Malcolm Gladwell told a personal running story that is verifiably false in the foreword to "Endure." Should that bothe

I think you have a problem...if this is the kind of fact checking that offends you...so he exaggerated a little by saying "a full minute'. 18 and change vs. 17 and change...he is the last person I would accuse of inventing performances.

The fact that he said a “full minute” makes it worse IMO.

There is no reason to think that the evidence that you suggest comprises the race that he was writing about. Did you check every result of his and verify that not one was a minute faster than all previous results? If you did, you didn't present us with that information. Also, many races are not on Athlinks. It seems like you just picked a few races and didn't apply any logic to the possibility of others once you decided you found what you want to find.

I'm just impressed that a guy in his 50s can still go sub-18:00.

Comb through his Strava to exhaust the possibility that he is telling the truth and then report back to us. Thanks.

And good luck. Apparently the dude used to record each interval as a separate workout. lol

Maybe he "returned to serious running" between those 2 races. Or maybe he just mixed them up in his memory, and the 18:15 race is the one he was talking about.

Also, having sleuthed this down doesn't make you a "nerd" so much as a stalker.

Please tell us your age, A picker of nits, most likely. It sounds like you have no idea how spectacularly good and personally satisfying the time he ran at his age was. I think you are a jackass, but I'm just another old guy still trying to run well post-age 50.

"found what I assume is the result"

Athlinks is an incomplete list. His performance at his age is what matters.

Sounds like fair criticism especially if it pertains to the content of the book.

corrigendum . good word!

elvid33 wrote:

There is no reason to think that the evidence that you suggest comprises the race that he was writing about. Did you check every result of his and verify that not one was a minute faster than all previous results? If you did, you didn't present us with that information. Also, many races are not on Athlinks. It seems like you just picked a few races and didn't apply any logic to the possibility of others once you decided you found what you want to find.

This! ^^^^^^

That was my thought when I read the OP. Nowhere did Gladwell state the race seven weeks earlier (Redhook Crit 5km) was the same as the 5k he was talking about as he said; "... (the race) I'd entered since returning to serious running."

Mr. Picker, I think you made an incorrect assumption based on incomplete information. Gladwell is brilliant and a great writer to boot. I find it highly doubtful he was have made a misstatement like that on purpose.

So is Alex Hutchinson. Endure was on this best books I have read in a long long time. And his articles on Outside Magazine and his newsletter Sweat Science are infinitely interesting.

Also, courses can be long or short. Maybe he's using his watch to note his PRs. On Athlinks, it shows I've broken 40 in a 10k, but in that race, the cyclist riding in front of the runners turned around a couple blocks too early, cutting nearly .25 miles off the race. My actual time for that 10k was over 41 minutes (I kept going after the finish to finish 6.22), but using Athlinks, you wouldn't know that.

Maybe the 18:15 wasn't an all-out effort. Maybe it was a "tune-up" at 90% effort and therefore he doesn't consider it a race.

So the general consensus of posters on this thread is that that likely wasn’t the race Gladwell was talking about? It would be disingenuous of me not to acknowledge that that’s a possibility (and I thought I did in my original post, although maybe I was implicitly relying on the word “seems” to do too much heavy lifting), but based on the location of the race (New Jersey, which he mentions in the foreword), the fact that he ran it at age 51 (which he mentioned in the foreword), and the fact that athlinks, while not 100% comprehensive, has the vast majority of relatively recent domestic road race results in its database, to me it seems way more likely than not to be the race he’s talking about. I mean, how many 5ks is he running in New Jersey every summer?

Do the majority of folks on this thread genuinely disagree with that assessment, or is this a case of people saying, “Well, if you want to be technical about it, let me be technical back at you, you four-eyed, pocket protector-wearing, protractor-pushing nerd!” Which, to some degree, fair, I guess—especially since I’m not 100% sure this is the race in question. But the passion and creativity people are bringing to providing reasons why this might not be the race, which allows them not engage with the premise, makes me think that more of you would be bothered by a major non-fiction writer (who we like, because he’s one of us) playing fast and loose with the facts (especially running-related ones) than have so far stated it in this thread.

To be clear, none of this is intended to call his running results into question—he’s a good runner with a well-documented history of very strong AG performances in the New York area, and if anything, his story downplays how good a runner he is (the opposite of the classic and universally frowned upon PR inflation lie). I created the thread to see if people share my reaction, and while a couple folks seem to agree that he probably shouldn’t have done this, most don’t seem to agree with me (or care). Which, kind of to my surprise, has only made me feel what I originally felt (frustration and surprise) more strongly, but, well, I guess that’s arguing on the internet for you!

Also, I realize I may I may have assumed folks would have as much familiarity with both Gladwell's return to racing in recent years as I do. Which was silly of me.

Here's his full set of unclaimed results on athlinks:

https://www.athlinks.com/search/unclaimed?category=unclaimed&term=malcolm%20gladwell

The arc of those results, coupled with the age-51 comment in the foreword (neither of which I intentionally withheld--I just know I can be long-winded and didn't want to write a book) are big part of the reason why I'm so near-certain that this is the race he's talking about.

raterofopinions wrote:

I think you have a problem...if this is the kind of fact checking that offends you...so he exaggerated a little by saying "a full minute'. 18 and change vs. 17 and change...he is the last person I would accuse of inventing performances.

17:55 ain't "17 and change". Why's everybody sucking Gladwells D? He exxagerated his improvement ... by a lot.

I don’t have a single race result on Athlinks, and yet I have run a lot of races. OP’s fact checking lacks rigor. He who lives in glass houses...

A picker of nits, most likely wrote:.To be clear, none of this is intended to call his running results into question...!

If we are picking nits, that’s precisely what you’ve tried to do in this thread.

First, congrats to the OP for actually reading a book. I haven't read Endure yet, but I might now. As far as Gladwell's comment is concerned, I haven't read it. In my personal experience when coming back from a serious injury, I'll often do a time trial, sometimes with other people, to get a feel of my fitness. Even if he used the words 5k race, maybe Gladwell was using poetic license in this case. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt.

As far as Endure is concerned, Matt Fitzgerald had a similar premise in his book Brain Training for Runners. As a whole, I didn't like the book was written, but it includes a page that literally changed my approach to racing.

IIRC, according to Fitzgerald, the brain contains a governor that shuts down performance early to keep you from literally running until you die. Under normal circumstances, you cannot override this governor, but you can retrain it. Fitzgerald would purposely run a tune-up race too fast, knowing that he would bonk and have to hold on until the end. The purpose was NOT to run the tune up as fast as possible; it was to endure as much pain as possible.

In theory, when he reached that point again in a real race, the brain would remember that it had pushed to that point before and he didn't die so it would let him push to that point again.