Another run across America underway - is it legit? Boots currently on the ground

Regardless of whether you're with Will C and his HR data scrutiny or not with him, the behavior of Goodge and his crew to Will C last week was appalling - just being constantly abusive rather than engaging even generates more suspicion about this record attempt.

Yes, it makes no sense really. If you get Will C to check your attempt, it's almost a gold seal of approval. It makes a better story to be friendly and take advantage of him making the effort to come and check.

I've recently had experience of questioning something I thought was dodgy in my life and got huge push back from the people involved, discrediting me, not wanting to talk about it and appearing to cover up stuff to silence me. It's not a good look, it just made me dig deeper and I ended up finding something bigger than I originally thought.

I am pretty sure it's a scam trying to sell rebranded binaural beats. Do they work? Maybe.
Is the effect significant? No.

People seem to keep missing that this is not going to be a world record or even fastest Englishman’s transcon. John Lees, a GB team race walker, walked across in less than 54 days in 1972.

CorrectThe world record is of course Pete Kostelnicks sub-43 days, which has never been in jeopardy.
The record for fastestest "Englishman", which isn't an actual record at all but a footnote somewhere appears to be John Lees sub-54 set in 1975.
The 64 days splashed on the side of the support van is in reference to Bruce Tullohs crossing in 1969 although I'm not sure why.

This is also why no one is wasting time "investigating". No one cares.

new Facebook post from willvic. it’s not his official report though.

I think everyone involved in this is a little crazy. I also think Goodge is not doing the miles as claimed.

still no definitive proof but it doesn’t pass the sniff test.

lets see what Wednesday brings.

new post on fb group: "
Hi all,
An update from me, now safely back in the UK. With great regret WG’s heart rates have returned to their physiologically impossible levels of before my visit. This all appears like a child’s game.
In short, his heart rates for the challenge look like this:
Day 1: His HR is always fine on day 1 of these challenges. Never a blemish.
Days 2-12 his heart crashes to circa 110s. At which point I stringently contact WG and crew and told them to show me a pulse.
Day 13: HR 138 – the rocket works.
Days 14-16 things markedly tail off again.
Day 17 - in light of my saying that I’ll report them to the authorities if they don’t behave, WG has his worst day of the challenge with just 76k at a pace of 8:34. His HR of 130 is clean though, considering the weak pace.
Things tail off again, as the pace rockets to 7:45 but at a slower heart rate of 126.
His HR for my 6 day visit are fine: 143, 137, 135, 119 [raining: walked the entire day, data clean], 129, 126 [another day of walking due to rain].
But then on day 28 after my confirmed departure: the pace rockets to a searing world class level of 7:06 but at an HR of just 119 – 7bpm quicker than when he walked the entire day before for 16kms less. And he follows up with a 120 yesterday, with his rate twice crashing.
------------------------
Another reason for my visit was to see how he was achieving these amazing second half of days. And quite frankly, he wasn’t. He walked some 90% of the second half of days that I was there, as evidenced by his splits for each half of distance – discounting the Nucalm nap of course:
The two days before I arrived saw two spectacular negative splits:
5:54 and 5:40
6:00 and 5:52
These negative splits are incredibly rare in running and all but unseen in multiday, and he is peeling two off back to back.
But when I arrived, to see how in the world he’s speeding up of a day, here are his splits:
5:09 and 5:47
4:53 and 5:59
4:54 and 5:44
5:22 and 5:33 [rain, straight walk, still a slow down]
5:32 and 6:10
5:00 and 5:37 [more rain and straight walking]
5:12 and 6:13 [day that I leave for UK]
As can be seen, these figures show someone fading throughout the day in a 100% pure manner than what one would expect on a multiday, with no chance of an even or negative split.
Let’s take a Jogle split for Lawson and Molinaro [both day 6]:
7:19 and 7:49
7:04 and 7:38
Both showing the perfect natural fade that Goodge also does under observation.
But then, after my departure, it’s happy hour, and straight back to negative splitting:
5:18 and 5:10.
Clearly part one was a major struggle, but then a big pick up in pace over part two as his heart dropped to a completely implausible range of 88-112 for the last 20 miles, having been at 116-151 for miles 2-29.
-----------------------
The abuse to me from WG and crew is as extreme as it gets. Balenger screamed at me multiple times on camera that I only care about this because I, “have a hard-on for a dead man,” which is one of the most unsettling and offensive insults I’ve ever heard.
Goodge shouted at me to go and do something to my wife. I didn’t catch what, but Mark who was there, said to him: “no Will, you mustn’t, you mustn’t.”
Unfortunately, I had to call off my observation of WG short by around 1.5 days, because on day 26 he became unhinged and started to threaten me physically. At one stage he suddenly marched straight out in front of my car forcing me to a sudden stop and then came and lurched for the driver’s door handle. Fortunately the car had an autolock on it.
A little later I saw him pick up a dark object from the grass verge which looked like a rock and concerned he could hurl it at the car, I threw it into reverse and gave him a wide berth for the next four hours. But when I did risk a drive by, he whirled around and still carrying the rock hurled it at the car from point blank range, where it made a loud crack on the side. Mark and James witnessed this.
I then imposed a 250 metre radius around him for my safety, but he would still scream the worst possible abuse at me from afar, pictured, when all I was doing was acting as a witness and observer to an attempt on a national record that had stood for 54 years.
Their youtube video for this week attempts to paint me in the worst possible light, but fortunately people are seeing through it. The crew were saying I’m mad for running up and down the course, when all I was doing was putting in 30-40 miles worth of training whilst waiting for WG to appear, as I’d tend to drive 3 miles ahead and wait.
The “major development” I have spoken of continues to grow in stature and has now become acute. I shall publicly release it here, at noon UK time, on Wednesday 3 May. I am just tying up its research.
My full report will follow in due course, but I need to see what the response is to the development, and it may just be better to let the run play out in full as the report’s stats would become dated the moment they landed.
Until Weds,
Will",

