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

My first year at a D1 school I met a frosh who asks me about the XC team, and whether he could try out even though he hadn't been training. He says his 800 pr was 2:00. It turned out his pr was actually 2:10, but he actually turned out well, and might have broken 2 that winter-I don't remember. He improved a bit more, and his dad wrote the coach to congratulate him for the improvement, and mentions the 2:10 best from high school. It's a good thing he improved fast. This guy ran lots of races around and maybe under 1:50 after graduation.

I ran hurdles in high school, and was just average. This other kid was 2 years ahead of me was terrible, he couldn't 3 step, and would usually just break 20 seconds in the 110's, never improved in 4 years. Goes away to the army (suposedly) and comes back my senior year to tell us he has done 12's and is two stepping the hurdles!! Has no response when I mention that the world record is 12.9; and just walked away when he was asked how he learned to swich legs!!

JEH....are you talking about the guys who were running around the country to raise $$ to build a high school track?

If you want to find a bunch of freakin' liars, join the military, it's like they breed them there. I've met guys who've run up Pikes Peak with waterbottles velcro'd to their thighs. Ultra-runners who smoke over a pack a day. And one guy who won $2600 in the Canton Marathon. I knew a real runner from Canton and he said they didn't even have a marathon.

Second year at a small D2 school a freshmen from some high school in PA shows up and says his PR is around 25 minutes. For some dumb reason we think he is talking 8k, but after he drops from the group in the first mile of the first run (probably 6 to 6:30 pace) that season we wonder what is going on. We find out that his high school coach told him that Div II times where close to his times. His coach didnt realize that we run 8k and not 5k!!! Needless to say he didnt last much longer at all.

I think their site was runtheusa.com

Also, I forgot about this one instance, where this other student (not on the cross team - not likely to ever be a great runner) was excited/beleagured because he just ran a 4:30 mile off of hardly any training. "Yep," he said, "I decided to do it indoors because it's windy out." Our indoor track was the typical 200m track.

It wasn't really BS, just ignorance. Surprising though that someone could be sport deprived to the point of not realizing that running around a football field (bigger) is more than running around a basketball court (smaller). He took the news relatively well, though. But I did take special care to let him know as gently as I could.

Last year I was hanging out with my friend before I did a track workout, and he said he wanted to get a little bit of running in. I said that I was gonna do a 15 minute warmup beforehand, and if he did 8 laps around the track it'd be a good start for him. So I start my warmup and he starts slowly jogging around the track. Well I do a lap and a half around the track, then leave it to run on the roads for a few minutes, and get back right before my watch hits 11 minutes. My friend was nowhere to be seen. So I just finish my warmup and do my workout, not thinking a lot of it.

I see him again that evening, and was like "What happened to you today?" He said he ran two miles then left. "8 laps?" "Yeah, I did 8 laps, and you weren't back so I left." "You sure you did 8 laps?" "I'M NOT LYING, DUDE!" I asked him how he did two miles in less than 11 minutes when he'd never broken 7 for the mile before, but he got really pissed, then my other friend and I just burst out laughing.

I've got two:

1) I was covering a local 5K road race for the paper I work for, and right after the field cleared the line I went over the the finish line. There was this guy there waiting for his wife, and we started talking. He asked how long it should take before we see the winner, and I said 15 minutes, give or take. He said: "Really? Well, I was at the Race to the Taste 5K in Chicago and the guys who won that race only took about 10-11 minutes." Hmmm. I politely tried to point out to the guy that 3.1 miles in 11 minutes was a bit quick, but he insisted. OK, guess I'm stupid. I walked away -- and of course the winner finished in about 15 minutes.

2) A friend (and co-worker) of mine didn't have a TV, so a couple of years ago I taped Boston and we'd watch it in a conference room during lunch. This gal from another department came in one day and asked what we were watching, and when we told her the Boston Marathon, she said "Oh, really? I've run that before." She also mentioned that she had run Chicago and a bunch of other marathons. When we asked what her PR was she said, "Oh, two hours and something." The scent of bullshit was starting to waft through the air, so we asked if she raced 5K's and stuff locally. Sure, she said, then went on to say her PR for 5K was "about 15 minutes". Later on we got on the web to see if she had run anything that she had claimed, and guess what we found? Of course -- nothing.

I invented the question mark!

Are you saying Run the USA was a con?

yep, evrybody knows it was.

seriously man, the website was like some promo for a local 5k they put together. ask 'em, they'll tell ya.

