Why would anyone hide their Athlinks results?

Someone directed me to this thread. I'm the person you're talking about. I don't see why you didn't just ask me directly and instead resorted to anonymously bashing me on a public message board? I don't have time to go through all these posts and answer/correct every misinformed thing you've written.

I've had an Athlinks account for probably 10 yrs, long before anyone cared which races I was doing and what my times were. I started using it to track the races I did and then also to figure out which races other competitors were running, including money races. Then I realized others might be looking up which money races I was doing (some of which had pretty good payout), so I made it private. It was as simple as that! I didn't realize that 10 yrs later someone would get on a message board and be critical of it, or insinuate that I'm "trying to hide bad performances"-- really?

I started my website in 2011 because after I won my first marathon someone was critical that I didn't have a website and public Facebook/Twitter, so he knew nothing about me. I went "public" at that point and started my website, sharing info on the common things I get asked and to be candid. I knew by going public I might be putting myself up for criticism, and that's fine, but people were critical by "being too private" too (as you're doing right now!). It's like the quote by Eleanor Roosevelt,

"Do what you feel in your heart to be right- for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be damned if you do, and damned if you don't."

As far as being critical of my training and racing-- how many others are even willing to put this much detail about their training out there? How do you know that other elites aren't coming back for a second run on their long run days? So many athletes and coaches are fairly private about their training and don't want to give it all away.

I know for fact there's groups putting in doubles on their long run days, over 30+ miles (including after doing a hard long run in the morning). I discovered this trick by accident, because I'd shortened my long runs while at high altitude and was breaking up runs. I felt pretty good after doing it, so I kept doing it. Isn't that how training usually works-- through trial and error you figure out what works and doesn't work for you? I'm not "running miles for the sake of running miles"-- I'm doing what works, whether aiming for a peak marathon or having to rest up more because I'm doing back-to-back marathons.

I put it all out there on my website and what got my slow-bum from being a 19 min. 5K recreational runner to 1:16 HM/2:37 in the marathon. You're not going to find many runners who's HM/marathon times are this close-- it's testament to the training and tapering, including the Sunday-double.

Btw, I did a blog with the stats to compare men's and women's marathon times- 2:37 for a woman equates to 2:13:12 at the World Level or 2:15 at the American level. This matches up closely with the Mercier calculator showing 2:14:33 (which also used World ranked performances like I did).

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/lv?key=0AjluJp4Z6Bi-dHFOLTFkMjdvOExfTWM1cGVRS29jeGc

If you have further questions, you're welcome to ask me through my website.

Jag, do you mind posting a link to your site? The OP's douche-baggery had made me a fan of you and I'm always interested in reading on elites who actually post training information (there are so few that do).

Jag, no need to get pissy. This is Letsrun. Everyone gets unfairly criticized here. Now if someone wanted to get real critical they'd accuse you of starting this thread yourself to draw attention to your blog.

...what you did there.

jaguar1 wrote:

I started my website in 2011 because after I won my first marathon someone was critical that I didn't have a website and public Facebook/Twitter, so he knew nothing about me. I went "public" at that point and started my website, sharing info on the common things I get asked and to be candid.

Why bother? As a woman and if you're good-looking, it just sets you up for stalkers. You don't owe anybody any information. Nobody needs a twitter account. So unless you're making money from these things, you should just take them down.

I agree that it is beyond asinine to propose that you've hidden your Athlinks.com information to keep people from knowing about subpar races. However, anyone interested in finding marathons or othr races that offer prize money is not going to do that by going to Athlinks.com looking up which races you or anyone else has done in past years. That would be both convoluted and imprecise. There are far easier ways to go about it.

I assume that this critic was someone who could offer you something material. I've never heard of someone putting that much effort into appeasing some random stranger. I looked at your sour site and it's primarily about promoting your achievements in the hope of securing more sponsorships. This meshes with your Athlinks.com behavior, which is futile but does have a point. I see nothing wrong with any of this.

I'm not going to comment on the details of your training, but you seem to be saying that anyone who goes into great detail on the Internet about it should be exempt from criticism about it. Do you really think that's how things work? You obviously visit the forum at Letsrun.com. And, for that matter, do you believe that elite runners all have secrets that no one else is privy to and are invested in protecting those secrets from the proletariats? This isn't about different labs trying to develop true superconductivity or the like.

Most elites simply don't have the motivation, for whatever reason, to go on in exhaustive detail about their running. That is an observation, not a criticism. That said, there are in fact plenty of training logs from some very fast people available for public consumption.

