Few bits of Ben is Running's Valencia half video irked me. First and foremost is that personally I don't enjoy having his sister/gf's running on the channel. If I want to watch an almost identical lineup of women running similar times to those two there's a glut of influencers I can look to, I don't come to your channel for that content. It's very on trend that she's become a Runna influencer having failed to reach her A goal in a near perfect race set up for her, with a private pacer on a near perfect course with all this gifted and sponsored support.
Then the concept of the video - going to Valencia so Ben can help pace her to a PB, and the talk about Colchester being too hilly for her earlier in the year to run quick enough. Is the pacer feature on the Coros watches that you're both conveniently showing a few times in the vid not good enough that you need a pacer to come out with you?
Then the hilly Colchester debacle - like yeah it's a slightly hilly course - a bit hillier than the big half but it's not a fell race by any stretch. At the point you're running a 2hr 10 half the problem isn't that you've picked a course with 50ft too much elevation for you, it's that you can definitely get waaaay fitter. You're in your mid 20s, just train a bit more/a bit harder. If you 'need' to fly to a foreign half to get one flat enough to PB as a 2hr+ half runner honestly what's the point? To me it's almost embarrassing. C'mon get fit enough that you aren't taking walking breaks in your PB attempts before you worry about choosing the fast foreign courses.
Then the HR thing about her average being 190 - again I get there's potentially a sponsorship/financial aspect to not calling out that data from the Coros. But do they seriously believe that her average HR for a 2:04 half marathon was 190? And that they've never previously had any indication that her CV system is some sort of one in a million freakishly high running one? No serious person could believe that her HR was 190 for over 2 hours, especially given that we know she was taking walking breaks. Maybe an opportunity to educate the viewers (who are going to be less well versed if they're following for a 2hr hm runner vs someone following for a 66 minute guy) on issues with optical wrist sensing during a race. I remember a reel from a different runner who essentially torpedoed his whole marathon because his wrist sensor was telling him the same sort of thing for the first 5k.