Ivo’s running has come up a few times on this message board over the past few years, usually in threads discussing ultra results where a poster will make a joke about Ivo being able to beat Walmsley or Kilian and linking to one of his many 26+ mile, 6:15ish paced “easy” runs. As a result, I followed his Strava—which has since been made private—and looked into his races a few years ago and found a lot of what superawesomness outlined on the first page and in their Google doc:
-Multiple 17+ minute road 5ks with full GPS data, often accompanied with excuses as to
why he ran so slowly. No 5ks under 17 minutes.
-Tons of seemingly heroic training runs—things like routinely running 20ish miles under 6:30 pace. Looking closer at these sessions, they would almost always be a little questionable having: A) significant differences between the moving time and overall elapsed time, B) generally funky GPS data, C) Strava segment paces that didn’t line up with the overall pace of the run, or D) some combination of all three issues. A lot of these training runs would be on a 400m outdoor track, around a small loop in a park, or out and back on a bike path—they’d almost never be on a big loop that could be mapped out accurately. In a previous thread that has since been deleted, a poster accused Ivo of using an improperly calibrated foot pod to make it appear that he was running faster than he actually was.
-Strange, incomplete, or no GPS data for almost all marathons that he has run (superawesomness does a great job of outlining this in their Google doc). For the few marathons he has full GPS data for, they are in the 2:40s, which lines up well with the 17+ minute 5ks, particularly considering his age and background.
-No GPS data for any of his Bethel Hill Moonlight Boogie 50-milers, which is the only 50-mile race that he has done. He always had a weird excuse as to why his watch didn’t work, despite uploading runs immediately before on the course. In 2021, he claimed his inconsistent pacing at the race was due to multiple bathroom pitstops, and said that he shouldn’t have carried any wipes with him in order to not give himself the option to stop. Race photos / video show that he definitely was not carrying wipes with him. In 2019, he uploaded this photo of his watch as proof he ran the entire 50 miles: https://imgur.com/a/BpLUlxD. This photo has always looked heavily doctored to me and there are a few other instances of him uploading blurry / badly photoshopped pictures of his watch as proof over the years.
I wasn’t aware of him cheating / getting removed from the virtual Speed Loop mile in Raleigh until this thread, but it tracks with what I observed during 2020 when he posted a lot of suspect time trial results with strange GPS data (usually on one particular bike path). Since relocating from North Carolina to Colorado in recent years, his Strava has continued to be pretty weird. He implies that he’s a sponsored runner and makes vague references to training with a group of professionals who do not seem to have consistent names, online presences, or any verifiable race results. At one point he said that he ran a 10-mile time trial with this group and their coach did not tell them the length of the time trial until there was a mile to go—this all seems incredibly implausible and, predictably, there was never any GPS data to go with any of this. He’s claimed that it would be easy for him to get the win at the JFK 50-miler, but is yet to race it and I would be stunned if he actually shows up to the 100k World Championships in August. Taking all this together, I think Ivo is a good runner—it seems likely he’s a 17-minute / 2:40 marathon master’s runner—but he definitely is not an elite ultrarunner and his Moonlight Boogie times should be removed from any all-time lists.