LRC Sleuths- Fellow LetsRun Visitor Rob Pope Has Nearly Completed Forrest Gump's Five Runs Across America and wants scrutiny

Push stroller wrote:

I'm a fan, hahaha.

FriendlyLobo wrote:

How much does everyone want to bet that "scam_watcheroo" is Rob Pope?

Unlikely. I've done past analysis like this and written up detailed reports on here before about other runners.

So what? Tom Hanks is a Frisco lib and draft dodger.

USAF Veteran wrote:

So what? Tom Hanks is a Frisco lib and draft dodger.

Not according to Sergeant Dan.

Bubba. wrote:

USAF Veteran wrote:

So what? Tom Hanks is a Frisco lib and draft dodger.

Not according to Sergeant Dan.

lieutenant dan*

aah, but did he catch a game winning touchdown before he started, and has he beat the Russians at ping pong?

other than that, I'll bet you three catfish this is legit.

"life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you're going to get."

cheers.

I literally think he could be a long lost relative of Anton Crapicka.

A side note on Forest Gump. It is an unrealistic film. He is portrayed as a sprinter in the film(like a white Usain Bolt), so it is ironic that he becomes an ultra runner. That doesn't really make much sense.

i always thought the movie would be better if the bench scenes were him just staring at the other person and not talking with spooky music in the background.

anyway this guy looks legit and is refreshing to watch and listen to!

For such a fast marathoner, he does sure seem to be going quite slow across the country. I started looking at his strava page and his baby mamma's blog and there is a lot of scattered info, but I found it hard to follow. He really isn't running that many miles compared to some people who train a lot (too much), so maybe it's legit, but then again, maybe not. It seems like for a lot of his run he had a camper van support vehicle. Pretty relaxed year to just jog 30 miles or so a day if you have that type of support. Also, easy to rotate with someone else, you jog one day, your buddy jog another day and presto you have all the gps records. Who knows? I would love to see someone who took a more detailed look at the numbers and photos and compiled some overall stats. Now, if he did the whole thing completely self-supported pushing a stroller that would be hard core, but the stroller seems to be a new post-baby development.

I think it is extremely unlikely that there would be funny business going on in this run. Rob Pope has the leg speed as former Australian Marathon Champion and he isn't trying to break a speed record but more for the enjoyment.

I've also emailed him and he is open to answering questions.

From his Facebook, his last day of running is this Sunday April 29th near the Flagstaff area with an open invite to anyone that wants to help recreate the final run scene from Forrest Gump:

https://m.facebook.com/events/169598987077223?acontext=%7B%22ref%22%3A%2298%22%2C%22action_history%22%3A%22null%22%7D&aref=98

Sorry to jump on this thread. I have someone who i believe may be cheating. Could you take a look?

Thermiz wrote:

Sorry to jump on this thread. I have someone who i believe may be cheating. Could you take a look?

Sure, you can send me an email at scamwatcheroo [at] gmail.com if you don't want it post it public.

I ended up writing my own version of the MapsToGPX script so that I could bulk download Rob Pope's entire set of Strava uploads as GPX and have them using the UTC start time that Strava lists in the HTML of the weekly view pages instead of the ambiguous 2 weeks back from present that MapsToGPX does.

This came out to 1276 GPX files with 2 days where Rob uploaded duplicate runs from his TomTom and Polar watches. This is 1.43 GB of data uncompressed. I have zipped it up and uploaded it onto my Google Drive:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1qfbEbcJZ4XGnI7ZuocHfO898t9gjjALq

Also, I have ran the entire dataset through my analysis tool to spit out the cadence, speed, and stride length graphs. You can browse them on my Google Drive. I didn't upload the full Excel analysis output that I normally do because that is over 2 GB and Excel files don't compress well. But they are available if someone really wants.

