What were your first memories of the Letsrun early years

“Keep it on the crete” from the concrete runner

summer of malmo

the massive Lydiard thread

The old sub4 thread for sub 1:50 800m training

the guy who won the turkey trot and yelled “gobble gobble MF’ers!” While grasping and making circular motions with his Balzack

I honestly don’t understand all the grief the brojos take. Rojo definitely says some goofy stuff at times and ‘ofa lon teh’ is one of my favorite recent moments, but there’s a weird in loco parentis thing that’s going on with a certain segment of the running community that’s hard to understand for me. It comes across to me that they expect the Brojos to reflect their interests and they are very angry when they do not.

This site gets a lot of flak but much of it is self-induced. The moderation is inconsistent and often biased. Posters can spew lies and information and that is left up as 'free speech', point this out and the post is deleted within hours if not minutes. Also, the brojos post inflammatory stuff on a frequent basis and get away with it, expecting laughs instead of derision that they deserve. It's not really a healthy environment, and there is a reason hardly any elites post here--or have posted here in more than a decade. That's one big difference in the early 2000s you saw a fair number of elites on this message board. That doesn't happen anymore. This site could be managed better. It isn't.

I remember a lot of headlines where some white guy finishing 9th would be celebrated as the "first place non-African-born" runner.

Can't believe it hasn't been mentioned yet, but how about the thread about the high school guy that would take shots of Whiskey throughout his hs xc races. I know it was obviously fake, but wow it was amazing. It wasn't just one post or one race either. The thread went on for months and he would have weekly "performance" updates. Eventually he learned the proper "dosage" and at what point during the races he should take the shots. Talked about how he would hide them all over the cross country course or have a buddy help him during the races.

Best part was everyone knew it was fake, but everyone just played along and even offered their own tips and tricks. I've searched everywhere for the thread but can't seem to find it, but it was incredibly long and details and I wanna say it spanned the entire xc season. I miss the days where someone could troll and everyone else would just play along because it was fun.

Personally, I applaud the honesty of the brojos. I haven’t interacted as much with Robert, but I’ve found that if you email them and ask them a direct question, they answer directly.

I also make a distinction between the message boards and the reporting on the site. The brojos, JG etc are very honest about their points of view and have been pretty consistent over the years. I think they do track right on a lot of stuff, but so what? This is their website, it has a purpose, and they make no bones about it. Do you want them to appoint an ombudsman or something?

As for moderation, I agree that it can be inconsistent. That’s because it is done by individuals and their judgement varies quite a bit. Once again, every time I’ve emailed them with a question, I get a response. It has always been reasonable IMO. If you don’t think so, that’s fine, but I’m curious why you would subject yourself to such an unpleasant experience.

As for elites, we just had Doug Consiglio basically doing an AMA that lasted for weeks recently. Steve Spivey is on here often. Malmo is still here. Molly Seidel definitely at least reads the boards from her podcast appearances. Do you think that happens on the baseball equivalent? Your perception of whether more or less elites are here may not reflect the reality. One thing I would point out is that social media was in its infancy when this website started and elites had far less in the wya of vehicles with which they could interact with fans. Do you really think the treatment they get here is worse than IG comments?

C’mon man!

Wejo's Flagstaff updates, McDonald's orders and pre-race espressos

Mayeroff's antics/adventures

Summer of Malmo

Canova's posts

The Rono comeback saga

Been following Letsrun since y2k and see some great mentions here but its not all fun and games. Posters have exposed our share of frauds through the years too! most notably the cross America runner and the DJ who faked his BQ. If I recall correctly, the bros offered a $ for a verified BQ.

2005 going into my senior year of high school. I remember watching an internet stream of the World Championships in Helsinki (back internet streams of live sports was really the Wild West) and discussing Alan Webbs wild strategy in the 1500 final.

Been here since the start. Don't contribute nearly as much anymore. Miss the historical perspectives of the old timers and the elites. Witnessed first hand why many athletes no longer bother. On one occasion, I had taken a US team overseas and they were subjected to numerous posts on how bad they were, before we even left the US. The team did well, despite the negative vibes, and had 6 Olympians, including a medalist. (You can figure it out)

I remember jumping on in 2020. Not much has changed in 20 years.

