Uncle John’s Unsinkable Bathroom Reader (88 page)

Inventive recipe titles are a PBO tradition. These not only zing off the weird chart but also make you wonder if you’d actually want to eat them.

Peanut Butter Mole Enchiladas (2008)

South-of-the-Border Sushi Appetizers (2008)

Orange Marmalade–Chorizo Pizza (2008)

Magic Marshmallow Crescent Puffs (1969)

Peacheesy Pie (1964)

Loaded Baked Potato Pizza (2008)

Swaddled Peppers (2004)

Dotted Swiss and Spinach Quiche (1990)

Tropical Crab Rangoon Appetizers (2008)

Granola “Fried” Ice Cream with Red Cinnamon Sauce (2004)

Choco–Peanut Butter– Banana Breakfast Strudel (2008)

Pizza Bubble Ring (2004)

Guess Again Candy Crunch (2000)

Tropical Sunshine Flatcakes with Orange Cream (2008)

Blueberry Burrito Blintzes (2006)

Chicken Manicotti Olé (2002)

Toasted Mexi-Meatball Hoagies (2006)

Part I of Robert Garside’s run around the world (page 399) was “man vs. the elements.” This time it’s “man vs. man.” And it’s a lot harsher
.

T
HE LYINGMAN
The first person to publicly question Garside’s feats was David Blaikie, a former long-distance runner and editor of the magazine
Ultramarathon World
. “I do not believe, based on what he has posted about himself on various Web sites and what has been reported by the media, that he has fully run any of the major sections of the world he has claimed, or even a substantial portion of any section.” Only a superhuman, argued Blaikie, could run 50 to 125 miles a day, every day, for days at a time, and then only after months of training and with a support team following close behind. And no one in the ultramarathon community (an ultramarathon is any running race over 26 miles) had even
heard
of this guy before.

Blaikie and others did some digging and found major holes in Garside’s story:

• His account of being robbed in Pakistan was a complete fabrication. Garside was actually in London at the time dealing with a “personal crisis” having to do with his ex-girlfriend. In fact, Garside skipped much of that first leg through Europe.
That’s
why the official starting point was New Delhi, and not Piccadilly Circus.

• In December 1999, Garside’s diary stated that he was “alone and heading up to the Amazon jungle.” But several witnesses saw him in Rio de Janeiro at the time, partying with one of Britain’s most famous fugitives, train robber Ronnie Biggs.

• Even if Garside had the stamina to do the run himself, there was
no way
that his girlfriend—a student with no long-distance running experience—could have kept up with him through the dangerous jungles of Mexico for 10 straight days. In truth, the couple skipped 800 miles of the run, opting to travel by plane to just south of the United States border.

“Blaikie is my Osama bin Laden,” Garside responded. “I’ve been
watching this terrorist every step of the way. This faceless coward is conducting psychological warfare, testing me. You’re not supposed to write such things based on theory. You write on evidence.” And the evidence, according to Garside, showed overwhelmingly that he accomplished the feat. But the Guinness people were taking their time scrutinizing the hundreds of hours of tapes that Garside gave them, as well as the mounds of credit card receipts, official records, and witness testimonies. “I would never do the things he is saying,” said Garside during his run.

So if his run was legitimate, why did he put fictional passages on his Web site? Garside always seemed to have an answer:

• His account of being robbed in Pakistan was a “psychological tactic” designed to fool would-be competitors into thinking that there was no way they could catch up. “As with any competitive sport, there must be tactics. I’m a sportsman, I can do that.”

• About partying in Rio when he was supposed to have been running through the Amazon: “At the time I had a representative doing my Web page for me, so I slapped his wrist and it will be changed as soon as I have the time.” (It wasn’t.)

• Why leave out the part about the plane trip across Mexico? “I didn’t think it was interesting. I didn’t know people wanted to hear about that.”

As more of Garside’s lies began to surface, his allies began to abandon him. “Robert has deluded himself into believing that he has not cheated,” said journalist Peter Hadfield, who had covered the early part of Garside’s attempt. “Every time his fabrications are exposed, he invents a new story and convinces himself it is true. When his cover is blown again, he invents another story and then convinces himself of that.”

Even harsher words came from British photo agent Mike Souls-by, who had given Garside more than $10,000 early in the run. But then Soulsby withdrew his support and publicly blacklisted Garside, telling reporters, “I had thought Robert was credible but now realize I have been totally and utterly conned. He’s a miserable little two-faced shyster.”

As the criticisms kept pouring in and the excuses kept coming
out, the war between Garside and Blaikie escalated. Garside claimed Blaikie “sent out the
Ultramarathon World
Taliban posing as journalists” to disrupt his press conferences and taint his name. Blaikie claims that on one night in 2001 Garside made dozens of “abusive phone calls” to his home in Canada. Garside didn’t deny it: “I have the moral right to call up this cold, cognitive bastard a million times and keep him up all night and ruin his life. He’s ruined mine.”

