David deserves all the embarrassment he’s experiencing. I do not feel bad for him at all. If he cannot tolerate what comes with being a public figure, then do not make yourself so public. To be fair, however, Megan might be worse. They are children who haven’t had to really grow up. Maybe they could just focus on their family for a while and stay off of social media to process things in a more healthy way.

This seems reasonable. I suspect his documenting his training and the pressure of being in the limelight led to him being overcooked. Much harder when under a microscope. Walmsley overtrained in the past and that led to subpar results. He figured it out and came back better. While Roche isn’t on his level, he is capable of a top 10 finish on a good day. Now people get to see how he responds to this setback. I think he will come back stronger if he trains as a runner rather than a coach selling his coaching business.

This forum picks people apart ad nauseam. There's nothing left to pick apart about this guy and his family. Give it a rest.

Lmao man one person in those podcast comments (out of 60+) says "you could have walked it in" and is met with "Go f*ck yourself" from the Roches. How dare you disrupt the echo chamber?

I never want to hear about David being tough again. He is not tough. When things get hard, he DNFs. The consequence of having a very easy life but also having a victim mentality.

It is pretty normal to have a bad day at a race, especially 100 miles and have to reassess and most of the time you can still finish. But it is very on character for this guy, I knew he would DNF by cal street, totally called it.

People like Rojo asking why this guy is disliked. Its because he's like an awful version of Sage Canaday (this is not a slight on Sage). Sage doesn't pretend to do personalized coaching with his coaching plans he sells. He doesn't make ridiculous claims based on half truths, his approach is science oriented but doesn't cherry pick and follow trendy data and he can back up what he says. And at WS when Sage started puking on the trail trying to chase Walmsley through the canyons, he gutted it out and finished 11th.

One of the other aspects about David and Megan that doesn't get represented on here enough because there may not be as many "trail heads" here is also how they do not fit into trail culture and say things like its totally ok to drop trou and sh!t right on the trail. We do not need people like them representing or participating in trail races.

But if you’re a woman changing a tampon within sight of the trail, you might just get a “you’re amazing!” from Megan as she passes by.