full report will be released on 3rd of may noon UK time.
Will C also accuses Will G of throwing rock at his car?

This doesn’t look good folks. Praying for everyone involved.

Incredibly bad play by Goodge's team.

This whole run is suspect now even without any additional data. Nobody legitimately acts like this when being observed by a monitor that they allegedly welcomed on social media. The negative splits coinciding with no monitoring are icing on the cake.

One thing that I'll give Willvlc credit for is that he would be an excellent stripper because he knows exactly how to tease and tease without giving it all away.

And from his latest Facebook post, looks like the report is indeed all about heart rate. That's going to be disappointing.

It's not "all about heart rate". It's about the unheard-of pacing--the negative splits mentioned above--COUPLED with absurdly low heart rate. There is also a new set of data points: the way that Goodge's data was consistently normal looking when Willvic was present, and back to the impossible pattern whenever he wasn't.

The abusive attitude toward Willvic is also really damning, seems to me. Anyone doing a legit run would welcome the publicity. Anyone not cheating would welcome the interest and the independent validation of their results.

Day 28 is a joke, as much as I have tried to justify the numbers, I just cannot see how the data for this day is reasonable. Day 29 is not any better.

I reluctantly watched one of Goodge's tacky videos. Couldn't help noticing that he does a lot of the running/walking with his face, head and neck almost completely covered. Including wearing shades. Even when it's warm and he's wearing nothing else but shorts and shoes.
Maybe the "major development" is that Cockerell or someone else has evidence that it's not always Goodge doing the running. Maybe it wasn't even Goodge throwing rocks.
I was on the fence with this one. Glad Cockerell went to observe because wrist HR data alone will never be convincing enough. I'm now 90% that this crossing isn't being conducted in an honest manner.

What kind of legitimate run results in the runner throwing rocks at observers? Are you serious?

Day 28 makes zero sense to me as well, especially when you contrast that with the days that Will C. observed.

Good post. I think the way we crack this case is to come up with scenarios like this of HOW he might be cheating. Head covering of 3 guys all about the same build is one way.

One would think that the team would have welcomed Willvic to watch how he can negative split while keeping his HR at walking paces. But it looks like he got the opposite. He got brutal days of running with clean heart rates where the team and runner got angry. This is a big tell.

Where is the unheard of pacing? Go and check out Kostrknick or Lawson on their multidays. They’d leave him for dust. Also don’t just take Will’s word for it. Negative splits are not at all uncommon in multidays. Personally I find the response and behaviour of WG and his crew far more suggestive of dodginess than anything the data has thrown up so far.

Where is Laz? Has anyone contacted him about this? I would assume he would fly out there to observe while giving us some of the topical haiku poetry he became famous for during the Rob Young saga.

The kind where the runner already has enough stress pushing his limits from slowly plodding across the width of America with an incessantly annoying British asylum patient calling him a fraud every hour?