JK is a genius Part III: Here is his mile by mile analysis of how much the hills will impact the 2020 US Olympic Marathon Trials

I apologize for going too far off topic. I think Rojo gets unfairly insulted on here for the record....hence my defense (and evidence of why he is very intelligent). Back to JK: He's a very smart guy as well and IMO knows his training stuff....and I don't believe he went to an Ivy and I have no idea what his SAT score is. I think he taught math at some point though and he is very well versed in science and numbers in the context of running. His analysis of hilly course profile and "slow down factor" also seems very solid. I guess we'll see how the race plays out on Saturday....

concerned american wrote:

concerned american wrote:

this is all you needed to say. the rest i don't care about.

Rojo is a middle-aged man. STOP telling me about his SAT scores

S. Canaday wrote:

I apologize for going too far off topic.

I think Rojo gets unfairly insulted on here for the record....hence my defense (and evidence of why he is very intelligent).

Back to JK:

He's a very smart guy as well and IMO knows his training stuff....and I don't believe he went to an Ivy and I have no idea what his SAT score is. I think he taught math at some point though and he is very well versed in science and numbers in the context of running.

His analysis of hilly course profile and "slow down factor" also seems very solid. I guess we'll see how the race plays out on Saturday....

concerned american wrote:

Rojo is a middle-aged man. STOP telling me about his SAT scores

Stick to the facts in the future. If Rojo posts a thread about why JK is a genius, and people disagree with his reasoning, you jumping in about Cornell and SAT scores does not do you, Rojo, or JK any favors

S. Canaday wrote:

Rojo and Wejo are very smart guys.

What makes them very smart guys to you? Their sub-kindergarten spelling level. Their utter inability to learn English grammar? Their astonishing ignorance of basic arithmetic, history, economics, literature? Their dubyaing through life on unemployment?

You have very, very low standards.

I still believe that your wife, or anyone else, would be slower on a course with any amount of significant hills than they would be on a flat course.

I agree that some people run downhill better than others, but even the best downhill runners are slowed down by hills. It requires more energy to raise the mass of your body to the top of a hill, energy to overcome gravity, than you can obtain in return using the assistance of gravity on the downhill.

You say that she "feels" she is better on rolling hills than flat courses, but I believe she would be faster on a flatter course. Admittedly if she feels she is better on rolling hill courses, she might actually run/place better on those courses relative to other runners. And she might try harder on rolling hill courses because of this. But I do not believe that her fastest times would come from hilly courses.

This isn't running, but gives you some things to think about.

https://youtu.be/DCMQRPQS9T4

a very stable genius wrote:

S. Canaday wrote:

Rojo and Wejo are very smart guys.

What makes them very smart guys to you? Their sub-kindergarten spelling level. Their utter inability to learn English grammar? Their astonishing ignorance of basic arithmetic, history, economics, literature? Their dubyaing through life on unemployment?

You have very, very low standards.

Ivy League! Hello!!!

I've already been posting for the last couple weeks that my analysis shows the course is 2:55 slower than a flat course. After seeing the weather forecast of low 30s and 14 mph wind, it will be even slower because NOBODY will want to lead the race for any length of time. My formula for 5 minute pace is that there is roughly 50 ft of gain and loss per mile. At close to 1% per mile the uphill will cost the runners 12 seconds but they will get 6 seconds back on the downhills. The net is roughly 6 seconds slower per mile.

My original thought was that low 211 will win but with the weather I am going with a winning time closer to 212. That would be equal to someone running 208 on a flat course.

rojo wrote:

With over 700 Trials participants, I thought about making the following article the first pay per view article in LRC history, but decided to yet again give it away for free.

That's hilarious. When met with paywalls and adblock blockers online, I click-y the 'x' in the top right.

phonePhreaking wrote:

rojo wrote:

With over 700 Trials participants, I thought about making the following article the first pay per view article in LRC history, but decided to yet again give it away for free.

That's hilarious. When met with paywalls and adblock blockers online, I click-y the 'x' in the top right.

The first part of Rojo’s sentence implies that there’s a correlation between the number of trials participants and the potential money they might make it the article was pay per view

Sage is Back!!! redemption is coming!

a very stable genius wrote:

S. Canaday wrote:

Rojo and Wejo are very smart guys.

What makes them very smart guys to you? Their sub-kindergarten spelling level. Their utter inability to learn English grammar? Their astonishing ignorance of basic arithmetic, history, economics, literature? Their dubyaing through life on unemployment?

You have very, very low standards.

