This thread was originally titled, "Incredible development in the $612,000 Transcon Goodge run, currently ongoing" but the new title is more descriptive. The description of the run is here.
My analogy is fine. Nobody is claiming that WG is not running any of this Transcon. His biggest critics acknowledge that he is completing large amounts and there has never been any suggestion that anybody accompanying him is part of the scam.
Therefore it's obvious that your crap point is a complete red herring. People should stop claiming that if there is cheating then the cover up must involve every member of the public that turns up to run some miles.
It's an awful red herring, like suggesting anyone who cycled with Lance Armstrong must have been part of his conspiracy.
I don't believe this Transcon run is genuine. I do believe that people turning up to run with WG are genuine.
Anybody suggesting that if WG is scamming then all members of the public running with him must be scamming too is a troll throwing red herrings into the debate. End of matter.
Except you are missing the point that all of this started on WillC questioning the very low heart rates. And 90% of this run seems to be very low heart rate. And the heart rate hasn’t changed when people have run with him. There is no consistent explanation of what could be going on. Has he actually got the low hr and the mules are the ones with higher ones? Or is this all about data creation in which case, could they not find a techie who could put up some believable hr along with the rest of the data. And why did they throw in that 45 that WillC is getting all exercised about? What is your theory for what is happening?
I'm not missing anything, and I've taken in this whole debate.
Your repeated demands for an explanation of how any cheating is happening is another red herring. You don't need to know what is causing a fishy smell to know the smell exists.
I do not understand how my phone works but I know it works, and when it is broken I don't understand how it's broken but I know it doesn't work. I have no physio or medical background and don't know exactly how I get injured when I run, but I know when I'm injured. I don't know how Jesus Christ and his disciples managed to convince people that he walked on water or turned a river into wine, but I know that this did not happen.
And I don't understand how climate change works, but by observing the weather throughout my life I can tell that it's obviously changing.
And I feel like climate change is a decent analogy for this run. In the sense that any one individual case of extreme weather can be put down to a freak once a decade occurance, or tech fail. But the sheer amount of freak extreme weather conditions happening nowadays all combined mean that it's an incredible position to dispute that the world's climate is changing. Once a decade extreme weather conditions now happen regularly all across the world, every year.
And so it is with this run. There are a number of abnormalities that by themselves could have an innocent explanation. The odd tech fail may happen, the odd strong second wind with a fast hour may happen occasionaly. The odd mistake with gaps between start and finish points may happen. The runner may have an uncanny ability to always look fresh at the end of a long hard day. But the sheer volume of all these abnormalities, not just in this run, but in WG's other stunt runs, and RB's transcon, mean that for all these abnormalities to be genuine is just incredible.
And hereby I accuse those still supporting this run of being in the same league as climate change deniers. Your excuses are becoming tired, and you are becoming part of the problem. You are hindering efforts to keep our sport clean and making it easier for social media influencers to scam our sport.
I don’t mean to be nitpicky, but I believe my thread was created on 4/4 as opposed to this one on 4/14. These are important considerations when one is awake at 1:38 AM dealing with insomnia and thinking about the big issues of the day including the propensity for cheating on runs across continents.
Do we really need foul-mouthed Brit running across the country? He started on April 2nd. I don’t have time to monitor when he will cheat. Can someone take on this responsibility for monitoring the integrity of running r...
Indeed Tmadddhasfn. You were a pioneer, and you gave birth to the mutant, fetid, rancid runtbeast that was, and is, willvlc. My early, embryonic research quickly picked up on the barmy nature of the run, and got a lot of support; but I noticed the thread was really struggling for life, so had to give it a kick up the arse, with fresh energy and impetus as your theme was more directed to his foul tongue and self-serving nature.
This thread started when I found his 1.4 day negative split Jogle 4 years ago, was carried out in identical modus operandi. 2 clean days followed by 12 days of pure filth. After a complete collapse on days 3 and 4 he rose like a phoenix and never had a bad day or session ever again, bashing out big days off an HR as low as 88 for the day. Out in 8.4 back in 7 flat. As a novice. Yikes!
