About time for another thought or two from me as Rob supporters seem to be a bit thin on the ground here at the moment. I have a feeling this might be a bit long so apologies in advance, but if it is a problem maybe just read a sentence at a time and intersperse it with reading all the other comments attacking him. Alternatively just ignore it and move on.
The situation as I see it is this:
A guy decided to give the Transcon record a go and set off a few weeks ago. Some video was produced showing no runner by the RV and it all blew up, the immediate assumption being that he had gone all that way to sit in an RV and pretend he was doing it and in the meantime pull off the greatest endurance con in history (aside form Yiannis's first Spartathlon, oh no wait..) Since then everything has been scrutinised in depth with various oddities arising.
- Rob won't release his gps data - well as far as I know he hasn't claimed to have beaten the record yet, so not sure why that is a problem.
- But if he releases it at the end it might have been doctored - google is your friend. It doesn't take much to detect doctored Strava data and Tomtom even harder to fake. I'm sure there will be a queue of LRC members happy to oblige on the technical side there.
- But he has lied about stuff before so he must be lying now, like that bronze medal in triathlon in 2004. Oh someone's found something on a 2004 forum putting Rob in 3rd place in those championships - yeah but it's on a forum so you can't trust that (yes, someone actually said that)
- Well what about his PRs - no way he's done that. Well recently reported running 5:47 mile by a well respected figure, and that after running best part of 2000 miles (even if you exclude the hours sitting in a jacuzzi in the RV) So if he maintained that pace it would give him a sub 36minute 10k. Maybe a little less inconceivable that at some point in his past, maybe ten years ago, training for that distance he might have hit 5 minutes under that. I'm sure he can let us know, but maybe after finishing this thing.
- Yeah, but his claims for his first three marathons are unbelievable. Meaning I couldn't do that and no one I know could. But lets say 99.999% of people couldn't but the 0.001%, by some evolutionary hiccup, do have that capability. That would mean in the UK 600 people could. Maybe one of them went out and found they had an unusual capacity for running and recovery and decided to just keep going for the rest of the year covering 373 marathons and ultras in that time.
- Well if he made up all this stuff, he probably made up other stuff like being in the army. Let's check that. Oh, he was and he was in the triathlon team. Oh forget that.
- Look his charity page here says he raised £0. oh but this justgiving one says over £60,000. Better investigate the charity. Bound to be fake.
- I know let's send over some of our most respected (OK some of the younger LRC members are catching up here) running figures to catch him out. They arrive and report a change of perspective, noting that he is a genuinely nice guy (sorry, I know character references have no bearing on this, although character assassinations seemingly do) and that comparing him to Steve Warshawer. As predicted, comments about age and beards appeared though I hadn't guessed the smoking ones. They also say there are questions yet to answer, which means they are yet to be answered not that they can't.
- What about his other records, the one where he beat Dean Karnazes's longest distance without sleep? All fake. So I and others crop up to vouch for that and posted my strava link for the 60 miles I ran with him through the night to 350 miles when I handed over to Kev (first and only time I've met him but feeling some kind of kinship now!) for another 23. I missed the protocol about not revealing your identity on this forum so have been googled and then had my handle used to post false messages. Changed my handle, thought I had registered it but hadn't so had impersonators again. Registered new one but have still had someone using the new one. Isn't that the point of registering it? Ah well. Just ignore anything from arealpersson that doesn't say registered
- But he's a narcissist and just says he's doing it for the kids to impress people. Aren't we all a bit narcissistic though? I mean I've managed to mention my 17 day 52 mile-a-day challenge at least twice on here (make that three times) under the guise of it meaning I am able to believe what he is doing but really just because I want people to like me. I even managed to exaggerate the amount of money I raised for charidee by accidentally converting pounds to dollars twice. Surprised I wasn't picked up on that but, sadly this isn't all about me. Funnily enough the comment that I remember most from my run was some 14 year old who said he was inspired following my strava feed and had started to train to run a marathon when he was 18. So at least I can convince myself I really was doing it for the kids. But isn't there even something a bit narcissistic about posting witty messages on a forum board anyway. Granted it's slightly diminshed by the fact that no one knows who you are but I'm sure I Like Running And Riding In RVs gets some sort of satisfaction knowing that their cutting sarcastic comments are getting Beavis and Butthead snorting across the land.
Anyway what all this boils down to is we won't know for sure if he has done this or not until he shows us the gps data at the end of the run( and please let's not have the watch swapping theories when that happens. Just remember this kicked off because there was no runner near the RV, not even his mate). So we are really spending a lot of time discussing this before there is much to discuss. If I have got my pacing right, this thread should have reached 300 pages by the time he gets to Time Square, factoring in a surge of interest toward the end. That's a lot of hours that would have all been out doing what we do best - running instead of cooking up conspiracy theories.
And by the way, those moon landing photos ARE fake. I blew them up on my computer and can see the joins.