Pam Reed completes 300 mile run

I'll stand. Why don't you try and prove me wrong, wanker.

Perhaps you didn't notice that the Runner's World article you linked to was from 1998. I would get on me about out of date info. Retard.

This board never ceases to amaze me. It really doesn't matter what feat some crazed but basically well-intentioned runner manages to accomplish: vipers dripping with negative energy will find a way not merely of subtly denigrating it, but of proving to you in five or six dimensions that the "feat" is in fact a miserable failure and should be rewarded by insult, slander, castigation, castration, hysterectomy, and banishment from the Kingdom of God.

Dang. Why should we make a fetish of "attention," anyway? I thought we were serious runners here, and not focused on the foolish, ill-informed responses of a fickle public that doesn't really know our sport anyway. 2:10 marathoners have achieved something remarkable; if they're capable of taking satisfaction in their achievement--rather than, for example, bemoaning the fact that 2:10 isn't 2:04:30--then what some beautiful kooky female runner does in the desert should mean nothing. Or rather, it should only inspire.

I'm glad I live in a country that produces BOTH the 300 mile kook and the 2:10 kook. We're all crazy; believe it or not, the general public places us all more or less in the same camp--and in THIS case the general public is wiser than some....ah.....vipers.

You can go back to your other running site. A 2:10 marathoner is not a kook...why would you even compare a fast marathoner with a 3.75 mph ultra runner? You are so disrespectful.

Good for Pam though, the lady sure knows how to market herself. Her feat is so amazing.

Dude:

I hate to tell you this, but 2:10 marathoners ARE kooks--at least in the eyes of most "ordinary" Americans. Anybody who runs 100-130 miles a week for weeks on end, in all weathers, is a bit of a kook. A Buffalo. A tool. A machine. "Elite athlete" is true enough as it goes--but it misses the obsessional madness that any elite runner, from Dave Bedford on down, would admit to being driven by. All truly serious, truly long-distance runners are kooks.

In a good way, of course. That's my point. It's a wonderful madness--as long as it doesn't lead one set of kooks to start working as hard as they possibly can to differentiate themselves from others sets of kooks. Freud called this "the narcissism of minor difference."

I'm not disrespectful. I'm telling the truth. Please take the red pill and wake up.

damn good posts KudzuRunner.

KudzuRunner wrote:

Dude:

I hate to tell you this, but 2:10 marathoners ARE kooks--at least in the eyes of most "ordinary" Americans. Anybody who runs 100-130 miles a week for weeks on end, in all weathers, is a bit of a kook. A Buffalo. A tool. A machine. "Elite athlete" is true enough as it goes--but it misses the obsessional madness that any elite runner, from Dave Bedford on down, would admit to being driven by. All truly serious, truly long-distance runners are kooks.

In a good way, of course. That's my point. It's a wonderful madness--as long as it doesn't lead one set of kooks to start working as hard as they possibly can to differentiate themselves from others sets of kooks. Freud called this "the narcissism of minor difference."

I'm not disrespectful. I'm telling the truth. Please take the red pill and wake up.

2:10 guys aren't kooks and most aren't attention whores either.

these 300 mile kooks are the same people who dropped their engineering majors b/c it was too diffuclt, and lobbied the school to create a new major for themselves--things like "women's studies" or "american studies" in which they could "succeed."

o.k nobby here goes...

Those arrs bias numbers have a date for a reason.. Those bias numbers can fluctuate at any given year. That's why they have dates moron! The bias numbers are not just based on the course but the conditions of the course at the time it was raced. The conditions can be the actual course itself i.e the grade and surface. Other conditions such as the wind, heat, rain and cold can play a factor... You want me to continue..? Also what comes into play are the individual performances of each person who has run other marathon courses. These differences are also factored in determining bias number...

So what you did was wrong and illegal. I'm sure the ARRS would agree with me...

Now stay in that hole you loser! (another dumb brit)

yeah whatever kevin...

