Walmsley fanboys go home devestated

MASSIVE reality check.

He was never a factor in the race, not even contended, not even close.

I thought Walmsley did pretty well considering.

Definitely not a ‘bad’ result.

He beat Ward and a lot of other guys with lots of fanboys in this forum.

You're a pathetic troll.

He beat Ward and a lot of other guys with lots of fanboys in this forum.

You're a pathetic troll.

He's proving you wrong wrote:

He beat Ward and a lot of other guys with lots of fanboys in this forum.

Yeah, and 5 minutes behind Jacob Riley.

Hardly devastated. He rep'd himself with a solid marathon. Pure beast.

Likely a 2:12/2:13 on a flatter course without the wind and hairpin turns.

Solid running. I wanted to see something unexpected happen and definitely did. Great race to watch

congrats to all the finishers wrote:

Hardly devastated. He rep'd himself with a solid marathon. Pure beast.

The goal posts have moved from him making the team to ran a solid marathon.

The reality is that he got crushed and couldn't even make anywhere near his top ten goal. 3 minutes out of it.

You're all obsessed. No one outside of this forum has a clue who these people are. We know kipchoge, bekele, farah, gebresalase... no clue about any of the women.

He's good at running really long distances at slow paces. Cranking out sub-5s for that long is not his thing. Surprised he struggled this much on what should be in his wheelhouse after doing mountain ultras: hills.

The best ultra guy came into the ring with road racers and got spat out.

Typically with ultra runners in shorter races one sees a machine-like consistency, but not the top-end speed. Really he did what one would expect.

2nd tier athlete doing 2nd tier things.

He's proving you wrong wrote:

He beat Ward and a lot of other guys with lots of fanboys in this forum.

You're a pathetic troll.

Ward had a terrible day and finished 27th behind a lot of nobodies. You use that as evidence that Jim had a good day? You’re a fool.

ThatAverageRunner wrote:

I thought Walmsley did pretty well considering.

Definitely not a ‘bad’ result.

Wamsley didn’t go home devastated, he did fine it was just a deep field.

His fanboys on the other hand, went home devastated. Calling for a sub 2:10, top 3, and the likes. In reality his name wasn’t even mentioned once, nor did it ever appear on the leaderboard. Fans at home didn’t even get to see him on tv: devastated.

People need to understand that running 26 miles at <5min/mile pace is way harder than running 50 miles at 7min/mile.

I'm a fan but had no illusions he would make the team. 3rd was a real long shot, at least with the so-called Japanese-style marathon training approach he took. To me, that did not seem optimum, even given his preference for big mileage.

But you never know until someone actually races, so what I was more interested in was how well the Japanese approach would in fact serve him. I had him pegged for maybe 6th to 10th in a best-case scenario, or 15th more realistically. 22nd is enough off of even the latter, I'd say the Japanese-style block did not work out well for him. You could kind of tell that already with his 63-low-equivalent half-marathon in January, which was an improvement over 64:00 the year before, but not the kind of jump you'd like to see.

The Japanese approach "seems" to work for the Japanese. But in my opinion that's mainly because they have a huge population of marathoners who throw themselves at the wall using it, though not everyone of course. So you do get a certain percentage where it will stick, even if much of the time it doesn't.

What seems like a smarter approach to me in general is the Tinman approach of focusing more on CV workouts, to get one's Type-IIa malleable fast-intermediate fibers trained to more aerobic metabolism for a higher cruising speed, because it raises your cruising speed at all paces. (Because of this, Schwartz believes marathon-pace training isn't as beneficial as CV training for raising cruising speed even for the specific demands of marathon racing.)

Not very many elites have really tried this, of course, at least not lately, with the craze for half-marathon-pace and marathon-pace sessions these days. But with the somewhat abbreviated half-marathon and marathon buildups Walmsley has been fitting into the larger context of his ultramarathon training the last couple of years, it seems to me like Tinman-style marathon training would have been a better bet than Japanese-style.

Even for Comrades, which will be his next effort, for which he's been viewing the Trials as a stepping stone in building his training-block sequences, it seems like this would be a better approach since Comrades is much more akin to a traditional marathon than mountain/trail ultras are. As a fan, and hoping Walmsley does well at Comrades, I hope he will take a cue from his Atlanta result in evolving his training and move on to something else that builds on the learning from Atlanta.

MASSIVE MISUNDERSTANDING wrote:

People need to understand that running 26 miles at <5min/mile pace is way harder than running 50 miles at 7min/mile.

This is it.