But yes, thank you for your early effort. You remind me of the Beatles' Pete Best.
This post was edited 1 minute after it was posted.
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typo
why is this guy shirtless but his entire head is covered? is it common in this type of event? doesn’t that thing affect breathing? I don’t know what the weather is like over there but it seems odd that a guy running to raise awareness for cancer doesn’t bother to cover himself properly when spending long days in the sun (I’m assuming it’s sunny because of the glasses)
I don't have Instagram so haven't spent hours looking at photos of him. Has his body shape changed much? On that photo he seems to have retained an awful lot of muscle mass for someone running 60 miles a day.
Except you are missing the point that all of this started on WillC questioning the very low heart rates. And 90% of this run seems to be very low heart rate. And the heart rate hasn’t changed when people have run with him. There is no consistent explanation of what could be going on. Has he actually got the low hr and the mules are the ones with higher ones? Or is this all about data creation in which case, could they not find a techie who could put up some believable hr along with the rest of the data. And why did they throw in that 45 that WillC is getting all exercised about? What is your theory for what is happening?
I'm not missing anything, and I've taken in this whole debate.
Your repeated demands for an explanation of how any cheating is happening is another red herring. You don't need to know what is causing a fishy smell to know the smell exists.
I do not understand how my phone works but I know it works, and when it is broken I don't understand how it's broken but I know it doesn't work. I have no physio or medical background and don't know exactly how I get injured when I run, but I know when I'm injured. I don't know how Jesus Christ and his disciples managed to convince people that he walked on water or turned a river into wine, but I know that this did not happen.
And I don't understand how climate change works, but by observing the weather throughout my life I can tell that it's obviously changing.
And I feel like climate change is a decent analogy for this run. In the sense that any one individual case of extreme weather can be put down to a freak once a decade occurance, or tech fail. But the sheer amount of freak extreme weather conditions happening nowadays all combined mean that it's an incredible position to dispute that the world's climate is changing. Once a decade extreme weather conditions now happen regularly all across the world, every year.
And so it is with this run. There are a number of abnormalities that by themselves could have an innocent explanation. The odd tech fail may happen, the odd strong second wind with a fast hour may happen occasionaly. The odd mistake with gaps between start and finish points may happen. The runner may have an uncanny ability to always look fresh at the end of a long hard day. But the sheer volume of all these abnormalities, not just in this run, but in WG's other stunt runs, and RB's transcon, mean that for all these abnormalities to be genuine is just incredible.
And hereby I accuse those still supporting this run of being in the same league as climate change deniers. Your excuses are becoming tired, and you are becoming part of the problem. You are hindering efforts to keep our sport clean and making it easier for social media influencers to scam our sport.
Seriously? Your analogies are cell phones and climate change? You might not understand those things but plenty of people do.
The person who could understand if he’s cheating is the person who gets off the couch, stops playing keyboard warrior and gets out there and watches him for a few days. It ain’t that hard if anyone is really that invested.
It’s not like trying to figure out if or how someone cheated in a race that’s over. It’s ongoing!
Really, it just needs people to watch the first 1-2 hours after his NuCalm restorative nap for a few days to catch him doing one of his faster stints post-nap.
As others have said, there are so many individual weird quirks to this run, but there’s no concrete theory as to what’s going on. Unless he’s running well within himself most of the time and what we’re really seeing is stints of him pushing himself.
why is this guy shirtless but his entire head is covered? is it common in this type of event? doesn’t that thing affect breathing? I don’t know what the weather is like over there but it seems odd that a guy running to raise awareness for cancer doesn’t bother to cover himself properly when spending long days in the sun (I’m assuming it’s sunny because of the glasses)
He is often flex posing in his videos and pics with his shirt off any body completely shaved. It is all part of the NuPalm Marketing. You can't market NuPalm with a guy looking bearded like Forest Gump during his Transcon. Even Robbie has cleaned himself up.
But you do bring up a good point. Why lather yourself all over your body with sunscreen instead of just covering up? And why a head covering only? I don't see anyone going shirtless at Badwater....
