grox wrote:
Dennis T Reynolds wrote:Any true track fan (which I thought this websites founders were) focusing on it is insane when we just witnessed one of the most incredible performances of all time.
Any true athletics fan knows this performance is not comparable to real marathons and has no idea if it was good or not.
If you don't think it is good you are a complete fool.
You can't please everybody. Would people rather watch Kipchoge win London by a over a minute in 2:04? Then the whiners would complain that the pace went out too slow or whatever.
gahuga wrote:
Rojo:
First, "the writer doesn't write the headlines" isn't really true, 100% of the time. I know this because I'm a journalist and I write my own headlines. At previous jobs, I didn't -- just saying, she may or may not have done her own headline.
Second, if you really don't understand why your "just reporting the fact" that "LetsRun will be proven correct" is immature and unprofessional, the mass of posters on here will never, ever be able to help you understand. You led with "I'm totally right!" and only then moved into the fact that Kipchoge wasn't going to get sub-2, as it if were the second-most important bit of info you had to deliver. Gloat first, fact second -- does this help? This is ignoring the fact that your saying "they totally won't break two!" wasn't some bold damn prediction -- I'd bet the majority of people watching didn't think they could do it. I was sure they would fail, and was rooting like hell that EK would prove me wrong. Your stupid tweet made it sound like you were rooting for them to fail just so the entity LetsRun could be proven correct.
For all that LetsRun does for our sport, it has a reputation for smugness and smarminess of this exact kind, and that doesn't help the reaction you get. If you guys had never posted something like that before (or, similarly, awkwardly side-angled a reference to Wejo pacing Paula or finishing fourth at USA's in a non-championship year into an unrelated or barely-related article), you'd probably be forgiven more easily.
Now, to the OP's post -- it's interesting, looking at various sources and seeing how they choose to emphasize what happened. I put "breaking2" into the Google News search. I'll exaggerate the headlines I found for effect here, but the first hit had a headline like "SO CLOSE! Kipchoge runs fastest-ever marathon, just over 2 hours!!!!!" and the second was more like "Lame-ass Nike idiots fail to break 2 hours in their stupid rigged race!!"
I guess if you already hated Nike, you might be unable to resist sneering at them. I have many reasons for disliking Nike, but I think what they put together here was a worthy endeavor, and I enjoyed watching it. Yes, I rolled my eyes at the marketing aspects of the broadcast (such as the clock disappearing when it became clear he wasn't going to break 2, or the announcers trying to suggest that EK, ZT, and LD had "prepared for this run for two years!"), but the endeavor itself was a worthy one, and EK made a very brave attempt. No matter that it didn't come under official record conditions, human achievement was advanced last night/early this morning.
As a side note it was maybe the single most watched live marathon event ever with 4 million viewers. As we struggle and complain as enthusiasts of our sport that we don't get enough coverage, we struggle with new formats to gain attention this time trial did something the majors have failed at, attrack viewers. Yes our esteemed reporter forgot this detail.
Also, why does it matter who wrote the title? Someone at WSJ wrote it and approved it.
She is obviously not a Nike fan.
"It is the third time Mr. Kipchoge has fallen short when chasing a time goal, including at the Berlin Marathon in 2015 when the insoles of his Nike shoes fell apart and caused him to miss the world record by 63 seconds."
But this is true: "Any true athletics fan knows this performance is not comparable to real marathons"Dennis T Reynolds wrote:
grox wrote:Any true athletics fan knows this performance is not comparable to real marathons and has no idea if it was good or not.
If you don't think it is good you are a complete fool.
The only failure from last night was Kevin Hart. I like his movies enough, but man that was embarrassing. His presence was unnecessary.
HardLoper wrote:
You can't please everybody. Would people rather watch Kipchoge win London by a over a minute in 2:04? Then the whiners would complain that the pace went out too slow or whatever.
Strawman argument. I would have liked a good race in London. Did I ever complain about a 2:4 marathon? No. I don't think there's so many people who complain about 2:4 marathons.
Yeah I don't know why he was there. He wasn't really funny at all..it was just awkward.
Agreed about hart
It was not the success it would have been if he did go sub 2. However, I think it was a big success. Nike is getting a lot more publicity for this than if he won London. No one outside maybe London would ever heard his name and very few people would knew he runs for Nike.
Oh my goodness... wrote:
It proved that technically, its possible.
I literally didn't believe a man could run that fast for that long, even in perfect, petri-dish conditions.
It didn't prove anything except that if you changed the rules of the marathon to make it easier, then a great marathoner could run 26.2 miles even faster.
