Or they've got better things to be mad about than the world's most vanilla marathon blogger. Dude's about as controversial as a stock photo of mashed potatoes.
I would agree with this 100% before his association with BPN.
His narrative of being a normal guy trying to break 3:00 (like scores of Youtubers), failing/plateauing (Kofuzi beat him to it at Grandma's 2022), and then getting below 2:40 (unlike most of the Youtubers who were once trying to break 3:00) is a good one.
I think the whole "online coaching" industry is a gigantic racket. That said, do Olympians really have better insight into couch-to-marathon training, or how to juggle full-time employment/family/life/training?
For plenty it is but it isn't so by definition. It can be a professional service done by a proven person at a suitable cost that ties in with comparable services. Clearly noone 'needs' it but no one 'needs' to pay to have their house cleaned or their hair cut by a qualified hairdresser/barber. Not direct comparisons but principle carries across.
It's time to catch up with our favorite running YouTubers!
Ben is Running ran a eikden relay courtesy of Mizuno (and disclosed it was courtesy of Mizuno, progress!). He fell down on the cross country section of the course but got back up and exchanged the sash in the lead. His team went on to finish fourth. He also ran a track PB and made a video about it. And he and his girlfriend have completed their move to their own place.
Speaking of ShoeTubers on the move, Kofuzi is always on the move. The this time he spent four days in Eugene courtesy of Asics. He did put that he in a working with Asics on a summer tour, and that the tour concludes with him going to watch the Olympics in the fine print of the description after the affiliate links. But he didn't make a verbal disclosure in the video. Then he reviewed the Asics Superblast 2 the next day, didn't include the disclosure of his contract with Asics in his description or in his verbal disclosures (he only said he was sent the shoe for review) and then went on to praise the shoe incessantly. I'm sure that is all just a coincidence.
The Believe in the Run crew ran around the trails near the Western States 100 before the race, courtesy of Hoka and made a video about it. They included a 10 second text screen saying what happened in the race but no video of the race itself.
Allie Ostrander had a rough trip in the 3000m Steeplechase Final, but still ran a PR and the Olympic Standard. Her video deservedly has about 5x the views of Kofuzi's Asics-sponsored trip video to Eugene.
Spencer Brown aka the Athlete Special took a hiatus from the Seattle Park Run circuit and went to the trials. He didn't film the races because of the NBC broadcast rights. I wonder how Kofuzi got around that. Anyway his video is likely to exceed Kofuzi's in views.
The Greatest of All Time, Still the Original Running YouTuber won the Leadville Heavy Half and celebrated with ice cream! It's good to see Seth having a good season.
Phily Bowden ran a sub 9 3k and PB'd to a 15:22 5000 in the British Championship. She was in the mix until the last 600 meters. A good effort for her, and a video surely forthcoming.
Ben Parkes is loving the Adidas Adizero SL 2 and the Mizuno NeoVista.
And that's all the time we have for running YouTubers this week!
This post was edited 3 minutes after it was posted.
It's time to catch up with our favorite running YouTubers!
Ben is Running ran a eikden relay courtesy of Mizuno (and disclosed it was courtesy of Mizuno, progress!). He fell down on the cross country section of the course but got back up and exchanged the sash in the lead. His team went on to finish fourth but he missed most of it because he opted to go to a restraunt instead of supporting his team. He also ran a track PB despite it not being an officially licensed race which seems a bit pointlessand the results have been scrubbed and made a video about it. And he and his girlfriend have completed their move to their own place.
Allie Ostrander had a rough trip in the 3000m Steeplechase Final where she placed nowhere near the top 3 despite all the hype going into the event, but still ran a PR and the Olympic Standard. Her video deservedly has about 5x the views of Kofuzi's Asics-sponsored trip video to Eugene.
Spencer Brown aka the Athlete Special took a hiatus from the Seattle Park Run circuit and went to the trials using a title that implies he was competing, to try and game the algorithms, when ofc he wasnt. He didn't film the races because of the NBC broadcast rights. I wonder how Kofuzi got around that. Anyway his video is likely to exceed Kofuzi's in views.
Phily Bowden ran a sub 9 3k and also bombed with a 9:10 3K after and PB'd to a 15:22 5000 in the British Championship but placed poorly after leading the race. She was in the mix until the last 600 meters. A good effort for her, and a video surely forthcoming.
Ben Parkes is loving the Adidas Adizero SL 2 and the Mizuno NeoVista and is still injured though not being forthcoming about it, meanwhile his partner also has a stress fracture from their amateurish training plans, a shocking endorsement of both of their coaching licenses.
amended, also:
'FOD Runner' missed his 32:59 target, running 33:49, blowing up and still referencing his February illness
'Welsh Runner' similarly did the same race running 32:46, 2minutes off his 10K PR, so naturally wont be releasing a video or any social media posts about it
Nick Bester wasted his single-use Adizero Adios Pro Evo 1's on a 14:47 5K, calling it the hardest he's ever ran, despite being over 10s off his PR and is super super shoes. This week he did a track race and ran slower than 5K pace, finishing in 8:54, blaming his age.
