This is a slight exaggeration but not by much. Like he never broke a two minute 800 time, which was unusual for a guy who could run a 4:20 mile.
This looks like so much fun to try. Would be a unlucky to wait in line for this thing and then the number #2 guy in the world gets on and uses it for 2 hours before falling off at the last 30 seconds
The video says the pace is 200 meters every 34 seconds, so I doubt I could do this for more than a minute. Like keed said a significant amount of people couldn’t run that fast for any length of time, and even among marathon expo attendees people were immediately eating shit.
track at the gym is 25 laps per mile, so this is a shade over 11 seconds per lap. i track every 5 laps, so like 55.4 seconds for 5 laps. gonna do this in a couple hours. it’ll be a little slower bc while the corners of the track are raised, whenever i’m sprinting like 80% i still have to stutter-step/slow down at both ends (it’s shaped to be above a basketball court).
gonna shoot for a quarter mile, so 6.25 laps in under 69 seconds.
again, i hate jogging. i do usually mix in a 80-90% sprint lap 5x a mile or so though. i know i can run this fast, and i know it’s not a sprint so i should be able to last that long. we shall see.
Is this for real? The track is ~70 yards total? That sounds absolutely miserable.
Yeah ours is 1/16 mile and it still feels like you’re on a curve so often that you’d wind up with imbalances between your legs if you ran too far (our gym switches up the direction every other day, presumably for this very reason…of course every single day there’s at least one oblivious person ignoring the arrows and going against traffic).
tried twice, high 12 seconds and low 12 seconds. you’re right it’s too small, i’m only at like 90% sprint like, 40% of the time 
between the 2-3 steps slowing down into the curve, the stutter-steps in between curves and then speeding up every time, i’d have to just not GAF about falling or tripping or whatever.
for $100 i’d get a sub 11-second lap lol.
besides, seeing the pace of those people on the treadmill, it’s not whether or not i could do it, it’s just how long.
those edges of the curves are fucking amazing for calf raises tho. i went from like 3” short of touching the rim over the winter to touching it a month or so ago. def from calf-raises/squats/leg presses/jump rope.
Summary:
32 year old goes from 0 running and minimal overall activity as of April 2023 to a sub 20 minute 5k.
Baseline of 32:33 at the beginning to 19:44 at the end of 3 months. That seems like completely impossible bullshit to me, but there are people in the thread taking it seriously. Does anyone here believe this story?
Top reply in the thread:
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Losing 18 pounds in 3 months from a starting weight of 160 with 20 body fat is just insane.
edit - doing the math he lost 10 pounds of fat and 8 pounds of muscle, bone, etc. that can’t be healthy.
Doing something like keto, and very generously cherry-picking the time to take a starting weigh-in, might make it more plausible. But yeah it’s farfetched.
Edit to respond to your edit…the 8 lb of “LBM” could have been water in this case if it were in fact a low carb thing. Body just whooshes out fluid when starting keto.
100%
No clue on the validity but why does he mention the shoes he was using during the runs? One of the comments also mentions them, are there some special cheat code running shoes?
if the whole story is: 32yo 160lb dude has been sedentary for seven years and has never really been athletic before, and he ran an all-out baseline 5K at 10:30/mile pace, then twelve weeks later ran a 5K at 6:20/mile pace while dropping 1.5 pounds/week, and those are all the essential facts, then no just no
I didn’t read the reddit thread so a little unclear if he claims he went from 178 to 160 or from 160 to 142, but it doesn’t matter much because even leaving the weight out it’s still bananas. Now if it turned out in high school he was a competitive cross-country skier or that he ran his sub-20 5K down the matterhorn or that he initially weighed himself while standing on neptune or any other kind of typical prop bet subterfuge then beats me, idk, people are weird and flex in weird ways.
one of the stupidest internet ideas that never goes away is: We are all fantastic athletes by nature and the only reason we all haven’t run 4:30 miles or dunked on an eleven-foot rim or killed a mammoth using nothing but our natural ape agility & ferocity & if necessary a fucking sabre from the sabertooth tiger that klungo strangled by the light of the fire mountain is because we’re just too busy out here eating pringles and procrastinating.
which of course is partly true. Most people would be way more athletic if their family’s lives depended on their athleticism. Take the 6:00 mile/225 bench/4x10 pullup hotstove pringleburner from last week. Imo the answer was that there is no one right answer for all individuals and it totally depends on a person’s genotype and phenotype.
