“Hey, you visionary guy!”
The passage:
HH: Are you still running?
PR: Yeah, I hurt a disc in my back, so I don’t run marathons anymore. I just run ten miles or yes.
HH: But you did run marathons at some point?
PR: Yeah, but I can’t do it anymore, because my back is just not that great.
HH: I’ve just gotta ask, what’s your personal best?
PR: Under three, high twos. I had a two hour and fifty-something.
HH: Holy smokes.
By now we all know that Paul Ryan was (and may still be) a respectable avocational runner, not a borderline elite runner; and there is some question whether Ryan’s account of his personal best is a misrecollection or a lie. If it is a misrecollection, then Ryan must have also misrecollected that he only ever ran one (1) marathon.
Back in 1984 I did a triathalon. Not an Ironman; a short one. (By recollection: a one mile swim, a 25 mile bike ride, and a 10K run.)
I don’t remember my time. I do remember I finished behind 75% of the other participants.
I also remember it was the only triathalon I ever did. I’ve never even had the thought “I don’t do triathalons anymore.”
—
I’m not sure why this bothers me so. I really don’t care much about this year’s race. I vote in New York and my vote doesn’t really matter.
Anyway, a song for the GOP’s beautiful dancer:
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two hour and fifty-something
Two hour and fifty-seventy-one.Report
Yeah, 220, 221, whatever it takes.Report
And did you hear about the time he bowled a 320?Report
Sarah Palin beat Ryan’s time by 1 minute, 49 seconds – and looks better in heels. George W beat them both by over half an hour.
The story goes that Pheidippides only ran one marathon but died before he could give the officials his elapsed time and a drug screen, so they called it a marathon instead of a Pheidippides. But that’s an erroneous story conflating two different events. After the battle the Athenian army fast marched 26 miles from Marathon to Athens to defend against the Persian fleet, while Pheidippides had covered 140 miles from Athens to Sparta prior to the battle to request support.
So the event should either be a 140 mile run called a Sparta or a Pheidippides or a 26 mile team formation jog in full battle harness called a Marthon or Athens. Distance runners would figure this out if they weren’t high all the time, but then someone would note that the point of running from Athens to Sparta wasn’t to run from Athens to Sparta, it was to deliver a message requesting support. That’s why whenever I’m overcome by the urge to run 140 miles, I send someone a text message using a device called a “telephone”, from the Greek for “far voice”, and the urge goes away.Report
Hmm… sub-three marathon? Sure he isn’t a secret Kenyan?Report
Well played.Report
I will tell you that I do not believe any serious distance runner would be “mistaken” so grossly about his marathon PR. I have run two half marathons, and had planned to run my first marathon this fall (which will have to be postponed for a bit due to real-life conflicts). I can tell you to the minute what my best time was.
A sub-three marathon is an absolutely fantastic time. It is not a time that one would accidentally misremember.Report
I ran three half marathons several years ago and reading this I was convinced my best time had been 2:20, then I went back and looked it up and it said 2:49.
I guess this is why I never made it as a ‘serious’ distance runner, well that and the laziness.Report
I’m more willing to believe being wrong by a factor of twenty-ish minutes than a whole hour plus.Report
Maybe Ryan’s two-fifty-something was for a half marathon?
I mean, he tells half-truths and has a half-baked plan.Report
As a very bad runner, I know my personal best in my longest race (a half-marathon). One doesn’t forget such a thing. And one would never, ever forget running a sub-3:00 marathon. As an example, if I managed to run a sub 3:00 marathon, I’d change my name to Ran A Sub-3:00 Marathon, so that I’d never forget and so that nobody else would either. He was lying.Report
OK, Ryan tried to play his running skills up but after someone(s) caught it he addmitted he was wrong. I really can’t believe this minor ‘got yah’ created this much attention. Sorry, but for me this was no big deal even if no one caught it and he never corrected it. Not like the meaning of ‘sex’ … .Report
The funniest thing is that, even after his admission (that he was off by an hour), he’s still lying. His time was 4:01, not 3:5X.
But, you’re right, it’s not like he never claimed to have invented the Internet or been the model for the guy in Love Story, and the media continues to claim that he had.Report
Oh, it’s just (for me, at least) particularly irksome detail in his vast fabulist tapestry. The combination of casually swaggering machismo and lying about the sport I do myself nettles more than the usual lie.