Rojo and Wejo are good examples of how intelligence can be narrowly focused and doesn't always apply outside one's area of expertise. I know a guy who was once the Michigan state chess champion who likely had a super-high IQ, and retired off his investments at a young age, but lacked all common sense in other areas.

His intelligence was strictly logical/deductive driven. Along with that, he was arrogant, must have had an "emotional intelligence" IQ of less than 30 (if 100 is normal), and was completely insensitive to how his comments came off to other people.

Wejo and Rojo seem a bit like this to me, though not as blatantly so. They're very smart when it comes to running knowledge. But aside from that.... They seem lacking in awareness of how they come across to others in their writing. So much insecure, self-referential, hey-let's-pat-LRC-on-the-back-yet-again, "looky, looky, look at us" blather, especially whenever any other media outlet or elite athlete mentions they read something on LetsRun. O, hosannah to the heavens!

Their writing is clumsy and can be painful to read, given they are supposed to be Ivy League-educated. I can't remember which, but one of them is comically overdependent on using the word "as" like a crutch to string together overlong clunkety-clunkety-clunk sentences, with clause tacked onto clause onto clause cobbled together artlessly with "as"s. Frequently you will see two or three, sometimes even four or more "as"s used to string together a single sentence. Are they not even aware enough to realize how awkward this is? Has no one they deal with personally in their own world ever told them?

And yet they are Ivy League-educated? Truly, who cares? That they mention it, and repeatedly, just reveals the emotional insecurity they feel inside and project outward for the rest of us to see. It goes to show that a college degree, Ivy League or not, doesn't necessarily mean that much, depending on the subject.

I will offer a couple of compliments: Hiring Jonathan Gault was the best decision they've ever made. It would be even better if they'd hire another real journalist to take over even more of the writing duties from them. In an ideal world, they'd stick mostly to race prediction and analysis, and let Gault and/or another journalist either edit their output, or write it instead.

Second compliment: The Brojos come across much better in person on their podcasts than in their writing. Along with the race prediction/analysis, this is their forte. Not of the opinion they can probably improve their writing much. Just don't seem to have the talent for it, but the answer to that as mentioned above is hire another journalist or writer on a par with Gault to edit their own output.

rojo, I have to be blunt, JKs numbers are nonsense. He will tell you that he worked out the physics of the matter. He didn't. He pulled the numbers outa his a$$ and you, like a sucker, believed him.

I said this 15 years ago and in all those 15 years he has never even bothered to check his numbers against actual data. Never. Not once in all those years. He's deluded and you are deluded for believing him without even checking yourself.

Here's a reliable formula based on actual observations of what happens in an actual race:

For every meter of ascent in a distance race (this doesn't apply to hill sprints) you lose around 1 second and for ever meter of descent you gain back 1/3 of a second. Or around 3 seconds per 10 feet up and 1 secod per 10 feet down. Easy to remember and reliable. There are lots of silly formulae which underestimate how much time we lose uphill and gain downhill. Daniels' uphill calculation is reasonable accurate, but he overestimates the downill advantage.

Nailed it!

lol so is jk a genius?

If John Kellogg was right about the course being 1:24 slower due to the hills (and he usually is right about these things) then Rupp basically soloed a 2:07:56 on a windy day and NEVER looked like he was seriously pushing or straining. He looked so relaxed!

That makes me wonder what he could have run in a competitive, flat race with good marathoners around him.

Rupp could run 2.03 in the ideal race. But then Bekele and Kipchoge in an ideal race could run 1.59

Mayor of Edmonton wrote:

lol so is jk a genius?

While after the race, John said something to me along the lines of "Guess I was way off on my men's predicted time," I thought his analysis of the mile by mile stuff was good.

Yes, John thought anything under 2:12 woudl be surprising and he's not the only one as Ben Rosario said the same thing.

The only analysis I did after the race was to look at the mile splits of the men's leaders for 5-6, 13-14 and 21-22 as these were the miles where Jon said to look for a 20 second spread (+12.4 for 5, 13 and 21 and -8.5 for 6, 14, and 22).

Here is what the lead pack fan for 5-6. 5:10/4:55 so that's 15 seconds.

13-14 5:13 and 4:51 so that's 22 seconds.

21-22 (pack is broken up at this point so I used Rupp) - 4:59 and 4:42 - 17 seconds.

The average of those 3 is 18. Pretty darn close. I used the men because there pace was much more honest than the women who were sandbagging for a lot of it.

Those splits were mostly downhill with a tailwind.

so sounds like he's not a genius. Fake News