S. Canaday wrote:
I'll admit it's a little annoying (at least to me) seeing a lot of "Influencer Runners" come in who just started running a few years ago.....all of a sudden becoming "coaches" and giving "pro running tips" and selling "training plans" because they cracked 3 once and have gained a massive social media following very quickly...(for what I could call a lot of "clickbait" content). I dunno, maybe I'm just getting old and cranky. Maybe it should motivate me to improve my production quality finally and have better editing and graphics. Adapt or die.
This is definitely what rubs me the wrong way most. The softball reviews on companies that pay for plane tickets can be kind of expected and, while they should disclose that, after a while it's easy to tune out. But when these guys start selling their "expertise" to unsuspecting people really bugs me! For me, I feel like a lot of what I learned in running came from times when I wasn't running well or dealing with injuries and had to find ways to overcome certain challenges/limitations. That's the useful experience that can help someone but most of these guys just lucked out into being just good enough at running that they can be fast for the casual marathon crowd. I guess for some of these guys they did at least start out running mostly as adults and there is something useful in being able to provide other working adults a training plan that's based around other life priorities but I can't help but think that if a lot of these guys ran in high school they'd be the types posting on Letsrun asking if a 9:3x 2 mile or 4:2x mile is good enough to walk-on at a D1 college. Again, they're just good enough naturally that it's impressive but they don't actually know all that much about running as a whole!