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

I am relatively certain you are wrong; based on what I know about the man I find it difficult to believe Gladwell would falsify such an insignificant thing. Also, not all races are in Athlinks.

In this thread, Gladwell is getting the most credulous treatment I have ever seen anyone get on this usually incredulous message board.

There seem to be two main reasons most posters accept his claim:

The first is that the poster doesn’t believe Gladwell would do this and so he didn’t do this. That’s a tautology, and thus doesn’t need to be given any consideration—it’s not an argument, but rather circular reasoning.

The second is that not all races are on athlinks, and so Gladwell’s story may be true because the race he’s referring to may not be on athlinks. And I acknowledge there’s a possibility that the race I proposed isn’t the one he’s referring to, but I ask you what’s more likely: that the race that I proposed (which meets all of the identifying characteristics that Gladwell gave in the foreword—its location, distance, the season, his age when he ran) is the one he’s referring to, and Gladwell massaged the facts, misremembered them, or wasn’t rigorously fact-checked enough so that he could tell the story he wanted in the foreword. Or that he, a pretty serious AG runner, popped off a 16:55 5k and never before or again came within a minute and has no idea how or why, despite several attempts at the distance in the surrounding years?

We’re all serious runners here—we know miracle PRs don’t happen, not by this magnitude at this relatively serious level. If a serious AG club runner runs a race like that, they either run some comparable performances (like the only-twenty-seconds-slower 5k Gladwell ran two months prior), or they know why it was a unique performance—they had their most consistent training block in years, shoe technology improved, the course was net downhill or short, etc.

Again, I am not questioning his running credentials—it would take making a near-deliberate misreading of anything I’ve written to this point to say that. But just to be 100% clear: he didn’t inflate his PRs, and he is a really good AG runner. That isn’t in doubt.

But I am questioning whether he played fast and loose with the facts in this case, and if so, why? This seems, to me at least (and maybe to me solely, based on the bulk of the responses on this thread) like something worth wondering about a best-selling author who is one of our leading public intellectuals.

(Apologies about the user name change. I’m the OP, posting on a different device.)

fisky wrote:

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.

I read Brain Training for Runners right after I finished grad school (in Exercise and Sport Science). Matt Fitzgerald made several science mistakes- he lost credibility with me. Some of these people are writers, not scientists. Same goes for the silly book Born to Run.

People should expect and anticipate feeling pain in a race. As Timothy Noakes mentioned in a podcast around that time, when you reach that point you "release the breaks".

To the OP- Why don't you get on Twitter and call him out on him? Fact check him directly rather than get on Letsrun.