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

I believe your theory a lot more than anything Will C has made up.

Hold on, I just had a big breakthrough and I think I know what is going on with the heart rates. I'll prepare a report to be released in a few days.

I think it is just too easy to claim optical HR is rubbish. I wore chest straps with various Garmins for 10 years before I had ones with optical HR and so when I had my first optical HR on a Forerunner 735XT, I ran with it and my previous Forerunner and the chest strap until I was satisfied with the performance. Since then I have had optical with Forerunner 645, Forerunner 245 and a Fenix 6 Pro. You know instantly after a run when the HR data is wrong and this has only happened for me with the 245 after a firmware update after which I never trusted the 245 HR data again.

DC Rainmaker should be consulted if people want serious answers to this issue.

Why is Pete Kostelnik sullying his good name by being so weirdly in favour of a clear cheat?

The guy is as crooked as the (Strava) day is long.

Not weirdly in favor of any cheat, just not a fan of WillC's manner of judging a run across America as only based on heart rate data, as opposed to multi-factor location/GPS data. I've placed plenty of issues with this run, so don't misspell my name or misspell my intent.

that data is getting stranger. At about mile 15 his Heart rate falls off the cliff. For the rest of the day he is doing 10:30 pace at about 110 heart rate. Weird!

My hypothesis is that a "big tech fail" occurs as a result of data that is corrupted somewhere between the device(s) and Strava. I believe this only occurs on these high profile events because it is the only time WG and RB are wearing two devices (not confirmed but who wears two devices for training runs?). A whoop and Garmin/coros. The sensor tech between whoop and coros / Garmin is different. The sync process, algorithms for smoothing and apps are different between whoop and Garmin/coros. Only garmin / coros uploads to Strava. Whoop is a totally seperate platform. A comparison of whoop to Strava/garmin/coros would likely make the issue obvious. I call this scenario "big tech fail" vs "tech fail" (aka hairy arms, sunscreen, sensor not tight, etc). HR is also one of these "configurable" types of data elements meaning it can be flagged on and off because of data privacy regs. I'm not sure that it isn't fed from something like apple health. These guys always have phones with them.

agree DC rainmaker would be a subject matter expert on this.

also - whoop has published case studies of WG MdS and 48/30 ( Google WG whoop) and the conclusion they draw is that the guy totally wastes himself during the day but is able to recover sufficiently to waste himself the next day.
full disclosure : I don't know or follow these guys on team Goodge. I do have a tech background.

Hello. Disappointingly I am new to this thread, but I checked a Strava upload from today and saw a string of miles at < 100 HR.

Could someone please catch me up?

Hi Mr. Kostelnak. You advise above you’ve “placed plenty of issues with this run”. Can you list what those issues are?

Hi boogerjohnsin, you seem to be all over this thread trolling so I’ll leave it to you to go backwards to find my concerns. I hope you enjoy whatever it is you’ve been trolling for. I came on here to try to maintain some integrity, but it seems like this is just a message board to take down someone who is hijacking/marketing the ultrarunning spotlight, so I’ll now disengage with no problem

I disagree. It's not the record, it's the non-trivial amount of money he's raising for expenses, salaries and charity. If the event is not on the up and up and someone feels that the amount of charity money is more important than the integrity of the event, that's fair enough. I disagree, but not that concerned.

For the 8th billion time, it's not the abnormalities or the possible spikes - it's that this only happens in certain circumstances. I don't know if this is 100% incriminating, but it certainly makes one ponder the authenticity. If there's a good answer, I'll be the first to apologize for being a skeptic.

I think the interesting phenomenon here is how they can seemingly produce cleaner data when under pressure: if WG and RB have a quirk in how they perform these runs then either it's affected by this (for whatever reason), or it's one heck of a coincidence.

Interestingly, had an unclean day under Will C's supervision (day 26), and unclean periods on other days he was there. He suggests (a few pages back) this may be a deliberate ploy, and points to the relative lack of unclean data when supervising (or following demands for cleaner data) vs not. It is v. odd that the data would be drastically altered by his appearance.

Hi Pete, firstly apologies for misspelling your name, I had a few shandies last night.

Secondly - and I mean this sincerely - I’m actually not aware of any issues you’ve had with WG’s run. Weren’t you an advocate for his efforts much earlier in this thread?

Pete was questioning the start and end points of the run as they didn't match up on one of the days and perhaps the gps tracker being in the van. When Pete did his he was carrying the gps tracker I believe. My thoughts are that the tech companies could shed some light on this. I don't think anyone in this thread has the technical knowledge to opine on the likelihood of the weird data being due to likely tech fails or not. (Yes I understand the pattern). But the pattern could be due to something that is causing a tech fail during these events, some common thing that the team only does during event days. I don't think this is out of the question; it would make sense for the team to change how they prepare/run for events versus casual runs. The data is defo weird though, i've glanced at a couple and it would be good if WG and his team could address it. I suspect there's probably some quite simple explanation.

He has been all the way through. Just a couple of little issues regarding start and end points of his 'stages'.

No idea why though. I can only imagine the people who are consistently defending this obvious fraud are somehow linked/involved with the charade.