I have no idea whether he did the marathons, but I'm not sure about the claims about it being impossible etc. Eddie Izzard did 43 marathons in 51 days in 2009 and later did 27 in 27 days. Certainly it was well known about, but I don't think even Eddie would claim to be a world-class elite athlete?
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Merged Arday life and death
- Thread starter Nessie
- Start date
W.D.Clinger
Philosopher
Copied from that link:
- Marathon 29 - 5 hrs 7 min. Wow! Nearly there. Final run this Sunday! #30in35 #marathon 2 days ago
- Marathon 28 - 5 hrs 34 mins. Nearly there! Thanks to Michael & Richard today! #30in35 #marathon 3 days ago
- Marathon 27 - 5 hrs 54 min. Only 3 to go!! #30in35 #marathon 4 days ago
- Marathon 26 - 5 hrs 58 mins. Only 4 to go! Thanks to everyone who ran with me! #30in35 #marathon 5 days ago
- Marathon 25 - 6 hrs 3 mins. 5 to go!! Thanks to Michael for his good company today! http://bit.ly/a0ALrV #30in35 #marathon 1 week ago
That's an extremely slow jog, not a whole lot faster than my usual 3.5 mph walking pace when covering long distances on flat ground. I'm pretty sure I myself (at that age) could have done 30 such slow marathons in 35 days. Not that I'd have been crazy enough to do so.
ETA: By the way, I can confirm that I've never heard of an oral examination for an undergraduate degree in the US. It is not at all uncommon for oral presentations to be required in undergraduate courses, but it's not a hoop students have to jump through as the final step in obtaining a BA or BS degree.
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Nessie
Penultimate Amazing
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Lance Armstrong was certainly the subject of a massive pile on. Another example is the former Chief Constable Nick Adderley who faked a military service and medals. Then there are all the faked Holocaust memoirs, of which there have been quite a few, from the embellished, to completely made up.
Ziggurat
Penultimate Amazing
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It's very rare, but it exists. I had to do it for my undergrad degree. But the fact that it was required was very much a standout feature of that college.
Just doing a marathon is impressive but not as impressive as the logistics of find 27 on 27 consecutive days that you could travel to in that amount of time.
How many times did the journalist in question approach Arday before the police got involved? That quite matters. He absolutely has the right not to respond, calling the police seems excessive unless the journo in questions actions were at the level of harassment, or more than one or two emails.
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Nessie
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I believe once. But, the sum total of approaches from all sources was far more. One approach for a comment is fine. Ardey asking for no more, is also fine. Using the police is heavy handed, as was the use of lawyers, but it is all within his rights when he does not want to speak to anyone about the concerns being raised.
Which I acknowledge but getting the police and lawyers involved after one email is an ◊◊◊◊◊◊◊ move even if it was one email after a bunch of others.
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Rolfe
Adult human female
Reporting a retired academic to the police for harassment after two polite emails is something of an over-reaction. Which, as you say, reflects the fact that he knew his jaiket was on a shoogly peg. Setting the (very expensive) pit-bull reputation management law firm of Carter Ruck on the Times Higher Education Supplement to stop the publication of an article that was entirely legitimate journalism is another of the same.
But the fact is that the retired academic didn't contact him again, and the Times Higher Education Supplement pulled the piece. Nobody else knew about any of this until it came out after Nathan Cofnas published his blog article and the story began to grow legs. You're portraying this as if he had obtained a public injunction requiring everyone to stop contacting him, when that was very much not the case.
Rolfe
Adult human female
It's not rare at all! It may not be standard in certain arts degrees (which is news to me), but it certainly is in science subjects.
From the linked blog, he wasn't taking part in organised events, just running the marathon distance on his own, starting at 3am, following a number of different routes in London.
malbui
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When I was at Aber back in analogue days it was said that he spent his entire time there trying to learn, phonetically, the address he had to give at his investiture as PoW. Some of us got reasonably conversationally fluent in Welsh after a year of intensive courses; Chuck is… not very linguistically inclined.
Rolfe
Adult human female
I remember reading about how he had to learn to make the sound of the ch, as is natural to all Scots. I don't know how it's written in Welsh, maybe ll? How hard can it be?
ETA: I also remember learning to sing the whole of the Welsh national anthem, in Welsh, for a performance our choir was doing in the St David's Hall in Cardiff. From memory. In less than a week. John Redwood eat your heart out.