Watching Jay Leno tonight with this guy on about Google whacking. Trying to find one and entered Homophobic ultramarthon in the search engine and got back to the Pam Reed story. Too bad it found 15 pages so this does not count.

Yeah, I\'d like you to continue.

Firstly I\'d like you to expound upon the scientific method which Runner\'s World used in 1998 to produce their numbers? (if I recall correctly the article was based on a Runer\'s World poll, sounds really scientific to me, I wonder how they weighted for the Clydesdale division? What about the Gallowalkers who responded to the poll?).

After all, you linked to their article, so you must think that their method is superior to AARS.

Secondly, why don\'t you tell us how the St. George course has changed in the last 5 years? Have you looked at a map of the area? 1 road. If they changed the course the runners would be in the desert.

OK - Average temp for St. George UT in Oct:

1996 75 °F

1997 76 °F

1998 73 °F

1999 82 °F

2000 74 °F

2001 81 °F

2002 75 °F

2003 84 °F

2004 73 °F

Variation 11 °F

Average precipitation in Oct:

1996 0.02 in.

1997 0.02 in.

1998 0.13 in.

1999 0.00 in.

2000 0.08 in.

2001 0.10 in.

2002 0.14 in.

2003 0.00 in.

2004 0.12 in.

Variation 0.14 in.

Average Wind Speed in Oct:

1996 4 mph

1997 5 mph

1998 4 mph

1999 4 mph

2000 3 mph

2001 4 mph

2002 4 mph

2003 4 mph

2004 5 mph

Variation 2 mph

Not seeing a lot there to change the bias number.

That factor should mean that Boston\'s bias is smaller than St. George\'s for 2 reasons:

1) There are far more professional/dedicated runners at Boston than at St. George. A professional should be able to reproduce his/her form with more consistency than the average hobby jogger.

2) Boston has qualifying standards which should eliminate undertrained first timers, etc.

For these reasons Boston\'s bias should be smaller (closer to zero) than St. George\'s. But it isn\'t.

Finally:

Show me how? Which specific laws? I\'ve said it before and I\'ll say it again, you are a pompous git. Why don\'t you go get a clue you retarded cracker?

So.....let me see if I understand your deep point here. You are saying:

ALL runners are crazy (ok, but crazy in a "good" way).

ummm.....ok, I suppose that's possible, if you want to define crazy in such a broad way. Why not just go all the way and say "all athletes are crazy," or "all PEOPLE are crazy." Hey, NOW we're getting somewhere..........which is...... NOWHERE. What was your point again?

Look, all kidding aside, I do see what you are trying to say, which is: 'other people think the rest of us runners are crazy, so it seems absurd that we would bash "more extreme" runners than ourselves as crazy." We are doing to them, what the non-running public does to us. OK, ok, I see that point......UP to a point.

BUT.......HERE is where you are wrong: I concur that we runners ARE a bit crazy and nuts in a way, sure, we definitely are. SO......if WE already certified whacky runners are saying another runner is nuts, and that they are taking things so far they have lost sight of the sport itself......THEN...... it is probably TRUE. Get it?? We KNOW crazy when we see it. We've experienced it. It would be like Keith Richards in his heyday saying to another drug-using partier: "whoa......that's TOO MANY drugs man.....don't take that many. THAT's NUTS. You are missing the point when you go THAT FAR. " If Keith Richards says that to me, I listen. Really, that's the TRUTH.

Running is about speed, grace, competition, endurance, and so much more. It is not JUST about endurance, ie, a death march stay-awake-marathon to nowhere, against no one, where you are NOT EVEN RUNNING 1/2 the time.

You also had this to say:

HUH???? Don't you GET IT??? This is EXACTLY what Pam Reed is doing!!! She is a kook "who is working as hard as (she) possibly can to differentiate (herself) from others sets of kooks." HA HA! You hit the nail on the head on one of the reasons we are bashing her, and you meant to offer that in her defense. I think you were too impressed with yourself that you were quoting Freud to stop and think about the meaning of what you were writing.

