Did you just compare the tragic death of a man's father to an athletic injury? Certainly, both runners have undergone serious ordeals...but death and surgery have entirely different implications.
Forget about determining a competitive edge...how can a person be so calloused as to manipulate such a tragedy for the purposes of an online messageboard post?
And even if it weren't so utterly inappropriate, Josh Cox and Trent Briney are both fine runners in their own respects. It does them both a great disservice to belittle their accomplishments with irrelevant comparisons.
Why is it so difficult to individually recognize the adversity each man has overcome? Have we become so morally bankrupt that we resort to ranking our favorite athletes in terms of the tragedies they have overcome?
In all honesty, I've seen the spam and the sexual innuendo posts, but I truly believe this transgression against human decency is letsrun.com at its worst.