Since the spring of 2019 the above named athletes, William Goodge and Robbie Balenger, aka "WG" and "RB" have put on as many as eight manufactured endurance challenges, which have attracted enormous media coverage, the acclaim of the non-running public, and very significant commercial income.  If what they are doing is not real then their actions are false advertising, fraud and hugely damaging to what the distance running community most desires:  clean sport.

The evidence that these runs have been faked is overwhelming and the vast majority of the running community is now convinced that these two are not who they say they are.  There is a thread on the subject at Letsrun.com [Another run across America], which attests to this and is now one of the largest threads of all time.

There are dozens of clear markers that these runs are not real, but here are just ten:

1)     They perform in their unofficial, off-the-books runs light years better than in competition [where they are anodyne at best and WG is ranked as the 37,466th best runner in Britain]; they never fatigue and run huge negative splits.  They both claim multiple world and national records and make claims such as being faster than a speeding Tesla over 240 miles.  They also pluck goals out of thin air, like felling legendary runners' times, and sail past them without a scratch.

2)    Their heart rate for 90% of their challenges is at around 90-110bpm which is a physiologically impossible mark to hold for over 15,000k, especially with a lot of their pace at 5 and 6 minute Ks.  Their heart rates should be more like 130-180, which is where it is for their running outside of these challenges – just like the rest of the human race; and is always perfect elsewhere, with no tech fails.  

3)    WG promised to release his Whoop data for his Transcon, but now refuses, for reasons unknown.  He even claims Whoop have published it, but refuses to say where.  The community have seen just one day of it, as a screengrab from a commercial, and 4 hours of running were clearly missing.  This petition urges the release of that data.

4)    WG refused to be tracked on his Transcon, leaving the tracker in the van.  It made the run all but impossible to follow and gauge his progress, and is deemed incredibly suspicious.

5)    WG placed 174th at Marathon des Sables with 35hrs23, compared to the winner’s 18:33.  If we transfer this to Transcon, he should have run 79.8 days.  But he claims 55 days, for the 15th quickest of all time out of around 1,000 who have tried.  His second half was just 25 days, about the 7th quickest ever.

6)    WG recently tried a 100 mile race in California.  He did the early miles in around 24th place, but then dropped to 50th, 80th, and 124th, before leaving the course in exhaustion at 60 miles, with all of the hardest climbing – and 40 miles – still to come.

7)    The Transcon women’s world record has just fallen, with a very fine time of 47 days by Team USA member Jenny Hoffman.  She managed to break 10 minutes for the mile just 9 times in her last 42 days.  Goodge claims to have gone sub-10 187 times in the same period.  It is completely unthinkable for such an inferior athlete to have managed to run so many miles so much quicker.  It is not how running works.  Never has, never will.

8)    Goodge claims to have run a Transcon section of 9 miles in 80 minutes [Day 22 14-23]. This is a totally unrealistic pace.  The very top runners in the world tend to run about 95-110 minutes for 9 miles for multiday events. By comparison his 14-23 at the 100 mile race in California was 105.  His mark the day before the 80 was 123.  The Transcon WR holder Pete Kostelnick ran 14-23 on his 22nd day in 95.  Very fine stuff, but still a quarter of an hour behind Goodge.  

9)    WG has averaged a meagre 20 miles a week in training since 2019.  Most serious ultrarunners do about 80-100.

10) WG says he does all this for charity but it’s hard not to think it's more for huge  commercial gain.  Also, the community is very concerned that the monies raised via GoFundMe have yet to reach the charities nearly 6 months after the run.  There are also highly irregular donations like £4.5k from WG’s business partner, £3.5k from WG himself and a very recent £10k from Anonymous.  Why has this latter party waited so long for such a generous bequest?

WHY DOES THIS MATTER?  

Scientists at a leading University have said they have seen a lot of this sort of thing in recent years, and have granted it a name: “Digital Doping”. The main sponsors and promoters behind Balenger, Goodge and their second Transcon pacer Peter Lynegar [aka Peter John] and cinemetographers Reece Robinson and James Tregaskis, are: NuCalm, Whoop, Represent, Movement Blueprint [MBP], Run Shape Resilience [RSR], 247, PS247, Puresport and PSRC [Puresport run club].  WG has at least two dozen other more minor sponsors.

The organisations of Represent, 247 and Puresport have now engaged in “collaboration”.  WG is their main brand ambassador and head of running. Peter Lynegar [John] is named as one of PS’s coaches.

Goodge is also head of running at MBP/RSR.  This is what they say their “world-record holder” WG offers:

"The fitness industry is divided into absolutes, with hypertrophy-based programming on one side, and sport-specific functional training on the other. In the running world, Will and The Movement Blueprint are here to change that with RSR."

Harvey Lawton, the Movement Blueprint founder is an ex Rugby player like Goodge.

A 10 week half marathon training programme set by WG costs £129.

Represent clothing was founded in 2011 by George and Mike Heaton.  They have gone from a garden shed to £50 million in annual sales.  It is shooting for £250m in revenue by 2025.  They write of Goodge:

"William Goodge embodies The Unbeatable Spirit. At Represent, we wanted to support both the colossal effort and truly noble cause."

During his adventure runs, Goodge sells some two dozen Puresport health and wellbeing products which he says help him to run to the level that he does.  This includes their muscle joint balms and freeze roll-ons which 247 now also sell, plus a wide array of mushrooms, nootropics, CBD oils, CBD capsules, apparel and socks.  Capsules of 60 pills retail at £90.

Whoop and NuCalm work closely together to promote WG.  For instance, if Whoop advertise that their tech shows he has amazing recoveries, NuCalm then comment with a wave or a link to them – implying they are responsible.

WG has recently been heavily promoted by the influential podcaster Rich Roll, who is close friends with Balenger and used to live with Goodge’s cinematographer Robinson.  Roll and Goodge spoke for over 2 hours, and included a long infomercial about NuCalm as pivotal to his success.

Roll has also podcasted with Balenger about running across America on plants - also a gravely suspicious run with barely a human pulse.  Roll says of Goodge:  “I love Will Goodge.  He is a beast in Ultra, he does it with a smile, a passion for fashion and makes it look easy.”

Balenger and Goodge have almost 200,000 Instagram followers, and Roll has over a million followers of his podcast.  

If these two and their many backers are engaged in bogus claims and false advertising it is a hostile and damaging act against the noble and precious sport of Ultrarunning.  It steals the glory, media attention and potential sponsorship from the far more deserving.  Also records set falsely can last forever, basically ruining that particular event as a going concern.  The Liver King recently admitted that his claims are phoney and he got his body shape via steroids, and is now being sued for £25m for false advertising.  If people are buying the products that WG and RB sell in order to run like them, this puts them straight in the Liver King category.