Well, OK. No. The lies in his convention speech are actually more nettlesome. But this one really gets on my nerves.Report
My wife’s (a runner, her brother a 17-time NYC marathon finisher) take:
We all know politician lie. We practically presume they’re lying unless proven otherwise. We even like it when they lie, so long as they’re telling us the lies we want to hear. Politicians (and their lies) exist in another reality.
The reason Ryan’s marathon-boasting is so annoying (and why it may well stick) is because it’s a (much) more familiar sort of lying. We’ve all met guys like Ryan, and they all tell the same sorts of lies. At trade-show he’s the guy with the really impressive (and more importantly, bigger than yours) sales figures. On the dock, he’s the guy who caught a bigger fish then yours (Of course he caught it last week, last month, last year, strictly catch and release), at the anchorage, no matter how big a storm you were in, or how fast a passage you made, his storm was bigger, his passage was faster.
This guy is compulsive. No matter what the endeavor, he’s superlative. Gung ho and A+plus all the way. He *has* to be at the top of the heap, even if it means lying. He can’t help himself.
Why would Ryan tell such an inconsequential, avoidable fib, just to make himself look good? For the same reason Clinton serially cheated on his wife. It’s a compulsion born of a petty species of male vanity and a defect in character that makes neither of them able to resist, regardless of the risk.Report
The hallmark of the compulsive liar is this: the truth would have served him better. “Oh, hell yeah, I’m still running, despite my back injury. And yes, I ran a marathon once, heh heh. Nothing to write home about, a little over four hours, if memory serves. But I did finish. Toward the end there, I felt something flapping at my heels. Looked back… and it was my ass.”
See, that sort of answer, where you’re not the best, you’re just a contender, that humanises the teller of the tale.Report
We’ve all met guys like Ryan, and they all tell the same sorts of lies. […] really impressive (and more importantly, bigger than yours) […] bigger […] than yours […] no matter how big […] his […] was bigger […]
It does make you wonder what Ryan’s really trying to say.Report
If only the word fish wasn’t already taken as a euphemism in these parts.Report
Paul Ryan’s been changing his tune so often these days, it’s not sure what he believes any more. For years, he was thrusting Ayn Rand like a Times Square shill pushing peep show leaflets upon his underlings and anyone else who might stand still long enough for him to give ’em the old Take This Pounce.
But now he says Ayn Rand was an atheist.
Same is true of Mitt Romney, may I add. They’re both changing their tunes faster than the rhythm section can keep up with ’em. Obromneycare? Nix to that. Bain Capital? I am not the one who farted, I was doing the Olympics at that point in time. Paul Ryan’s Excellent Adventure in Tax Policy? That was long ago and far away: we think differently now.
There isn’t one issue of substance upon which these guys can be pinned down. We’re told something which varies along the scale from outright lies to, at best, half truths. That Ryan would lie about something so trivial as a marathon time is just a rounding error in the calculation of the height of the Mount Munchausen they’ve been building over the last few years.Report
Ryan also said he was born in Wisconsin, but records show he was born in a hospital. It’s all the little misrepresentations and exaggerations which lead to an overall mendacity which characterizes the GOP.Report
Ryan was once over heard saying, “I hope we can at least cut waste, fraud and abuse.” Waste relates to ghettoes where services aren’t as regular due to racist, rich white guys receiving the best services, and he was clearly making a reference to fraudulent welfare cases (mostly made-up by extremists in nazi-skin-head organizations) and the abuse that racists attribute the black males on cocaine, as if they beat their women on a regular bases.Report
I thought he sprang forth from the brow of Zeus. Several Chuck Norris jokes come to mind immediately.Report
…also some Ayn Rand jokes.Report
For some reason, I’m reminded of this
Ah, t’was such a simpler time.Report
Narcissistic personality disorder. There is no cure.Report
In light of Barack Obama’s legendary and manifest narcissism, this one’s rather flaccid.Report
Yay! 99! OPRE!Report
99? What does that mean? Tom win the argument?Report
Unfortunately, it’s complicated. I wish there was a shorthand for answering this…
The upshot is that it means Tom doesn’t win. That Tom needs to argue better/be less trollish.Report
Yes, Aaron. 99 means the other fellow can’t win fair and square and so has quit.Report
99 is a space-filler for statistical purposes. In a matrix, a spreadsheet for instance, data might not be available for one cell in a row, so “99” is entered, since the rest of the row’s data would be important.
99 is our shorthand for “useless and uninformative blethering of a particularly onerous sort”.Report
Or, of course: Don’t hit that!Report
When other people are obsessed with you, it’s narcissism by proxy.Report
Irony.Report