In all seriousness, they've had 14 hours to put up Strava, and there are many of them. How long does it take to upload a strava? Clearly in a very swish and populated area. Things getting super hot on here and loads of attention being paid now to his Strava. And what happens? Massive delay. Hellooooooo?!
My running cadence has been pretty darned consistent for every run I've ever done. Obviously races is faster because I'm running faster. You can look at any of my runs...my running cadence is in the 180s and my walk cadence is in the 130s. I continually move my feet :) My typical training pace is 10:30-11:45 and my cadence is always consistent.
Regarding my HR, as a RunWalkRunner (run 2 min, walk :30 typically) my HR average is lower than a constant runner. In terms of his, all I can tell you is we talked/joked about the HR conspiracy and I said 'my HR is 138 what's yours...his response was '105' The dude is in amazing shape. He was in a groove and on an 'easy' run.
These are my thoughts based on what I saw with my own two eyes and comparing our stats side by side.
I don't have a dog in this fight, just watching it unfold with amusement. But really? WTF?
The above means that the taller Goodge is running 6:36/km with a stride of 82cm at 182spm.... and you are doing 76cm with a cadence over 185. You say you are walking (say 10min/km) at 130spm, which gives 77cm
A lot of that makes no arithmetical sense at all. I don't know what your height is but at 1.65 (short) I do a cadence of 125 with 80cm walking at 10m/km, and at 4:30/km training pace I do 177 at 126cm
Not sure how tall you are, but Goodge seems very tall. Do you realise how ridiculous that stride of him would look?
I can't measure in centimeters so I don't know those distances 😁. And, I'm not overly detail-caring on my cadence...I simply run/walk/run one foot in front of the other. So you can do your math, I am 5'11"...fine, I'm 5'10.5" but don't want to admit it. I use a Garmin watch and it shows my average running cadence of the past 5 days/5 runs as 176, 164, 171, 172, 169. What is interesting is that Strava has different numbers for the exact same runs: 178, 173, 157, 177, 176, 167. On the day I ran with Will Garmin says my cadence on Garmin was 171 while Strava pulled in 179. Kudos to you for having less spm...I think? Again, one foot in front of the other is what matters to me. Of course, if I try to set some sort of speed record, maybe I'll care about all of the micro details and measurements.
I'm not missing anything, and I've taken in this whole debate.
Your repeated demands for an explanation of how any cheating is happening is another red herring. You don't need to know what is causing a fishy smell to know the smell exists.
I do not understand how my phone works but I know it works, and when it is broken I don't understand how it's broken but I know it doesn't work. I have no physio or medical background and don't know exactly how I get injured when I run, but I know when I'm injured. I don't know how Jesus Christ and his disciples managed to convince people that he walked on water or turned a river into wine, but I know that this did not happen.
And I don't understand how climate change works, but by observing the weather throughout my life I can tell that it's obviously changing.
And I feel like climate change is a decent analogy for this run. In the sense that any one individual case of extreme weather can be put down to a freak once a decade occurance, or tech fail. But the sheer amount of freak extreme weather conditions happening nowadays all combined mean that it's an incredible position to dispute that the world's climate is changing. Once a decade extreme weather conditions now happen regularly all across the world, every year.
And so it is with this run. There are a number of abnormalities that by themselves could have an innocent explanation. The odd tech fail may happen, the odd strong second wind with a fast hour may happen occasionaly. The odd mistake with gaps between start and finish points may happen. The runner may have an uncanny ability to always look fresh at the end of a long hard day. But the sheer volume of all these abnormalities, not just in this run, but in WG's other stunt runs, and RB's transcon, mean that for all these abnormalities to be genuine is just incredible.
And hereby I accuse those still supporting this run of being in the same league as climate change deniers. Your excuses are becoming tired, and you are becoming part of the problem. You are hindering efforts to keep our sport clean and making it easier for social media influencers to scam our sport.
