Biggest Bullshit Lie You've Ever Heard About Running Times or Workouts

As I entered the indoor track one day a girl I knew came up to me with a big smile on her face. She then told me she just ran a 5 min mile. "Yeah 4 laps is a mile. Right?"

Had a guy tell me that he was ticked he didn't make the Olympic team in the 800m (he wasn't even in the trials, much less making the team), so he went to a track at the exact time the Olympic race supposed to start and ran 1:36 for the 800m -- clearly far better than the winning time, therefore proving he was Olympic Champion. Clearly, he was mentally disturbed.

Hey ... I knew that guy and his friend. I was helping to set up a HS meet by grouping heats, etc. and coaches were asked to send in the times that they thought their athletes would run. One coach had two sub 1:40 800m runners!

I love all of the guys who ran 10.x 100m, 20.x 200m, 49.x 400m in middle school at field day ... timed by Mrs Crabtree around the orange cones on the front lawn of the school.

Several years ago, some friends and I went to Gibby's (great bar) in Niagara falls after the Last Chance meet at the University of Toronto.

After a long night, we went across the street to some place that sold Mexican food, and started talking with a couple of girls, one of whom claimed she was a 1500m runner. The talk turned to times, and she told us that she ran 3:57. We all began to laugh, and I told her why, and she said, "That's for 1500m, not a mile stupid!"

I tried to explain to her that only a handful of women worldwide were capable of that, but she would have none of it. At one point she accused us of being half in the bag and eating processed cheese, and I think I may have challenged her to a 1500m the next morning before my friends took me away.

These are great stories!!

I thought the Army thread was hilarious with all the 9 flat two milers and the 4:20 milers wearing full combat gear.

Two things:

1) Glenn Cunningham (or coach) saying he ran a sub 4 in practice.

2) We have a guy in my area who is a Special Olympics dude. He has something called Fragile X syndrome. His symptoms are relatively mild. He ran the HM in a major meet in Ireland, as well as the Houston HM nearly a year ago. He and his father convinced the White Rock Marathon orgnizers to let him line up on the front row so he wouldn't get "trampled" in the crowd - apparently brittle bones is one symtom of his disease. He ran 3:35. He has gone under 1:30 for the HM distance. Now the clincher is this: He and his father sell this "World Record for Special Olympics" story of 14:06 for 5000. It's been in our local paper, the Austin paper, etc. I've raced with him a time or two, and he's always 19s or above, as his other times might suggest. No one has ever seen him run anywhere near the times that a 14:06 would suggest. His results from other competitions are mediocre. I'm not sure if he and/or his father are delusional enough to believe he's actually done it, or if they just figure no one will check. The "kid" is pushing 30 now. He is a nice guy, happy and helpful, and runs quite respectable times for someone with his disabilities. The 14:06 thing is just odd.

Great thread, ha

Anyways, we had this guy come to practice who was i think enguaged at the time to one of our girls. He claimed to be a real stud. Said he ran like 8:40's for the steeple and 28 mid for 10k. he must have known just enough about running to know what good national class times were, but not quite enough to know that not everyone and their mother can run them. So even though none of us had ever heard of him before we gave him the benefit of the doubt sorta. Then he decided to do a workout with us. It was only like a 6-7 mile tempo depending on the group. The course we do it on is like 11 laps = 7 miles. He lasted one lap before pulling out with an injury, ha. He persisted to make outrageous claims however but by this time we had done a search on his name. One result came up and that was a 5k road race. He had run like high 17's or something. Needless to say he didnt come to practice much more after that.

Hedgehog, you're from the panhadle aren't you? I've read about the same guy that supposedly did the 14:whatever. Not.

Ran in college with a guy that constantly made up good one. Coach asked us the first day how much everyone ran over the summer he said "What's 12 x 7?" Implying that he ran 12 miles per day. We went out for an easy 6 that day and he couldn't finish.