Some names have come and gone or have become memes. Ventolin’s unsourced calculator was quirky, VIPAM was always the earnest fan, there was Flagpole, 430 miler, HRE, and Jason in Thailand doing who knows what.

One of my favorites was, and I hope somebody can point me to his YouTube channel, a 400 guy who was convinced he was awesome and above all, that he was hot. “I am so hot” was his catchphrase. He was insane in a special way. I wish I could find those videos. The guy had style.

The Journalism on this site is still average, sadly, however along with Dyestat and Milesplit, Letsrun can credibly claim to have helped build the running community so that more information in general, training techniques, and results have been shared which has led to new frontiers in American running.

There is so much more potential to market the sport better but there is no one with the mindset to do it. I’ve watched for 20 years and no one has done it. Not Letsrun, not FloTrack. The fact is our leading athletes are boring (distance runners) or shamefully tacky (sprinters), and our reporters are trapped in the usual sports tropes. Entrepreneurs in the space are all suffering from limited vision.

For example, this is the hard core fan’s go to website, one which has a bit of influence in the sport. It seems the operators have no idea what fans want. Here’s a couple of items:

We want race videos and results. We don’t want podcasts about a race none of us have seen. Doing more of this depresses interest. Savvy interviews, well shot races, innovative marketing of sleek athletes, ought to sell itself, but none of that is happening. A photo slick in a magazine does. it cut it Nike.

Another thing fans need is coordinated efforts to loosen up licensing on archive video. I’m watching some races now for the first time over 25 years after the race occurred. That’s crazy copyright capture that limits the growth of the sport. Work out deals and do the work of finding critical race HD video documentation. Is it really possible there is no HD video of El G’s mile record or Ngeny’s 2 mile records? I digress.

I could go on and on about how our sport does not promote its best assets and how even the leaders of the sport are clueless. What a damned shame. It’s a great sport but it’s difficult to blaze new trails without vision.

I meant, I jumped on in 2001, 20 years ago.

We can all act like it’s a LetsRun thing but real life people caring what the internet says are the problem. IMO.

Here's a weird one...

I was a redshirt freshman at UC Davis in 2000 and remember finding letsrun. Back then your IP address was publicly attached to your posts and the network Davis used handed out public IP addresses to dorm rooms. So after some regular posting I started to get trolled by an upperclassman teammate that worked in the IT dept on campus who knew exactly who I was because the IP address and I lived in that dorm room. He started sending weird emails to my ucdavis.edu address about violating ResNet policy (the network back then), etc. Got me super paranoid for a while before he admitted what he did, lol.

VIPAM, Bruce Hyde, Tinman, a guy from NY? Todd Reeser?, I recall someone saying he could be on epo, who knows, he ran a really fast 20k, made me start thinking about drugs in running. Jason Mayeroff doing 2k repeats and following his training. Some kind of devils drink cola he was pushing? The guy from California that raced in surf shorts and did push ups at the end of a half and ended up getting busted for epo?

How can this be five pages without any mention of kemibe or brutal?

Eddy Lee trying to go sub 4 in the 1500....

I've posted as various handles since 2005. When I started posting, letsrun was the number 2 messageboard for actual discussion, with dyestat being more active. Though letsrun was a about equal place to talk about college meets and pro meets in progress, just not as good for discussing training at the time. Despite dyestat's high school focus, there were more serious college runners there than on letsrun and this continued until 2008ish. Letsrun had a pro and elite focus though and its quality at covering these was the same as today on the front page.

Specifically letsrun

-someone posted a novel about a guy from Ireland who took on the world's elite runners, it was quite good

- there was less politics and more off running topics on other subjects. It was widely known the political threads were filled with nuts and they were ignored by serious runners, maybe some posted in them under other handles

- funny threads were more frequent

- quality training advice from dyestat was usually parroted here eventually

- not every third runner made videos and social media photo gallerys of their running experience. Stuff like that was a real treat when it was posted.