Congratulations on being the "official accuser" of LR! If I get your last statement correctly, this site should only be used by those that on "your" side, a side that has anomalies that have been beaten to death. The opinions of EVERYONE are supposed to be part of a discussion page. If not, like I suggested to on his FB page, perhaps the site should be closed and only allows in those that answer super secret questions so that you can ensure they are on "your" side. That way everyone on the thread can continue to bash and continue the witch hunt without opposing opinions. While it was be easier to just 'blow off' the site, I refuse to let people just bash someone with observable facts. Even only witnessed him for 1.5 days (I believe that is what he said--could be off by a day), so that is only 3-4% of the days ran. If your choice is to keep the sport only for purists with no product improvements and no social media for promotion, then you'll loose 90% of those who have been inspired by the thousands of videos of people running and doing amazing things, whether that be someone like WG, Iron Cowboy, David Goggins, or the countless others. Records don't matter...only a way of life does. Don't be so closed off and absolute!
Hi all,here's an update on another thread about the British runner William Goodge doing Transcon at the moment and some worrying irregularities.Namely that he runs at 150-170bpm in the first two days of his multidayers, colla...
Hi all,here's an update on another thread about the British runner William Goodge doing Transcon at the moment and some worrying irregularities.Namely that he runs at 150-170bpm in the first two days of his multidayers, colla...
I just looked at Robbie Balenger’s website. Him and Goodge are so pathetic. They post all these photos and boast about their endurance feats as if they are phenomenal athletes when in reality they are nothing special.
Case in point: Balenger boasts on his website about breaking “the record” for most 10k loops run in NYC Central Park during its open hours. He claims to have run 16 full loops in a little over 18 hours. That means he averaged over an hour per 10k! Is that supposed to be impressive? Compare Balenger’s 160k in 18+ hours to a real genuinely impressive record-breaking athlete like Aleksandr Sorokin, who has covered 177k in only 12 hours. Huge difference!
I would pity Goodge and Balenger for their desperate cries for attention and ridiculous stunts to promote themselves as amazing athletes if they weren’t so arrogant. I think the best way to get under their skin is to comment about Sorokin in replies to all their social media posts. “Yeah, what you’re doing is alright, but did you see that Aleksandr Sorokin broke the 100k world record? Dude averaged 5:53 mile pace for 6 hours! What a stud!”
Thank you for your response. I would like to think I am not making excuses but requesting rigorous analysis. You are not going to convince anyone there is cheating involved by saying he looks too good, he's running too fast, his wristwatch data looks fishy. Even those things combined will not be enough. You need some harder evidence than this and a good suggestion for how he might be cheating. You are a bit of an anomaly in being someone who has multiday experience yet having big questions about his ability to do this. In Laz's words "he is shooting for a meaningless record, but it is just a publicity stunt. he is wiser than RY. so something not worth the trouble to debunk." For me, the issue about this is that it is not a superhuman achievement, as his detractors as well as his sponsors are claiming. In difficulty level it pales in significance compared to the feats of PK, Dan L, Sorokin etc, so I find the attention he is getting compared to those pepole grating. I think a lot of WillC's sweeping statements are taken at face value without anyone checking. "Nobody in the history of multidays..." Where is he getting these facts from? Take the negative splits. I decided to check one of my 50 mile+ multidays. Of the last 6 days, 1 was a positive split, 1 even and 4 negative. I then looked at the whole thing. The first half took 110 hours, the second 108, so a negative split, just, on that too. Then take the fast 45. Again, "nobody in history..." We then have to narrow this down to non-elite, more than 50 a day for a lot of days, in the last 40 years. How many in this subset has he actually found and analysed to come up with this bold statement? I suspect I could have done that pace for 6 miles in one of my multidays and would probably have ended up walking 7 miles afterwards like he did. The fact is I wouldn't and who knows why he would have, but that is different from saying he couldn't have. So, the only reason I am responding to these objections is because I don't think they are enough. What we need is for someone to fly over there from the UK and follow him for a few days so they can catch him cheating, then we could all know for sure and stop going round in circles on here. Oh wait.
...What we need is for someone to fly over there from the UK and follow him for a few days so they can catch him cheating, then we could all know for sure and stop going round in circles on here. Oh wait.