Pam Reed CAN'T BEAT ALL THE OTHER "KOOKS" IN THE ACCEPTED, COMPETITIVE KOOKY RACES. In fact, she is not special at all in these other races. So what does she(and so many other ultra-runners) do??? She kills herself completing some absurd walk-run sleep deprivation contest, where she can get attention, feel special, and separate herself from the pack. Now we can argue all day long (which we already have), on whether or not her feat was impressive or not, but ONE THING IS FOR SURE: she did it in order to DIFFERENTIATE herself rom the other kooky runners, something she was UNABLE TO ACCOMPLISH in more competitive, more regulated, more quality-laden contests.

So if you feel strongly about your last quote, you might to re-think your passionate defense of Pam Reed.

[quote]Sir Lance-alot wrote:

Pam Reed CAN'T BEAT ALL THE OTHER "KOOKS" IN THE ACCEPTED, COMPETITIVE KOOKY RACES. In fact, she is not special at all in these other races. So what does she(and so many other ultra-runners) do??? She kills herself completing some absurd walk-run sleep deprivation contest, where she can get attention, feel special, and separate herself from the pack. Now we can argue all day long (which we already have), on whether or not her feat was impressive or not, but ONE THING IS FOR SURE: she did it in order to DIFFERENTIATE herself rom the other kooky runners, something she was UNABLE TO ACCOMPLISH in more competitive, more regulated, more quality-laden contests.

You've completely missed my point. There's a difference between practice and ideology. I have no doubt that Pam Reed--along with 99% of highly competitive runners--was trying to distinguish herself from the rest of the pack by excelling at her chosen form of extreme running. (I consider marathoning, ultramarathoning, and Reed's ultra-ultramarathoning, as related, although not identical, versions of extreme running.) Distinguishing yourself and differentiating yourself--in the sense you're using the word "differentiating"--aren't the same thing. Reed, for her own plainly obsessional reasons, was trying to say to her fellow ultra-ultras, "Hey, look what I did." That doesn't make her different from them--i.e., it doesn't differentiate her from them--and it certainly doesn't make her different from the 2:10 marathoners: if anything, it's an implicit plea for their respect. She ran/walked roughly 11 back-to-back marathons in 80 hours. I think that's pretty cool, frankly--and pretty wacky. In a good sense. Reed is quite a bit more kooky than I am. I run 15 miles every Sunday in about two hours. That's plenty extreme enough for me---and a big kooky, as a regular Sunday ritual. To run that much and more every day of the week, as 2:10 marathoners do--well, I appreciate the obsessional energy, since I have some small part of it. But that sort of running, like Reed's, is too extreme for me. To each his own. From my perspective--a 45mi/wk runner--both Reed and the 2:10 marathoners are...well...a little kooky, and in roughly the same direction.

From the perspective of ordinary, non-runner Americans, the distinction between Reed's sort of extreme running and the 2:10 marathoning sort of extreme running is even less apparent than it is to me. They're all obsessive runners.

The narcissism of minor difference is when somebody comes along--you, for example--and works really, really hard to prove that 1) the 2:10 marathoners are culture heroes and 2) that Reed is the antichrist. All subcultures breed gatekeepers of this sort; among confederate reenactors, for example, the 2:10 marathoners are the equivalent of "hardcores" and Reed, from your perspective, is a "farb." (See Tony Horwitz, CONFEDERATES IN THE ATTIC.) Of course, from the subcultural perspective of the ultra-ultra folks, the 2:10 marathoners are the farbs and Reed is a hardcore.

My point is that all runners who feel this need to parse our species into hardcores and farbs are guilty of engaging in the narcissim of minor difference. If the differences feel huge to you, rather than minor: well, as I said, you need to get out more and interact with nonrunners. Or you need to get just a little more compassionate towards your fellow obsessives (i.e., Reed), rather than casting stones.

According to the LSD people, shouldn't she be able compete with Paula in the marathon?