The allegations dogged the final two years of the run. Instead of being celebrated when he arrived in a new city, Garside would have to defend his credibility. “The truth is, my run is too much of an outlandish, wild, wonderful thing to believe. That’s why I’m being persecuted. People have been persecuting me my whole life.” And why would other long-distance runners be out to get Garside? “They’re just jealous that I’ve done it while they’ve only talked about it. The hardest thing is to get up day after day after day for over five years and just run, run, run. It’s like torture. I have done the run. I have got huge blisters on my left foot to prove it!”

Yet no matter how hard he tried, Garside couldn’t run away from the allegations, and each new admission put another dent in his chances of being awarded the record from Guinness. “There’s an expression in England,” he said, “You can’t get anything in life without p*ssing a few people off.”

Perhaps the biggest reason that so many runners publicly chided Garside was that had repeatedly turned down requests from actual long-distance runners to join him. Why? What was he hiding?

In July 2003, only a few weeks after he returned home, Garside was challenged by Britain’s Channel Four to run 130 miles around a track in 24 hours…while under observation. That would match the mileage of one of his longest reported days—and, if he succeeded, would put his critics to rest. Garside would have to wear his full pack and carry a bottle of water, just as he did during the actual run. He accepted, writing on his Web site that the challenge would
be “easy-peasy.” It wasn’t. According to the ultramarathon runners who monitored the race, Garside’s pacing fluctuated throughout and he looked uncommonly winded for someone who claimed to have amazing stamina. Garside gave up after 72 miles, barely halfway through the challenge. Again, he offered an array of excuses: Running on the track was too boring; it was too soon after the world run; he hadn’t had enough time to prepare.

Garside’s critics pounced. While admitting that 72 miles may be impressive for an amateur, to the ultramarathon runner that distance is “insignificant,” so the test confirmed that Garside did not possess the “mental attitude” required to run upwards of 100 miles in a single day over steep terrain in humid conditions while drinking water out of puddles. Still, Garside claimed that in no way did failing the challenge take away from the veracity of his 51/2-year run. “That’s all that matters,” he said.

After that, the press’s fascination with Garside faded. In late 2003, he announced plans to swim around the world and to make a movie about his running journey. In 2004 he and Endrina Perez were married, and they later had a child. According to Garside, it took his mind and body two years to fully recover from his run around the world. All he could do was wait for Guinness to finish going over the evidence and make their ruling. That process took nearly four years to complete.

In March 2007, Guinness finally awarded Garside, by now 40, the official world record. “I am so happy and relieved and I am so grateful to all those people all over the world who helped me throughout the years I was running,” Garside beamed to reporters in Piccadilly Circus, where he was honored. But the whispers of “cheater” still lingered, and once again Garside was defending himself. “With good intent, I set out to run around the world…I swear on my mother’s life—on Jesus Christ’s life—I did it with positive intent and nothing else.”

Marco Frigatti, Guinness’s head of records, was on hand to present the award…and also found himself on the defensive. “We haven’t just asked him what he did and approved him because we
liked him,” explained Frigatti. “The decision was based on…15 boxes of credit card statements, receipts in Robert’s name, and other useful evidence, which supported Robert’s presence in all of the 29 countries within the time specified. We also reviewed over 300 time-coded tapes featuring Robert running at different locations during his journey.”

So did that finally quiet Garside’s critics? Hardly. “I’m stunned, quite frankly,” said Ian Champion, the chairman of the U.K. Road Runners Club and a witness to Garside’s failed Channel Four Challenge. Champion, along with just about everyone else in the ultramarathon community, refuses to acknowledge Garside’s record, maintaining that Guinness’s authority “doesn’t matter” when it comes to the extreme sport—only sanctioned runs that are monitored by ultramarathon officials would count. So don’t expect to see Robert Garside running in any long-distance trials. “He could’ve achieved so much because his drive and determination are incredibly strong,” lamented journalist Peter Hadfield. “Instead, it’s his lack of moral character—his readiness to deceive—that’s destroyed him.”

After the brief flurry of news stories covering the official record in March 2007, Garside once again slipped out of the limelight. No press reports of his planned swim around the world—or his movie—have surfaced. The various Web sites set up during his run still exist, but they make no mention of the record, the swim, the movie, or even of Garside himself—they just provide links for buying running apparel.

So is Garside living the quiet life? Is he out there right now training in the water? Wait and see, and keep your eyes out for him, because once the Runningman gets going again, who knows where he’ll end up…or how he’ll get there?

The feather that sticks up from the top of a quail’s head is called a
hmuh
(pronounced “h’muh”).

For nearly 20 years after Neil Armstrong stepped onto the Moon in July 1969, the Soviet Union categorically denied having a manned lunar program of its own. It wasn’t until the late 1980s that we began to learn just how close they came to beating the United States to the Moon
.

H
EARING IS BELIEVING
Not too long after 9:00 p.m. on the evening of April 11, 1961, a United States government listening post off Alaska picked up the sound of human voices speaking in Russian. That wasn’t unusual; in the early 1960s, the Cold War was at its height, and the listening post had been set up for the purpose of intercepting Soviet communications.