A guy I know always tells me he runs all his easy runs at 7 min pace, but he has never run a sub 23 5K, go figure.

At the beginning of my sophomore year of high school, a kid who had recently moved into our school district showed up for cross country practice. He immediately ran his mouth about how he was All-State last year in cross country and that he was going to be the best runner here, blah blah blah. Our school was surrounded immediately by woods with many trails, all of which ultimately led to subdivisions. So at the start of the first practice, he took off like a rocket on the twisty trails, way ahead of everyone. By the time we reached paved roads, he was nowhere in sight. When we finished the run, he was standing there wondering what had taken us so long. This pattern repeated itself over the next couple of practices. We would lose him on the trails in the first 2-3 minutes and he would vanish by the time we hit the subdivisions. On the fourth day, though, we sprinted after him and saw him run off the trails (before the subdivision) into deep woods.

We followed him and caught up and confronted him. He admitted that he would run fast enough to get ahead and duck into the woods to smoke weed that he had stashed there. He'd get stoned for 30-45 minutes and then return to school well ahead of us and look like a stud runner. As it turns out, he had never run as far as two miles in his life, and used cross country practice as an opportunity to get stoned. He never showed up for practice again. So we never got to see him humiliated in a real cross country race.

I worked with a guy who knew I was a runner. He was on the other hand a fat slob who claimed to be. I asked him how far he ran. 20 miles every other day. Knowing he was a notorius liar I asked him what he did them in. His reply was usually under 2hrs. When I explained that would be world record pace, he didn't bat an eye and told me he could probably do them faster if he didn't wear jeans. Of course he would tell about trout fishing in Colorado and just icing the entire boat down to bring them back in. Or he when he drove the GM turbo truck from the 60's across the US in 12 hrs. It was over 20 feet up to the cabin. He was a probably 6'3" 270 so I asked him if he played football. Yea, fullback. So what did you play on

D? Fullback.

I've heard this one a thousand times at local races.

"Naw I haven't been training much... how about you?"

My favorite answer: "I've been busting my nuts and I'm ready ot kick some ass!"

Yes, where are you from? The hell of it is, he's a pretty good guy. His dad is a chain smoker with a prosthetic leg. The whole situation has "After School Special on ABC" written all over it.

A buddy of mine has a kid who ran for UT several years ago. One day he called his dad and asked about this phenom from the Panhandle who was going after a "world record" in Austin that afternoon. They went out and watched him (I don't know if it was an All-comers, a Special Olymoics, or what) and he ran his usual 19 something.

It's a fairly minor one. In the mid-1980s I was on Christmas break and spent it near Irvine so I did some training with a couple of UC-Irvine guys who were in fact very good runners which made this tale a little more odd to me: (Rusty Knolls and John Cohen, plus Gary Guyer from AZ State were down there training for a couple of weeks in the winter).

So we go out for a decently snappy run and do it in 52-minutes and change. It's supposed to be a ten-miler on the roads and it was "measured wtih the wheel". When I told these guys we were running in the 5:50s range and it was more like nine miles, they acted like I was totally mistaken and swore it was ten.

Whatever, I knew my training pace well enough to count it as nine.

We had a walk on guy on our team who claimed that he ran 100 mile weeks in high school. On his recruiting questionaire, he wrote that he ran 9:58 and 4:26. During the cross country season this year, he was always the slowest in the workouts plus the kid missed like 5-6 practices because he was either hurt, sick, or "forgot" about practice. A real winner. We (the head coach and I) let him run one race all season. It was a real low key meet where they just lined up the men and women together and shot the gun. He ended up running somewhere around 18:30 for 5K and got beat by South Dakota State's number one woman (Sheena Dauer). I decided to do a search on the internet and found a handful of results from his high school days. From what I could tell his best times from high school were 10:57, 5:09, and 2:10. Amazing.

I was joined in my freshman year at University in the US, by another scholarship athlete in the 800m - a kid from Michigan who claimed he'd run 1:51 as a high schooler.

