Old Runners Exaggerating Their Times

I have a crazy story. I was meeting a girl for a coffee once and I was telling her about my running times and my goals/training etc. Some douche was eavesdropping on us and when he was leaving he piped up that he ran a mile in 3:30 when he was younger, and looked at the girl and told her she should find someone faster than me. I was shocked and couldn't believe it. I wanted to beat him up. After a few seconds when he was leaving the place I shouted out to him that he is full of crap and that he couldn't have run 3:30 because the WR is 3:43. He didn't even look back, just left the place. He would probably be afraid to see me again. The encounter proved that the girl was not my soulmate though. She seemed to think he was funny and was telling me forget about it and that he was having fun. The scary thing is she actually believed him at the start. I had to take my phone out and show her the WR on google to prove to her that he is an idiot.

I have a friend that claims to have done a workout of 5x a mile with two other guys in 4:12.

They were good sub elite runners but this is bs for sure

Old old man wrote:

I have a friend that claims to have done a workout of 5x a mile with two other guys in 4:12.

They were good sub elite runners but this is bs for sure

Exaggerating workouts is a different story. I wouldn't lie about a PR, but as time goes by my memory of every rep gets a little faster and those hills I used to do repeats on seem to get longer and steeper.

“Slow as tar”, lol

“Back in the day” for me it wasn’t the easiest thing to find a real FAT meet—actually it was rare. HS stuff was often cinder track, and if not that, then asphalt. Sometimes it was imperial, sometimes metric. Sprint times were all over the place. I have hand times that are unbelievable. It seems like the stone age now looking back on it.

Before there was real money to be made in track, there were LOTS of fast sprinters who never “got real”, and who would casually enter a race here and there, usually to impress a girl, sometimes to add to their soccer/football resume. I have already told the story about how when I was fast, I got beaten fair and square by a Scottish soccer player...also about the guy from HK who was insanely fast but never competed because his parents would literally beat him if he wasn’t studying. Also the kid out east who just walked in off the street and ran a legit 10.7 in someone else’s shoes, that didn’t fit. Also a guy I knew from T&T who worked sanitation, at 46 years old he gave me a run for my money when I was 16, at the company picnic. These types of guys might have some random hand time from somewhere, and it might be real, even though they were never on t&f radar—especially guys from the Caribbean, where they have cared about sprinting for a long time.

Also many meets, good meets, were never recorded. Times would be posted on a wall and you had to write them down, because at the end of the day they went in the trash. I had a few meets like that that were electronic times, but with no wind gauge.

Also many old sprint times may have been run with big wind, which people can forget, and which don’t appear in results.

Also records where I was were often kept in the club, which used to have amazing internal meets.

Old meet results are lost in the mists of time, and even if you can find them, they are sketchy—heck, just look at FloJo’s 10.49 from 1988, and I’m talking before that. Unqualified, maybe...but not exaggerated, at least for sprints.

Bottom line: how fast are you NOW?

clearing out boxes I found race results from when they mailed them out. I was actually faster than I remembered. But in those days I ran for the feel of it, not times.

Be nice to the old liars. They ran whatever time they say they ran. If you question their 3:20 mile, they might end up in the LA River.

I told people I ran 18:33 back in 2008 but then found out on Letsrun the course was short (Kent State Bowman Cup 5k) and it was 2.95 miles so my 18:33 was more like a 19:32.

Sometimes you have to change your story once you find out the course was too short. I didn't run with a garmin watch. The course director, Jason Hawk, said the course was 3.1 miles even though I showed him the letsrun post that claimed it was short.

https://www.letsrun.com/forum/flat_read.php?thread=2715577

What I did, and I'm glad I did this, is write down every time for each HS race on a finisher's ribbon or a bib. We didn't get medals or bibs early on, but small pieces of tape tied to safety pins that were like our ribbons. So I wrote on sharpies what my times were.

I'm 59, which counts as old.

I have notebooks with my times from the 80s and 90s. Believe me, my times were underwhelming even then, but their mine and their are accurate.

I think it would be awfully silly to exaggerate your times, regardless of reason. Your own integrity is way more important than what others might think of you.

Women are so obliviously gullible to men with fake confidence. They mistake it for competence because women are not competent. While men are so obliviously gullible to women who act fake nice and sweet. They mistake it for nurturing and caring because men are not.

There is a reason women date obnoxious dbags who are actually losers, and men date quiet nice girls who are actually bltchs.

Both would rather believe the person is acting genuine, when the reality is the loser and the bltch are the real person.

Reader of the run wrote:

Old people always exaggerate stories. They are often just innocent white lies like track times, but sometimes for more treacherous reasons.

Look at this outrageous eye witness account of history that is taken as factual.

''In the camp there was a cage with a bear and an eagle,'' he said. ''Every day they would throw a prisoner in there. The bear would tear him apart and the eagle would pick at his bones.'' said Mr.Hubert, ''but it happened.''

Thats more believable than making soap and lampshades out of prisoners...

I'm approaching 47 years old and I'm the opposite of the what the OP suggests.

I value honesty far more than someone thinking I was super fast or any such nonsense. If I ever tell someone that I ran X or finished Y, I assume they will Google it. (Yes, I know that they never will, but if they did I would want them to say, "Dang, he was right, down to the second," because that's to my benefit in the long run).

RossiCheated wrote:

If I ever tell someone that I ran X or finished Y, I assume they will Google it. (Yes, I know that they never will, but if they did I would want them to say, "Dang, he was right, down to the second," because that's to my benefit in the long run).

Funny. When I first met some guy who ended up becoming one of my closest friends and consistent training partners, we did the typical thing that guys do when they run with someone new - not so subtly trade PRs in a d—- measuring contest. This was way back in 2001 or 2002. I found out a year later, after we had become good friends, that he did an internet search of my name (not sure that Google was a thing yet then, maybe Yahoo) because he was suspicious that I was spinning some tales.