Lesser known Youtuber Amritpal Ghatora still hasn't come back to his channel after 12months, however hosted an atrocious track-meet in London mid-week which featured heats of 60x athletes. Absolute carnage.
Lesser known Youtuber Amritpal Ghatora still hasn't come back to his channel after 12months, however hosted an atrocious track-meet in London mid-week which featured heats of 60x athletes. Absolute carnage.
I think that's just his job with tracksmith rather than him as a YouTuber.
In this video, I attempt to answer the question of whether there is any fundamental difference in running shoe reviews between when a shoe is supplied to the...
SJD got a lot of flack for leaving the kids with his wife all day to be taken care of while he runs in the mountains. Kofuzi travels all year to document races while the kids are at home. I guess when you get paid. It's okay.
SJD got a lot of flack for leaving the kids with his wife all day to be taken care of while he runs in the mountains. Kofuzi travels all year to document races while the kids are at home. I guess when you get paid. It's okay.
Since Kofuzi reportedly closed his non-running business during the pandemic because his wife is the breadwinner in the family, it looks like his wife works hard all week and then is alone with the kids while Kofuzi is travelling the world for STCJs.
Hi, I'm Roger Biebert, and I am here today to review Tim Grose's "2024 Running Shoes - Reviewing the Reviewers". Let's get into it...
There are times when "Reviewing the Reviewers" resembles western cultural events trapped in the "Twilight Zone." Episodes are hauntingly familiar, and yet seem slightly askew. What if the "grassy knoll" recordings from the police radio in Dallas had been crossed with Chappaquiddick and linked to Watergate? What if Jack Ruby had been a private eye specializing in divorce cases? What if Abraham Zapruder—the man who took the home movies of President John F. Kennedy's death—had been a sound-effects man? And what if a shoetuber is slightly biased in their shoe reviews? These are some of the inspirations out of which Tim Grose constructs "Reviewing the Reviewers," a video which continues his practice of making cross-references to other videos, other shoetubers, and actual historical events, and which nevertheless is his best and most original work.
The video itself, of course, reminds us of "Blow-Up," the 1966 film by Michelangelo Antonioni in which a photographer saw, or thought he saw, a murder—and went mad while obsessively analyzing his photographs of the "crime." Was there a dead body to be found on that fuzzy negative? Was there even such a thing as reality? In "Reviewing the Reviewers," Tim Grose plays the character who confronts such questions, but in the context of shoetuber reviews. He's a shoetuber himself. He works on cheap, cynical exploitation running videos. Still, reviewing his review and documentation of other videos, Grose becomes convinced that he can find some insight or a smoking gun, but for some reason, he never delivers an overall summary or conclusion. Is there any correlation in the data?
The plot thickens beautifully. Grose doesn't have just a handful of ideas to spin out to feature length. He has an abundance. We run through tabs and tabs of data on other shoetubers, like a gallery of violent characters in a Tarantino film, including the likes of FOD runner. Have any of them committed a crime with any of their reviews? If so, is that crime complicated by a series of other crimes, designed to lay a false trail and throw shoetuber viewers off the scent of an industry conspiracy?
Meanwhile, the Grose character digs deeper. For him, it's a matter of competence, of personal pride. Arguing with himself about video production, Grose denies that he's just imagining things: "Sound matters as much as video!" In a brilliantly crafted sequence, Grose focuses his camera for a moment on himself, and then back to the excel document, doggedly extracting what seem to be facts from what looks like chaos.
Grose's visual images in "Reviewing the Reviewers" invite comparison to many Alfred Hitchcock films. There are such Hitchcock hallmarks such as a spreadsheet scene that plays like the opening credits of North by Northwest, invoking the possibility of government conspiracy, maybe several grisly murders in unexpected surroundings, violence in public places, and a chase through across the United States to Mt. Rushmore.
But "Reviewing the Reviewers" stands by itself. It reminds us of the violence of wearing a shoe too long, the uncertainty of historical "facts" from "JFK," and it ends with the bleak nihilism of "Carrie". But it moves beyond those films, because this time Grose is more successful than ever before at populating his plot, or spreadsheets, with three-dimensional data points.
Best of all, this video is inhabited by a real cinematic intelligence. The audience isn't condescended to. In sequences like the one in which Grose talks about another shoetuber, we're challenged and stimulated: We share the excitement of figuring out how shoetuber reviews develop and unfold, when so often the videos only need us as passive witnesses.
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