While possessing the body of a runner he owned no running shoes or clothes, had no magazines or books on the sport in his room, knew little if any track trivia and gave vague and general answers to the first-day-greeting questions we all asked each other about our past performances.

He was academically ineligible from day one (this was the mid 1980s and he was an early prop 48) so he wasn't able to officially train with the team and we were never able to - not once - to convince him to come on a morning or week-end run with us.

His academics never improved, and he left school at the end of that freshman year, never to return or be heard from again.

A couple of years later, I became friendly with a couple of runners from Michigan who'd run in high school in the state around the same time (one was a state 1600m champ) -- no one had every heard of this kid, and told me that the school he supposedly went to had never produced an 800m runner under 1:56. (Somewhere in Flint, can't recall the name)

To this day, I'm convinced he pulled some sort of elaborate con to extract an athletic scholarship from our retiring distance coach (long on the tooth, but lazy on recruiting) and had never run a step other than to catch a bus.

(Back in the pre-internet days, a couple of forged letters, some fake race results and a complicit PE teacher could have bagged you at least a partial ride to some of the more gullible programmes.)

Once again, my instintive suspicion and paranoiac tendencies might be taking control, but I'd lay cash down that this kid was a fraud - and it still irks me nearly 20 years later.

Martin

A kid on my HS track team claimed to run a 22 flat 200m as a freshman (he was a soph at the time) and a 33 flat for 300m as a sophomore, because that time he tried, he said his dad told him to keep going to 300m. I've never seen him break 25. Supposedly his 22 was splits of 12 and 10 flat.

He also claims he can break 50 easily if he trained for it. I've never seen him crack 56, although he claims to have run a 52 now. A 4:45 mile is merely a stroll in the park when his PR is like 5:30. And major league hitters? Yeah they suck because he can hit the ball far on the highest batting cage setting. He thinks he can be the best hitter in baseball now based on that. You get the idea.

Another kid of my xc team in HS claimed to open the first mile at Mt. SAC in 4:58, yet in track, his PR was around 5:40. Go figure.

My friend had to run the mile in PE and asked for my advice to run the sub-8 that would give her an A in PE because she knew I was a runner. I told her how she should run the mile. Later on I saw her and asked her how she did and she had run like a 7:47 and I was like that's great. Then I got to talking to her about her splits for the mile and she claimed that the first 400 was in 60 seconds. I tried to correct her and tell her that I didn't think so but she just would not listen and couldn't understand why I wouldn't believe her.

My mom tells everyone I run 4min for the mile and 2hrs. She sees no problem with truncating a "few" extra seconds/minutes. I've tried to get her to either say the right thing or nothing, but she'll have none of it. Great Mom otherwise, though (smile).

Some dudes earlier this year claimed they supposed crossed the whole freakin' USA. They even had a website where you could track their supposed progress. That's pullin out all the stops for that fabrication.

Martin Franklyn... How's he doing lately?

Lastly, I ran with a friend (decent runner at his parents home back when we were in college). He wanted to do this "10miler" that he did about once a week in HS. After 15min of easy jogging (close to 2m), we stretched. Then we set of for the remaining 8. He was a little geeked to be doing his old course, so it did not take long to get to a nice swift (I'll call it 6, but it very well could have been faster). I was kind of tiring as we neared an hour, but was glad we only had a few minutes to go (10min at the absolute most, if I was having the crappiest run ever). We get to 75min, and I mention how it would seem that we should be back by now. Like a true Kenyan, he says, "Ah, only about a mile left." I was already slightly miffed as this meant the run was likely over 12, not 10. But, I was sure I could make it. Working hard enough to not want to talk much, I asked at 90min what was going on. "Almost back... I guess it's a little more than a mile from where I said... kind of forgot about a little bit of the last section." We finally came to the street his parents lived on, and I thought I might weep. An hour and 40min 10miler.. I guess math wasn't his strong suit.