After this morning’s result I’m struggling to find enjoyment in following this sport

Riight, its training or discipline or lifestyle or risk taking....LOL. No, it is cheating, doping plain and simple. Seen a thousand times before. And it always comes with its apologists who come up with the same excuses.

astro wrote:

Riight, its training or discipline or lifestyle or risk taking....LOL. No, it is cheating, doping plain and simple. Seen a thousand times before. And it always comes with its apologists who come up with the same excuses.

So how many elite athletes do you know?

Half Marathon is a silly recently made up event that means nothing. Half Marathon is no different than 150m, 300m, 600m, 1000m or 2000m. Letesenbet Gidey is not going to start winning a bunch of Olympic &/or W.C. gold medals in 10000m or Marathon because she can race a fast 1/2 Marathon.

She had the same cadence as the men who were pacing her. But for some reason she looked slower, like she was jogging. She looked relaxed until the end, when she looked incredibly strained and then threw up later. Take solace from that.

Someone on the course said it was perfect conditions, is flat but has a downhill feel to it the whole way. YY also ran a personal best even though her last personal best was 54 meters short of a half-marathon.

She is a metronome and looked at her watch constantly. Probably checking she's under 3:00 for each km. She had a lot of sinus issues which seemed the only sign of strain so I do feel like she was working hard even though she looked composed. I think she's a grinder, not a track star with an explosive kick.

!???? wrote:

Posts like this are just total nonsense. What is wrong with you? Stop

Say why you are upset.

There’s a post in the thread saying a woman running 62 high is meaningless because the half marathon is a ‘fake distance’. It doesn’t deserve a long winded explanation of why it’s a stupid post, it’s willfully stupid, like several other posts in the thread.

I think women’s times are soft because in many countries women don’t have the opportunity to run so the fields are weaker. They either get married as a teenager and have kids or have to work to support the house. As time progresses the countries with the best distance runners will have more opportunities for women to compete so we’ll see women’s records fall by massive amounts. The half marathon time shouldn’t surprise anyone.

If you watch an obviously doped result it is hard to get excited about it. Personally I find college and high school racing more interesting to follow.

The IAAF tables give her performance the equivalent of a 4:02 mile, 3:45 1500, 13:39 5000, 29:02, 2:11 marathon. I think those times as a set are a bit inequivalent, but clearly she is running way out of any other outlier performances for women. I too am left cold buy most recent records, especially on the road. It's a shame as I really appreciate her gorgeous running form, but then I always appreciated Shelby's grittiness too. It makes one weary for sure.

Sounds like you're grossly overestimating the accuracy and legitimacy of Vdot equivalency calculators.

So are you saying that it's really not surprising when somebody runs one of the most popular road-race distances in a time 5 seconds per mile faster than any of the countless competitors before her?

astro wrote:

When sonething seems like doping in this sport, it is. It is PEDs.

Well, this doesn't seem like doping, so it isn't.

The End.

I wonder if she will beat the marathon record.

I Win wrote:

astro wrote:

When sonething seems like doping in this sport, it is. It is PEDs.

Well, this doesn't seem like doping, so it isn't.

The End.

A woman from a country where EPO is easy to get, where there's almost no out of competition testing and at a time when there's been even less who has Jos Hermans for an agent runs a half marathon faster than Miruts Yifter ever did seems like doping, so it could be. I'm calling a tie here.

You are utterly delusional.

No. It is doping, cheating and fraud. Nothing ambiguous about it. We have all seen these type of doped up times before. All the factors you list is not a tie, but a slam dunk. She's a cheater in a cheating sport.

astro wrote:

No. It is doping, cheating and fraud. Nothing ambiguous about it. We have all seen these type of doped up times before. All the factors you list is not a tie, but a slam dunk. She's a cheater in a cheating sport.

I 99% agree. But I'm not going to say it's absolutely clear she's loaded because we have no hard proof. And I win has no hard proof either so rhetorically it's a tie.