ETA: I also remember learning to sing the whole of the Welsh national anthem, in Welsh, for a performance our choir was doing in the St David's Hall in Cardiff. From memory. In less than a week. John Redwood eat your heart out.
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I take it back, lazy bastard.
malbui
Beauf
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Welsh has four letters that don’t exist in English: ch; dd; ll; and rh. They take a bit of practicing but if you’ve got a full-time professor of Welsh coaching you one-to-one it shouldn’t take long. Welsh is also completely phonetically consistent: learn the values of the letters and you’re away.
theprestige
Penultimate Amazing
There's also notorious white fabulist Clifford Irving. He was sued for, and confessed to, fraud for his hoax.
And notorious white alleged plagiarist Jerzy Kosinski, whose persecution is alleged to have contributed to his eventual death.
And notorious white hoaxster Rachel Dolezal, who was pilloried in the public eye for her race-claiming.
And notorious white fabulist Elizabeth Warren, who was publicly called out for her self-serving pretense to ethnic heritage.
Yeah, no. White people get caught up short for this kind of nonsense all the time.
And notorious white alleged plagiarist Jerzy Kosinski, whose persecution is alleged to have contributed to his eventual death.
And notorious white hoaxster Rachel Dolezal, who was pilloried in the public eye for her race-claiming.
And notorious white fabulist Elizabeth Warren, who was publicly called out for her self-serving pretense to ethnic heritage.
Yeah, no. White people get caught up short for this kind of nonsense all the time.
Rolfe
Adult human female
It was 30 in a 35-day period. He makes it sound as if he ran competitive events in a competitive time. However, it sounds as if the actual claim is that he jogged 27 miles a day around the streets of London, which isn't quite such an impressive feat for a 25-year-old PE teacher.
Then there's the claim of having done the last however-many with a cracked fibula.
He supposedly ran 600 miles on a treadmill in six days. Later revised to a total time period of 12 days, one day on one day off. I'm not sure how much of this I believe. A lot of the claims seem to be wild exaggerations built on a relatively mundane truth. I can't remember how long he said he took to run from Edinburgh to London - the two cities are 400 miles apart, but he says he ran 600 miles - but people who know say again that it would be a remarkable feat for a top distance runner.
However, it's the medical claims that seem to me to be the wildest. Epilepsy, brain tumours, a stroke, locked-in syndrome, parents being advised to switch off his life support. Doing his PhD viva a couple of weeks after having a brain tumour removed, which caused him to lose all recollection of his thesis, so he had to relearn it. (Mind you, from all I hear about that thesis, a bullcrap generator would have filled in the gaps.)
Ziggurat
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I meant in the US (and specifically for bachelor's degrees, not graduate degrees).
theprestige
Penultimate Amazing
From the linked blog, he says he was running a marathon almost every day for a month, starting at 3 am each run day.
One method that's been proposed, when there's a concern that an artistic work might have been AI-generated, rather than being an original work of the artist, is to ask for the work by-products.
A finished painting should have sketches and studies, some of them substantial works in their own right, as by-products. Same with a book. If it was written by a human, we should expect there to be multiple drafts, and correspondence between author, editor, and publisher along the way.
One could ask similar questions here. If his blog says he's running a marathon almost every day for a month, what else does it say? Does it have entries recording the original idea, the planning, the prep, the training? Does it have accounts of all the other fun runs and personal challenge runs he's done, since running seems to be such a big hobby for him?
When I was part of an avid bike riding community, it was considered de rigeur to post a photo of your bike in front of some road sign, landmark, or other point of interest along your latest ride. Does Arday post any selfies of himself, in the predawn light of various London neighborhoods, mid-run?
I'm not saying he has to post these things in his blog. It's perfectly legitimate not to. And if it were just that one claim - gym teacher and fitness freak runs a lot of marathons for personal satisfaction, but doesn't document much of the effort - I'd shrug and move on.
It's only when every single claim he makes in his self-narrative is on that level of accomplishment, that every single claim becomes suspect. The more impressive the claim, the more suspect it becomes. And once one claim turns out to be bogus, every other poorly-documented claim he's made loses all credibility.
There is no world where "I was lying about the other stuff, but the 30 marathons in 30 days was real" isn't a ridiculous excuse.
Rolfe
Adult human female
I don't know about the US, but I was talking about bachelor degrees.