The Trials and Tribulations of Running YouTubers

Right let’s have it. Big important vote this morning. I’m happy to continue with the influencer World Cup but cba if people aren’t digging it.

Vote up if you wish for the competition to continue. Vote down to say you don’t want it to continue or simply don’t care.

Keep on keeping on.

“He even signed my best athletics kit after one of his big Parkrun sends”

Check the hard drive immediately.

In all seriousness looking at the debate here as to whether Bester is a legend or a loser. Seems a 50/50 split

Putting in my two cents- he’s a really nice guy who genuinely loves the sport

2/10, way too over the top and use some believable times next time.

He said they were going to a good home. Sounds as if he was donating them.

Was going to write the same thing!

Could of saved us all a lot of time by simply saying a back injury affected my London run!

Some of her fans are delusional it's almost like hero worship!!

That could actually be an extremely popular series.

More content=more videos=more money. I'd rather she made training vlogs, what I eat in a days etc videos than rambling on about London. But I guess whatever she does it's working for her (right now!).

Shortly after London, she posted a few runs wearing a large amount of clothes under the guise of 'heat training' and claimed she was doing an experiment with a coach.

These have now mysteriously stopped. For someone who wants to get to the top of the sport, she seems to have quite an amateur approach to analysing what went wrong in her race. I'm struggling to keep up with the changing narrative.

I looked at her results in the london marathon site and the 1st 5K split was
16:54min. projecting a final time of 2:22:37, but if you covert that downhill 5K to a flat 5K than it's projecting 2:24:26 final time. She really was never on sub 2:24 time in that entire race. Not even in the 1st 5K, let alone the first 15K. And she didn't just imply it, she said it clearly in my opinion.

It's very stark how oblivious her fans are vs. what letsrun thinks on the matter. They are eating up everything she says. That's 100% true about every kinda famous runtuber. There's no criticism or anything, even friendly suggestions. Comment section is 100% glazing.

Laugh of the Day! Gotta admit this animation by Gnoza is pretty spot on for the state of some "Influencer Running" these days:

Thought some of you might like this.

From what I saw on several IG comments and some comments on Youtube: when people congratulated Kofuzi for a "new 5km PR" he didn't correct them though. He did admit in his recap that the course was probably short of 5km, but then he extrapolated a pace/time off of the 2.99 mile value on his GPS watch. I commented that if your GPS/Strava shows something like "2.99 miles" then actually there's a good chance the course was really (Jones Wheel measure) probably more like 2.90 miles (didn't run perfect tangents, GPS isn't that accurate on an "out and back" U-turn etc). That's way over 1-min + difference at his kind of pace. Probably worth a 19:mid for a real 5km.

You have to say the lets run lot are completely the other way though. Overly critical, often nasty, take themselves too seriously, seem to know way too much about the videos of people they profess to hate, bit elitist and half act as if they are sub 2:15 marathoners (I’d be surprised if any here are)

I like Phily's Channel but agree with you totally on this. She was tracking just under 2:25 for the first 5K then just got slower so I have no idea where this 'I went for it' narrative came from.

My guess is she realised in the first mile or so it was going to be a tough race for whatever reason and just ground it out, which is fair enough. But because she put so much pressure on herself leading up to the race to do well, came up with the initial story you refer to.

Runna is a flawed company. It's marketing practices are garbage. It absolutely created a short course to generate publicity. The fact that Kofuzi won't fully own the short should undermine his credibility regarding anything he reviews. That said, AI is going to continue improving, and it's going to really start displacing human coaching in the not so distance future.

AI will take most of our jobs. What "they" will do with us is another matter

The Greatest of All Time, Still the Original Running YouTuber is now a Masters Runner! He celebrated with an impressive 4:54 birthday mile at altitude! Seth should sign up for the usatf Master's Nationals. He'd probably win the 1500 in the M40 with a 4:40 equivalent.

The comments on the Boston Marathon Instagram post announcing the changed standards are super interesting. A very common ask is for the BAA to get rid of influencer bibs. It seems as if the backlash has begun to the marketing tactics.

I checked Runna out a few years back - you don't need AI to correlate recent runs to workout times. AI is used as a marketing term - it seems to work for them! Their target audience is the 90% of runners who need to add a little consistency to achieve a personal best.

They say they have "world-class running coaches". Their head coach is Anya Culling and the co-founder who was a personal trainer before Runna.

The whole thing is a case study of influencer marketing hype, targeting user acquisition over profit and a quick investor return.