How Delusional is Nate Jenkins?

Don't know how delusional on a scale of one to wackjob, but your DFW comparison rings true. I found the above entertaining and suspect I'd enjoy his writing, in small and not-too-frequent doses. Tell me most runners wouldn't rather read that than say Ryan Hall's thoughts.

Why delusional? He is a hard working athlete who gets frustrated with the way things will sometimes go.

Looks more like spontaneous prose to me.

"Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself."

William Faulkner

He's looked a little slow in recent competitions on the track, even for him.

He's very passionate, but also very stubborn. The only reason he might be delusional is because he thinks the Nate Jenkins is the best/only coach for him. He flat out refuses to believe that there's anyone else who can help him.

He's a big Canova follower, but from the blogs I've read, his training is very (almost too) complicated. And it's tough to say that the training works for him, because, since the OT marathon, he really hasn't done much. Over two years of mediocre results from arguably one of the brightest up-and-coming marathon stars in the US.

I like the Nate Jenkins story, but it wouldn't surprise me if he never cracks 2:20 for the marathon again.

-esque

Doesn't he live near Bill Squires?

Not sure he is capable of running 2:10 no matter how things go. He trains hard as anyone maybe harder, just not that physically gifted. As gotten a lot out of his body, even got a shoe contract, but gotta be realistic.

In fairness, it's easy for a basically sane person to delude himself about his prospects for fast racing, and Nate's musings sounds uncomfortably close to some things that I might have thought or written when I was somewhere close to his age. Still, an objective observer would point out that his PRs are 4:13.29 mile, 14:04.68 5k, 30:27 10k, and 2:14:56 marathon. (He lists his half-marathon PR as 1:04:14, based on his own conversion of a 1:03:44 on the notoriously short, point-to-point, and downhill 3M half-marathon course of 2006.) I don't know much about his running background, but I gather that he is 29 years old, has been training pretty hard for a good number of years, and has focused largely, if not primarily, on running for at least several years. He may be very sincere in his belief that he has gotten his "sorry ass in 2:10 shape about 6 different times in the last three years," but it's easy to persuade oneself of such things based on training logs and subjective feelings, and quite another thing to demonstrate that condition in a real race on a track or record-quality course.

If he's doing what he wants to do, and isn't giving up anything significant by pursuing his dreams, then it may not make much difference whether he's deluding himself or not. But the tone of his writing does not suggest to me that he's content with where he's at in the sport, and his running profile does not suggest to me that he's likely to get to where he wants to go in the sport. At some point, we should all ask ourselves how running is going to fit into the rest of our lives, instead of assuming that we must fit the rest of our lives around running.

From reading his log once in a blue moon, he probably just needs to ease up. More rest, more easy days, less workouts. I'm always amazed when I see his training log...it always looks super-impressive...but not as impressive as a fast race.

Not sure why he chose to move to Colorado Springs when he could've moved to Jon Sinclair's basement in Ft. Collins.

I'm not sure what your motive is here but the full quote finished

"A big part of me would like to believe that last run on sentence was very William Faulkner esc and completely free of grammatical errors, but something tells me it isn’t even close."

It was from the comment sections on his blog in response to a question. Nate has horrible grammar in general but I feel pretty sure he isn't editing his responses to questions before he posts them.

I believe he's capable of 2:10. A few years ago people would have called him delusional for thinking he could run a 2:15. May his delusions carry him faster still.

We all know that feeling...everything is going perfectly, but it is not happening in the race.

The problem with the marathon is you only get 2-3 chances/year, so you really put all your eggs in one basket.

He probably ran 15 miles in 1:13-4 several times over the past few years, and it felt smooth/good/easy etc. If you can do that, you *should* be able to run 210. But 100 things can screw it all up race day, including your own head.

You dont run 216 in Central Park w/out being a good competitor and talented athlete.

My vote - he is trying too hard.

Nate Jenkins is the man. He is definitely CAPABLE of a 2:10, doesn't mean he'll do it, but it'd be foolish to RULE it outside possibilities. Obviously it's a longshot as it is for any athlete currently in the 2:14range....getting timing/periodization right...Everything and I mean EVERYTHING (or almost everything has to go pretty steady leading up to one to these things to nail it down...CONSISTENCY, CONSISTENCY, CONSISTENCY

I think his mileage and general conditioning is great but I think he should maybe lay off on hammering Canova style hill workouts/stomach-knotting speedwork all the time. Impressive logs dont always translate into impressive races....but then again keep in mind that training's also an art so if it works for him to hammer a lot, even if it's all mental and doesnt have much physical benefit for him to run all-out hills and other killer workouts, then he should just do it.

I'm sure threads like this just motivate him more to train. That isn't always a good thing for some runners like him though because motivation without sensible training/recovery can mean training oneself into the ground.

B.U. Mini-Meet

Boston University, Boston, MA, December 26, 2009

Section 5

1 scharen, logan unattached 4:54.04

2 saean, tim unattached 4:55.10

3 S, Marissa unattached 5:01.62

4 Jenkins, Nate unattached 5:08.64

5 Knapp, Renee unattached 5:08.97

6 kjaersgaard, frank unattached 5:13.80

7 Santucci, Andrew unattached 5:15.55

8 smith, christopher unattached 5:16.76

9 brigham, alyssa unattached 5:17.44

10 Noyce, Scott unattached 5:21.98

11 Runner, Mystery unattached 5:29.74

12 mingels, brad unattached 5:38.26

For a someone of his caliber, this is kind of funny. Was he looking at his girlfriend during this?

http://coolrunning.com/bin/res_load/res_print.cgi?r=09/ma/Dec26_BUMini_set1.shtml

That wasn't him. . . but if you insist it was, you're going to be real excited when you see that "Steve Prefontaine" is apparently alive, well, and running lots of road races every year.

Hodgie posted earlier on this thread, he dipped under 2:11 once, also ran 28:20ish, how does Nate compare to him?

Would you put them on the same level? No way.

craigmac4h wrote:

That wasn't him. . . but if you insist it was, you're going to be real excited when you see that "Steve Prefontaine" is apparently alive, well, and running lots of road races every year.

If that wasn't Nate Jenkins, then who did it? The BU mini meet director should hunt him/her down. I thought maybe it's possible Nate really ran it but he was just using it as an easy paced jog to look at the girls' behinds or something. I say this because if Nate was using the mile as a workout he'd have at LEAST run anywhere from 4:30-4:40, or 4:19.XX if he's trying to really work on his speed.

I was there, watching a friend run that heat. It wasn't him.

Maybe instead of someone playing with names, it was actually someone else named "Nate Jenkins."