But if we’re trying to answer it more generally for the set of all dudes then I thought about it the same way SK did: in my high school class of 500, of the 250 guys there were maybe two dozen who could go sub-6 in the mile, then maybe three dozen who could bench 225, and maybe a half-dozen who could have done the pullups thing. That said the pullups thing’s being so low is partly because nobody really cared about pullups, and also I think pullups are a little correlated with the mile time in that bodyweight lifts tend to be easier for lean dudes. For myself benching 225 was a billion times harder than the other two because every time I get to 215 my skeleton explodes. The one time I went all-in and got to 240 I blew out my shoulder, which could have just as easily been my wrist or elbow or bladder. I’m just not made to lift heavy weights. But a lot of other people are. And this variation has served our species tremendously well.
I also agreed with SK about the faster miles, in that for sure more than 10% of all human males are capable of a sub-6 mile. I wouldn’t want to guess a percentage because it evokes a world so different from our world that it’s pretty meaningless. I’d guess less than half of dudes though. And that the bell curve would really plunge as the times got faster (there’s a reason sub-6 is the bar bet standard). When SK said the thing about his own sub-5 mile time (which is an awesome time btw, as were some other people’s itt), that his 4:45 was an unremarkable time or a bad time or whatever, I mean absolutely, SK is right again in that it’s bad compared to the one quarter of one percent of people who are truly outstanding high school milers and that as a mile time it fucking SUCKS compared to Sebastian Coe or a ramjet missile, in their world 4:45s are rookie numbers, they’re idaho russet numbers, sub-4 guys are all about the japanese purples and french fingerlings, and EPO, and cocaine. But for real nobody is running sub-5 without a bunch of genetics in their favor. So when somebody in the sixth circle of hell i.e. a LetsRun forum says well actually 90% of dudes have the unlocked potential to run sub-5 mile while mentally bending a spoon then they’re either silly or wrong or cover your ears because the jack of spades is about to spit cider
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didn’t read the thread but the newer generation of carbon-plated shoes (e.g. vaporflys) are helping people to be way faster (typical estimates are 2-3%) and it’s for sure one part of the story of why a lot of times are dropping across distances.
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I skimmed the Reddit thread and based on some comments and his stats, the most likely answer is that he intentionally did a bad initial 5k (didn’t pace at all, so ran/walked and didn’t fully exert based on his average heart rate). If you assume his time from just one week later (27:00) was his true starting fitness level, it’s not that crazy.
Edit - it also looks like his fast times might have been cheating (doing short laps, cutting off like .2 miles).
Ok yeah it was Vaporfly that were specifially mentioned.
People just absolutely LOVE LOVE LOVE flexing about what they “accomplished” while lying about how they accomplished it to make it seem they achieved something hard with minimal effort. “That was easy, anyone can do it”.
The root reason why people do this? I’m not completely sure but id guess its some combination of:
Not wanting to give away an actual edge if one exists.
Make yourself look better by effectively putting others down. (you accomplished something they couldnt with ease).
Not wanting people to discredit your accomplishment because you used x or did y which made it easier to accomplish what you were trying to do.
Curious to know what others think about why people exhibit this type of behavior.
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#teampringlesandprocrastinate
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Guy doing legit sets of 5 X 407 lb dead’s in the gym.
Easily 100 lb more than I’ve seen anyone else do in my gym.
Ill get back to higher, but nice to see real lifting in a sea of mediocrity.
Sat waiting for the squat racks to open up.
2 people doing stupid hip thrusters. Someone else doing 40kg bench.
A lot more than I can lift too. A couple of the trainers in my gym are very strong. The trainer I used to work out with could deadlift over 500 lbs. He was a regular strong man competitor. Another trainer at my gym I’ve seen do at least 550. He used to be Canada’s national power lifting champion if his bio us accurate.