This is strange, because it puts people in the position of you thinking of them as pessimists for suggesting that you could improve your HM time. But actually, that's not an unusual performance curve at all for an elite woman. Catherine Ndereba went a little under 1:08 and 2:19 in the same year. It's typical of higher-mileage runners who shun short races or see them as stepping-stones to other things. Ndereba's 5K and 10K times are nothing short of abysmal compared to her marathon times.

Perhaps you believe that using record times and deep lists are not a legitimate bases for comparison, but if you divide the men's WR by the women's, you get 0.9111. Do the same with the ARs and you get 0.8999 (using Khannouchi's mark) and 0.9046 (Hall's). The difference between 100th place on the all-time men's list and 100th on the women's is a more generous 0.8818 (and closing all the time). Using these figures variously translates a 2:37:14 for women to about a 2:18:30 to a 2:21:30 for men.

I suspect that you favor instead using the results of a single race -- say, the one where you ran your PR. In that race, 2:15:00 was good for 22nd and 2:17:14 didn't quite crack the top 25. Fair enough in some ways, since those races were run on the same course under identical conditions. This whole "problem" boils down to whether one uses basic physiological differences between male and female performances or normative ones.

By the way, I don't think the OP was taking issue with your capabilities as a runner. He or she seems more concerned with your presentation and alleged excuse-mongering. If such is the case, this person should probably scour every bit of his or her own correspondence pertaining to the same issue to make sure there's no making of excuses being perpetrated there, either.

A blog is just a blog. The OP seems overly-fixated on this runner. If you have a comment or concern, sanctimonious message board criticism seems unwarranted. The criticism of anecdotal race condition comments is absurd. The OP seems to be saying, "I love this runner so much! If only she could be more like me."

Please don't pretend that you aren't the OP. It is soooo very obvious that you are.

OP needs counseling to overcome his OCD with this woman.

buddy puddy wrote:

The OP seems overly-fixated on this runner.

And the person who argued most vigorously with the OP seems overly invested in defending her, and holds eerily similar ideas that aren't exactly mainstream (e.g., 2:15 for a man equals 2:37 for a woman). And they're both apparently elite runners who hide their Athlinks results because they don't want anyone beating them at money races. And they are both Bill Squires disciples, something you don't hear much anymore.

All of these similarities are probably just a huge, wildly unlikely, next-to-impossible-to-believe coincidence, though.

jason T-Rexing wrote:

Jag, do you mind posting a link to your site?

If you really can't figure this out from the information given (it took me and probably the rest of the folks here about two minutes), you wouldn't get anything out of it anyway and you're obviously anything but a fan of hers.

Camille Herron? Never heard of her but the email she posted from tracks to that name.

A quick note to the new board members: Jaguar1 was a regular poster on let's run a few years ago.

Reminder to all parents to have a conversation with your children about stalkers.

jason T-Rexing wrote:

Jag, do you mind posting a link to your site? The OP's douche-baggery had made me a fan of you and I'm always interested in reading on elites who actually post training information (there are so few that do).

Why? And invite more stalkers? She owes you nothing.

Because people can do what they want and it's none of you business? Athlinks is great for keeping all your race results easy visible to yourself in one place. Not everybody is vain and feels the need to share all that with the world.

You Are What You Is wrote:

Athlinks is great for keeping all your race results easy visible to yourself in one place. Not everybody is vain and feels the need to share all that with the world.

In case you're just as stupid as you seem: Athlinks harvests everyone's race results without any input from runners. This means that someone's Athlinks "profile" is not the result of vanity, it's the result of someone starting what seems to be the shittiest, slowest site in the world in an effort to make a buck. And come to think of it, the "vanity" you mention is evident only in those who HIDE their results for whatever reason. Jesus Christ, if you think you suck, and you probably do, don't run races under your own name, or at all.

A friend of mine is a very accomplished age-group runner who runs with a blind person in races once or twice a month as her guide runner. It's a very generous thing he does. It would be understandable if he left off his 28 minute 5K times off Athlink. He's not looking for any publicity and he certainly does not owe anyone on explanation.

Bugless Dirk wrote:

And come to think of it, the "vanity" you mention is evident only in those who HIDE their results for whatever reason. Jesus Christ, if you think you suck, and you probably do, don't run races under your own name, or at all.

That's ridiculous. So people who have their facebook settings on private or people who don't use facebook and don't keep blogs are vain? People's names and info are their own business. If they want privacy, that's not a character flaw. What part of that is hard to understand?