I don't have any issue with the cadence/speed/stride length data of the available GPS data from Rob's Strava account. The conclusion is the same as before. They have reasonable speeds for a long event such as this and the cadence data shows the 0-60 rpm oscillations because he is openly using a push stroller to carry some of his gear. I've looked through Rob's Facebook photos and they do indeed indicate that he was using a push stroller throughout many of his runs and not just recently. This photo shows him with his push stroller on May 27, 2017:

https://www.facebook.com/runroblarun/photos/a.326866937653680.1073741828.325003944506646/473464029660636/?type=3

From what I see on Rob's Facebook and his girlfriend's blog, it looks like his girlfriend drove an RV from point A to point B each day while Rob carried the gear he needed to get through the day in his stroller.

More interesting in the analysis is the Per Run Summary I created that indicates the start and end times of each run as indicated by the data in Strava along with the distance from the end of one run to the start of the next run so that we can check the continuity. The columns you will want to pay attention to is the "Time To Previous Run" and the "Distance Start To Previous Run End":

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1qhjmzwRKnp8c2skjO6tPIvlWPqTlQR3X

With this per run summary, we can see that there are issues with gaps in the Strava data. Note that in the Time To Previous Run column, some of those values are negative because it looks like there is a bug where Strava's UTC start time and the displayed localized start time do not match and they are out of order. Ignore the rows with negative hours for now. Also, the dataset includes some of Rob's runs when he went back to the UK during this time, so keep that in mind when looking at the distances and check the provided Strava links in the summary.

Here are some of the notable gaps greater than 5 miles I see in the data (not an exhaustive list):

[1] Between Sep 30, 2016 and Jan 15, 2017, there is no Strava data. This corresponds to a gap of about 1488 miles.

[2] On the run that starts at Feb 10, 2017 04:07:05 PM MDT, there is a gap of 105 miles to the end of the previous run.

[3] On the run that starts at Mar 01, 2017 03:51:00 PM MDT, there is a gap of 112 miles to the end of the previous run.

[4] On the run that starts at Mar 08, 2017 02:00:28 PM MDT, there is a gap of 247 miles to the end of the previous run.

[5] On the run that starts at Mar 11, 2017 03:43:18 PM MDT, there is a gap of 107 miles to the end of the previous run.

[6] On the run that starts at Aug 01, 2017 06:49:56 AM MDT, there is a gap of 45 miles to the end of the previous run.

[7] On the run that starts at Oct 12, 2017 08:21:54 AM MDT, there is a gap of 70 miles to the end of the previous run.

[8] On the run that starts at Oct 29, 2017 08:04:57 AM MDT, there is a gap of 40 miles to the end of the previous run.

There are, I estimate, around 50 gaps in the data that are not in the UK and are greater than 1 mile. Some of them are in the 1-10 mile range but others are more substantial like what I showed above.

What I think is happening is that not all of Rob's GPS watch data are synced from his TomTom and Polar accounts to Strava and why we have some of those bigger gaps. There could also be the possibility that Rob forgot to start his watch for some of the runs.

I'll see if I can verify but this also raises the question of what kind of gaps are okay for this kind of GPS data given that Rob Pope is not claiming a speed record and it is mainly a fun run?

As a side statistic, the Strava data currently available shows Rob covered about 11690 miles from Sep 2016 to the present time, including some runs he did while back in the UK for a period.

You can see a plot of his run duration and distance per day from the available Strava data below:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1NBczFuEMbHVtOE2LMXUG1uI9FhLF3Rj_

It looks like Rob typically logged a total of between 9-14 hours of activity on the days he ran and covered 20-40 miles.

scam_watcheroo thanks for all of your interesting analysis!

So, what was our expert cheat catcher's conclusion, that this was legit?

He doesn’t seem to have done any ultras, always a red flag. If he likes to run so much, why has he never appeared in an ultra race? It would certainly help him run more, after all.

I dont understand why people can't just go on a long adventurous journey of a run without blasting it on social media.

Conclusion? wrote:

So, what was our expert cheat catcher's conclusion, that this was legit?

The evidence indicates Rob Pope is legit. There is nothing I'm suspicious about.

What's with all the year old or 12-15 year old threads popping up lately?