There was a Moroccan guy named Toufik Attaheri that lived here in the DFW area for about 1 1/2 years and convinced everyone except a few of us that he was a world class runner. He would tell different people different PR's I guess depending on how fast he felt that day. The first day I met him was at a local 5k where I ran a stellar 16:18 to his 15:50something. The first thing he says after hello is that he has run 13:07/27:48 and I just kind of said "well alrighty then". Of course the next day I put his name into Tilastopaja, google, and every other site I could think of to see if he was for real. No mention of his name or any alternate spelling. But the problem was he was a pretty good runner and around here people don't know a 13:00 5k from a 15:00 5k so I ended up feeling bad when people would ask if I knew him and how fast he was. I would just kind of say "yeah I don't know about that guy". He worked at one of the running stores around here and was training for the local marathon (Cowtown). The day of the race he takes off at the gun running around 5:10-5:15 pace and ended up in an ambulance by mile 20. Bottom line is he stayed around here for over a year and never ran anything close to anything good, despite training pretty hard the whole time. He also claimed to have had a $100,000 Nike contract yet when I asked our Nike rep. about it he just laughed and said he knew all about that guy and it was all b.s. And there ends my story.

I was once in an invitational in high school, and I was the third seed in the mile. My seed time was 4:29, the kid in front of me was 4:25, and the first seed was 2:45. It was a kid whose coach accidentally entered his 1000 meter time in the mile. Of course, most of us figured this out right away, but there were some younger dudes that were trying to figure out who the super fast kid was while we were checking in. It was funny.

A guy I was going to race in the first indoor mile of the season said he'd run a workout of 4xmile in 4:45. I knew it was BS. He ran 4:38 in the race and beat me by one second. This guy is a notorious liar, he always claimed to be running 80 miles a week and stuff and hasn't produced anything stellar.

Another guy supposedly ran a 14:40 3 mile time trial just before XC season started. He ran low 16's at the state meet, he broke 16 a couple of times, but that's it. (5k)

Back in the mid 80's, I'm at the track at Kent State doing some 400's. There's a guy there running what looks like 175-200 meter repeats fairly quickly. I get done with my workout and we get to talking and I ask him what his workout consisted of. He tells me that he is running repeat 200's in 21 seconds. I tell him that is amazing considering that I had a teammate who had just ran 20.26 in the LA games who couldn't do that workout, but he doesn't flinch. So, I ask him what he is training for and he says that he wants to run a fast 800. At the time Kent was hosting open meets on Tuesday nights and it just so happened that the next meet was going to have an 800 in it so I invite him to come run. UT-Pan American's coach Doug Molnar and I go 1:54 and 1:55 and this guy went about 2:07.

I didn't have the heart to bust his chops about it. Ironically enough, this guys kids go to the same elementary school that my son goes to so maybe they'll continue the rivalry....

...about these lies is that so many are told by legitimate runners--not world class or even national class, but runners who like to compete. Definitely not penguins or gallowankers.

I've been told a number of times by a number of people how their brother, mother, friend, etc climbed Mt. Everest when what they really meant was that those people had done the Everest base camp trek. There's a big difference.

pete julian left the cali last spring to "retire."

The summer after my first year of running in high school I had this sunday school teacher who was in his early 40's who still seemed pretty fit and beat me in a local 10k. So one day we get to talking about what he ran in high school and he claims he won the New Jersey State 800 title in 1:46 back in the 60's. I'd only been running a short time and wasn't too knowledgable so even though I doubted it, he seemed like a good guy and it sorta seemed believable. So I check the winning olympic times in the Alamanac and report back to him that he would have been in the mix of things at the olympics and start to question him about why he didn't go to the olympics. He gets all pissed and doesn't give me a good answer but sticks to his 1:46. The next week I come back after researching the top 10 all-time high school 800 times and re-question him. He got kinda pissed again that I didn't belive him - I think he actually believed that he did run 1:46.

In an ironic twist of fate he ends up being the distance coach my senior year in high school. Heading into the state me he starts getting fired up and telling me my mid 4:20's won't cut it, "everybody down there [at states] will be running 4 flat."

He ended up getting fired when my mom wrote a letter to somebody in power detailing how he ditched me at the state meet after 1600 trials to drive 3 hrs home to feed his dog (and then decided to spend the night there.) Good guy, just out in left field.