Ben Smith: The Real Marathon Man UK

Dunno, he could be genuine if he's running / walking them like Eddie Izzard did for his challenge.

I will post what I said in the Rob Young thread:

Dr. Obvious wrote:

robbiey wrote:

He seems a lot more professional that Rob, with even a shop:

https://www.facebook.com/the401challenge/shop?rid=640112516120618&rt=9http://www.the401challenge.co.uk/sponsors

Excellent find. This proves that this Ben Smith guy isn't doing it "for the kids". He's getting paid for it from sponsorship for his sob story and "charity work", just like our Rob Young. Did they both go to the same grifting seminar? Their similarities are striking. They could be twins.

It is clear that NONE of these "charity" runners are actually in it for "charity". They do it so they can get paid by signing up sponsors to their sob story. They are in it to make money for themselves. Not sure why the UK has so many of these runner scams.

401 marathons in 401 days wrote:

And, of course, the question must now be asked, has he got evidence to back up this incredible achievement?

Probably of the order of thousands of runners have run with him during his challenge and have the Facebook selfie and the Strava record to go with it. Yours truly included.

His times and pedigree are completely unremarkable. He doesn't particularly identify himself as a runner.

p.s. He didn't manage to do 401 consecutive days. He had a couple of weeks off due to back problems. Doctor's orders after a visit to A&E.

I want to see the cadence data from his GPS watch.

Came over from the Rob Young thread. I'm pretty confident Ben is legit. Like others have said, all his routes are published in advance and he encourages local runners to join him and he makes contact with local clubs to get more runners involved that way.

When he did 2 (or possibly 3) days up in my neck of the woods, many of my clubmates joined him. I think they typically ran around 11 minute miles, plus stops along the way.

The only reason I didn't join in was that I was training for a marathon at the time and I had no intention of doing any training runs that slow at that point in my training.

I think the main difference between Rob and Ben is that Ben is just doing a personal challenge and raising a lot of money for charity along the way. He's not pretending to be a shit-hot runner. Rob, on the other hand, wants everyone to believe he's some sort of prodigy, achieving stunning performances after two years of haphazard training. And he is clearly trying to make money for himself, using the charities just to increase his appeal.

He's on the news on TV at the moment actually. They just said 9000 people have run with him during the challenge.

401 marathons in 401 days wrote:

So in the wake of Marathon Man UK aka Rob Young being exposed as a fraud and habitual cheat, it seems the UK has another guy out there who is far more worthy of the title 'Marathon Man UK'.

He has just completed 401 marathons in 401 consecutive days which is pretty darn impressive!

Is it? He runs very slowly, so from an athletic viewpoint there is nothing impressive, almost any of us could do physically do this. This is just committing large amounts of time to an arbitrary simple task and asking people to give money to charity. He may as well have committed to mowing the lawn for five hours a day for 401 days.

Whatever makes people feel better about themselves I suppose.

While I've been put off the whole let's do X marathons in X days thing (Thanks Robert Young), at Least Ben is legit and out doing plenty of good stuff by raising money.

Despite all the recent revelations relating to cheaters in the ultra community I do kinda think this guys is not one of them and I would genuinely be shocked and surprised if he was found to of cheated.

The big question for me is "What next for Ben?". Now he's finished his challenge, what are his plans? Will he go back into a normal working life? Will write a book and start doing motivational speaking? Will he embark on some new challenge?

I suspect that he's accustomed to the adulation of his fans and supporters and will probably end up doing the book, speaking, new challenge. It'll be interesting to see where this story takes us.

Yorkie Bloke wrote:

Despite all the recent revelations relating to cheaters in the ultra community I do kinda think this guys is not one of them and I would genuinely be shocked and surprised if he was found to of cheated.

The big question for me is "What next for Ben?". Now he's finished his challenge, what are his plans? Will he go back into a normal working life? Will write a book and start doing motivational speaking? Will he embark on some new challenge?

Don't think he's an ultra-runner, actually. Just someone who had done quite a number of marathons before he decided to do this challenge.

Apparently now he plans to do some weird reverse taper to return his body to normal. He plans to run half-marathon distance every day for a month, then 10k every day for a month etc...

If it was me I'd probably just rest for a while, but perhaps he's worried he'll pile on the pounds if he just suddenly stops after running around 800 miles every month for over a year.

He's doing a lot of talks in schools about his experience with being bullied and his advice on how to deal with it. He's legit and a really nice guy.

Will the skinny rat that posts here try to expose this guy too?

Someone over on the Rob Young claimed Ben's Strava was private, but this is the account where he's logged all his runs. I found this as he did one of his marathons with my running club and another with my triathlon club, although I didn't join him personally ...

https://www.strava.com/athletes/10829970

There's a huge period of no activity at the end of 2015.

There is nothing impressive about jogging 26.2 miles every day.

I Love Annie wrote:

There is nothing impressive about jogging 26.2 miles every day.

There is if you raise just shy of £300k in the process. I, like so many others, ran my first marathon distance with Ben on a 401. No, it's not "a marathon" as we all stopped for lunch, the pace was really gentle, there was no winner. But I met people for whom running with Ben had really inspired them: the lady with Lupus whose 4.5km was amazing but broken, the guy with bursitis in both ankles who was running his 11th 401 marathon (against medical advice!), the woman who had travelled from Greece...

People dropped in and out all day - you walked or ran what you wanted to do, from 1km to 42km. The message was just 'get out there, chat, run, be sociable, raise money for two big charities in the process, then get a selfie with Ben afterwards'. He frequently stopped to give talks to schools, but also ran official chip timed marathons as part of the 401.

I'm really proud of my 42.3km, which was 21km longer than I had ever run before (I signed up only a week before so had no training, and was returning from injury with no more than 8km as my longest run in the weeks preceding it). As a tail-runner I did a lot of walking and talking as well as jogging, so my moving time was an hour slower than I'd like to aim for in my first marathon (in other words, 30 minutes slower than I'll actually achieve), but I proved to myself I could do it - and felt good about having been part of it too.

So, yes and no. For a competitive athlete, jogging 42km a day isn't a big deal. For underfit undertrained hobby-joggers it's a bloody miracle.