The Trials and Tribulations of Running YouTubers

In a full circle moment we find out it was Ben Parker who was shouting at his dog Fenton in Richmond Park, which was overheard by unknown runner at the time Ben Felton, who then took this name and became the successful YouTuber he is today

He just got the Saucony Azura in, but probably bought them with his own money.

He's been reviewing Chinese shoes for months and absolutely loves them. Can't see that changing!

Agreed - hoping he does more content with his brother in law over the coming months too as they are hilarious together!

Absolutely, the circlejerk in the comments of some influencers, complete brown nosing but will take on small insignificant runners who are just a bit dumb. Picking on the little guy but want to be cool with the “cool kids” popular influencers. You just know the person running that is a loser.

Didn't Ben is running do about 30 hours cross training following a stress fracture and get called out by Callum elson for on the run it 3 ways pod hahaha

Everyone's favourite run club hero Calum Goddard is dealing with an injury but that doesn't stop him getting a Vo2 max test and after looking at the data, deciding to run his easy runs harder.......great

And this is why we don't EVER trust a review that begins with:

'Shady marketing department of sh!tty brand have sent me this sh!tty product, but they didn't get to see the video before I posted it and all opinions are mine."

Fully support FOD's position there. Skimmed a few older reviews to catch which brands had sent him stuff. Asics was another (Mount to Coast also got a brief mention at the end of a video, but I couldn't see a review for their shoe, maybe it was agreed he'd do more harm than good saying anything?)

Can see how the marketing people who send shoes out think though - there's a horde of social media shoe reviewers out there, they're going to keep sending free stuff to the less critical ones who shift the most merch for them. Their job is just to move stock, people being honest about meh products hurts their bottom line.

Online reviews everywhere have become totally corrupted by this process, if you look at a shoe on SportsShoes etc and read the reviews it's astonishing how many say "This review was collected as part of a promotion" (at least they are declaring it though)

The shoetuber community did save me spending £120 on a pair of discounted VF4 this week - the general consensus on them was so poor that I felt the chances I get on with that shoe would be very low. Hard to believe when you look back to 2019 and see the VF2 dominating the front few rows of every road race.

I'm already a bit tired of the whole OFUMIU shtick tbh.

Yea, it was fun calling out hybrid athlete/hyrox morons for posting their strava times at the start but it's pretty obvious that the people who run the page aren't keen on going after any actual running influencers who do the same garbage.
I'm honestly too lazy to go through all their posts but I'm certain i've seen pretty much every influencer mentioned in this thread claiming their strava time on Instagram.

OFUMIU seems to cream their pants whenever a big name influencer posts on their page.

At least Marathon Investigation has balls.

I run a 5km in the mid 17s and had mine done a few weeks ago for the first time. I got 59. I am mid 40s, and having watched his video, there is not a cat in hell's chance he has a score of 58. Although an interesting insight for most, I am sure he falsified it.

Our man SETH JAMES DEMOOR has been reminiscing about the older years of the vlog in several posts now. He's also deal with a case of PLANTAR FASCIITIS. Please keep him in your prayers this week.

Less than a month off the back of stating in his pod with RTJ that his big thing to improve this year was that he is going to run his easy runs easy to actually build fitness.

Runna textbook 101: How can i speed-run as many injuries as possible in as short a time as possible.

Almost certainly fake, or the guys hes working with gave him a better score so he would promote them. I skip watched the vid and its literally just 6 different adverts strung together. Goddard-Mocklow's content is the worst of the worst in terms of just 30 mins of promoting slop.

(although his girlfriends is possibly somehow worse iykyk)

Physios love runna.

It pays for nice things.

Whilst I do agree with most of what you say, this bit in particular pretty much just means 'they asked for the review'. As in emailed them saying please review your recent purchase, and at most means 'please leave a review to get 10% off your next purchase'

Doesn't mean it was a free shoe sent out for review purposes.

Well yeh his dad Adam started and ran a fund called Majedie managing assets of c.£10bn, so no wonder that;

1. He could financially take the risk to pursue his passion and begin a start up,

2. He had the connections to raise significant Seed and venture funding within 2-3 years.

3. He has multiple properties to film his lockdown workouts

Anyway, he had a leg up but he's played his cards well, despite shambolic knowledge of the sport & some spurious PB claims, he cashed out nicely to Strava. I can't see Runna lasting long-term, the bubble will burst.

Other co-founder Dom does seem like a more genuine bloke.

https://www.fnlondon.com/articles/small-cap-specialist-steps-down-from-majedie-20141126

This guy is everything wrong with the runfluencer community

Early investors in Runna,got 30x money back.

Source-An athlete/coach who put in 10k,got 300k when they sold it.

Olympian Steph Davies got in early - they gave her 0.11% of the company in January 2022 according to accounts.

Assuming her shares didn’t get diluted as they released more equity, if Runna sold for ballpark £50m that’s ~£55k, feels very low?

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