There is another possibility. Should someone, whether they be from the UK, US or the North Pole, chose to go follow him for several days with an objective stance (not the "you're a fraud and I'm going to catch you stance), they may observe that he is, in fact, running every single mile every single day. If that were to be witnessed, then someone would be able to figure out why the anomalies are occurring. But, they would look at them from the slant of 'he is running it...now let's figure out why some things are strange' and not continue on a witchhunt. Like you said, the speeds he is running is not lightning fast. He is prodding along step by step in the 10-13/min mile pace for most of the run. As I said when I ran with him for 6 miles, he was barely breaking a sweat and talking with tone/pace as if we were sitting at a bar together. He wasn't panting or struggling between words. Throw all the "tech" out of this and someone watch him run!
Thank you for your response. I would like to think I am not making excuses but requesting rigorous analysis. You are not going to convince anyone there is cheating involved by saying he looks too good, he's running too fast, his wristwatch data looks fishy. Even those things combined will not be enough. You need some harder evidence than this and a good suggestion for how he might be cheating. You are a bit of an anomaly in being someone who has multiday experience yet having big questions about his ability to do this. In Laz's words "he is shooting for a meaningless record, but it is just a publicity stunt. he is wiser than RY. so something not worth the trouble to debunk." For me, the issue about this is that it is not a superhuman achievement, as his detractors as well as his sponsors are claiming. In difficulty level it pales in significance compared to the feats of PK, Dan L, Sorokin etc, so I find the attention he is getting compared to those pepole grating. I think a lot of WillC's sweeping statements are taken at face value without anyone checking. "Nobody in the history of multidays..." Where is he getting these facts from? Take the negative splits. I decided to check one of my 50 mile+ multidays. Of the last 6 days, 1 was a positive split, 1 even and 4 negative. I then looked at the whole thing. The first half took 110 hours, the second 108, so a negative split, just, on that too. Then take the fast 45. Again, "nobody in history..." We then have to narrow this down to non-elite, more than 50 a day for a lot of days, in the last 40 years. How many in this subset has he actually found and analysed to come up with this bold statement? I suspect I could have done that pace for 6 miles in one of my multidays and would probably have ended up walking 7 miles afterwards like he did. The fact is I wouldn't and who knows why he would have, but that is different from saying he couldn't have. So, the only reason I am responding to these objections is because I don't think they are enough. What we need is for someone to fly over there from the UK and follow him for a few days so they can catch him cheating, then we could all know for sure and stop going round in circles on here. Oh wait.
I agree with your assessment. But I take issue with Laz's comment. Just because his goal is essentially meaningless, that does not mean it is not worthy of scrutiny. After all, think back to Mike Rossi and Kip. Neither of those cheating episodes were historic efforts but they were damn fun to debunk on letsrun.
I will be the first to admit that I care enough to post on the message board. But I certainly do not care enough to travel a thousand miles to try to watch this guy run. Have you ever gone to watch someone you know run a Marathon? You are excited for them but it most certainly is boring and that is only for a few hours. Imagine trying to watch this guy run/walk for 12 hours! I can't think of anything more excruciatingly boring. Perhaps that is the secret sauce as to how these things are so cheat able. Nobody has the patience to observe such a run for more than an hour or two without wanting to kill themselves to be put out of their misery.
why is this guy shirtless but his entire head is covered? is it common in this type of event? doesn’t that thing affect breathing? I don’t know what the weather is like over there but it seems odd that a guy running to raise awareness for cancer doesn’t bother to cover himself properly when spending long days in the sun (I’m assuming it’s sunny because of the glasses)
He is often flex posing in his videos and pics with his shirt off any body completely shaved. It is all part of the NuPalm Marketing. You can't market NuPalm with a guy looking bearded like Forest Gump during his Transcon. Even Robbie has cleaned himself up.
But you do bring up a good point. Why lather yourself all over your body with sunscreen instead of just covering up? And why a head covering only? I don't see anyone going shirtless at Badwater....
The guy who actually did the Forrest Gump run was way cooler. I'd buy what he was selling. Beard oil? Would need a beard first, I guess.
