This thread is pure comedy.
I came across Truett’s performances recently and then listened to him and his dad talk about the process. It seems they have extreme clarity, confidence, and a total absence of mental clutter when training/racing. What you need to be elite.
What I’m mostly seeing here is the average LetsRun poster telling on themselves.
A 3-hour marathon is “top 1%” statistically but if you’re in your physical prime (say 18 - 45), spend your free time on a running message board, and claim to train “seriously,” yet can’t piece together a 3-hour marathon over a 16-week block… that’s a mindset issue. At that point, observing, learning, and giving credit is probably the move, not firing off paragraphs explaining why someone else can't possibly be performing at a level incomprehensible to you.
What Truett is doing is impressive. And more importantly, the approach is similar to what we’re seeing from a lot of younger/elite runners right now: They look around, see what’s possible, and then stop talking themselves out of it.
Ten years ago, plenty of the elite high school/college times (and certainly the depth of performances) would’ve been labeled unrealistic or “unsustainable” by this crowd. Now they’re just… happening. Because people are getting out of their own way.
There’s no mystery here.
The irony is WILD -- a forum obsessed with performance, populated by people most constrained by their own mental ceilings.
signed,
230-pound runner who will run under 3 hours this spring