Since it's not possible to quantify how much easier Nike made today's 26.2 miles than an actual marathoners, it doesn't tell you whether someone could run an actual marathon that complies with the rules in under 2 hours.
grox wrote:
HardLoper wrote:You can't please everybody. Would people rather watch Kipchoge win London by a over a minute in 2:04? Then the whiners would complain that the pace went out too slow or whatever.
Strawman argument. I would have liked a good race in London. Did I ever complain about a 2:4 marathon? No. I don't think there's so many people who complain about 2:4 marathons.
Not a straw man, lots of people complained about the 2014 London marathon.
Not proven wrote:... it doesn't tell you whether someone could run an actual marathon that complies with the rules in under 2 hours.Actually it tells us that it's currently impossible. As I read just now on the RW story comment on this, "even with every aid possible, some legal, some illegal, they couldn't do it".
Flounder wrote:
She is obviously not a Nike fan.
"It is the third time Mr. Kipchoge has fallen short when chasing a time goal, including at the Berlin Marathon in 2015 when the insoles of his Nike shoes fell apart and caused him to miss the world record by 63 seconds."
This was the quote that bothered me the most. A casual reader would interpret this as "Kipchoge is a choker who can't run a fast time."
If you want to slam Nike for some reason, go ahead, there's plenty to dislike about Nike.
But there's absolutely no need to take a cheap shot at Kipchoge.
Not proven wrote:
Oh my goodness... wrote:It proved that technically, its possible.
I literally didn't believe a man could run that fast for that long, even in perfect, petri-dish conditions.
It didn't prove anything except that if you changed the rules of the marathon to make it easier, then a great marathoner could run 26.2 miles even faster.
Since it's not possible to quantify how much easier Nike made today's 26.2 miles than an actual marathoners, it doesn't tell you whether someone could run an actual marathon that complies with the rules in under 2 hours.
Comply with the rules of running the marathon? Hmm, 26.2 miles on foot was run here. This was a time trial not a race. I was not aware that there were rules attached to time trial. It was an experiment or test of human potential given perfect conditions.
What may come of this effort? Maybe with the learned knowledge the 2 hour mark is not that far away to be broken in a race environment.
We may also learn a little bit more about making a better faster shoe.
Doing things out of the norm, stretching the comfort zones of the expected to try the unexpected in a non coventional way often challenges the narrow mined.
rojo wrote:
I'd risked my entire professional credibility from day 1 as a vocal critic who said this wouldn't happened.
You have zero professional credibility. You said this "wouldn't happened"? The fact that you needed to boast that you were right is sickening when you probably would have been a naysayer had Nike said their target was 2:00:25. Delete your account, YOU are bad for the sport. Not Flotrack, not Nike, YOU.
gahuga wrote:
Bring Back the 880 wrote:Waste of a spring
Bring Back the 880 wrote:
got a nice pay day out of it.
You're gonna need to pick one or the other of these sentiments, 880.
A waste for fans of marathon racing.
Bring Back the 880 wrote:
gahuga wrote:You're gonna need to pick one or the other of these sentiments, 880.
A waste for fans of marathon racing.
All 12 of them
luv2run wrote:
rec running wrote:For me, what it accomplished is that I don't need to go chasing after those amazing super-hoaky carbonic shoes. The shoes made no difference.
How do you know the shoes made no difference? He wore them and ran faster than anyone has in a legit marathon (including downhill wind aided Boston several years ago).
Yeah, sure...
Come back with 1:57 under the same conditions and I'll consider using your carboniferous magic super shoes to dominate my age group in the next turkey trot.
Trickle up wrote:
Not proven wrote:It didn't prove anything except that if you changed the rules of the marathon to make it easier, then a great marathoner could run 26.2 miles even faster.
Since it's not possible to quantify how much easier Nike made today's 26.2 miles than an actual marathoners, it doesn't tell you whether someone could run an actual marathon that complies with the rules in under 2 hours.
Comply with the rules of running the marathon? Hmm, 26.2 miles on foot was run here. This was a time trial not a race. I was not aware that there were rules attached to time trial. It was an experiment or test of human potential given perfect conditions.
What may come of this effort? Maybe with the learned knowledge the 2 hour mark is not that far away to be broken in a race environment.
We may also learn a little bit more about making a better faster shoe.
Doing things out of the norm, stretching the comfort zones of the expected to try the unexpected in a non coventional way often challenges the narrow mined.
What sport has individual time trials? Cycling. How does a time trial work? Hint: do they allow drafting? NO! This was NOT a time trial. This was NOT an individual effort. If you want to creat a team time trial marathon event, go ahead - butvit would be a TEAM effort, not an individual running a time.
This was a unique stunt that is not comparable to any normal race or TIME TRIAL. Idiot.