by Glenn Stout
Good question, if you haven’t crossed the Nullarbor, if you’re reading about it or forming a thesis based on maps that depict nothing but barrenness. From an armchair, it is absolutely impossible to run the Nullarbor. Once you’re out there, however, there is a way. Robert Garside discovered it. So would I.
Garside didn’t detail his “method” for running the Nullarbor as he crossed the plain. Instead, his online diaries were filled with anecdotes and snapshots; he was having fun, literally hitting his stride. He was getting what he wanted out of running: “I like to be out in the wilderness—that’s more in keeping with who I am.” But there were also the social interactions. “I like the world,” he says. “[I like] the people.” Garside had found a girlfriend in Australia—a young medical student named Lucy McKinnon—and was getting ready for what he believed was the most important leg of his journey: the Americas. Garside’s plan was to fly from Sydney, Australia, to Chile, and run north, all the way to the United States. The runner’s planned route from there was to hug the Pacific through San Francisco, then turn east to New York, but he had a key stop to make: Hollywood. There, Garside thought, fame and riches awaited.
It wasn’t going to happen. In early 2000, Garside was in Venezuela, where he met and fell in love with another woman, Endrina Perez, who then accompanied him for much of the rest of his run (and whom he would later marry). But in May, soon after he left Caracas, the simmering conflict with Blaikie became personal. In his introduction to a reposted wire-service story, Blaikie, increasingly strident, wrote: “The accounts are awash in strong prose about the dangers he faces but not much about his actual running.” On May 15, Garside responded with a series of angry emails. Calling Blaikie a “mummies’ boy,” the Briton wrote: “Running is supposed to be a positive thing BUT the only criticism I have EVER had in the past five years is from YOU.” Blaikie’s reaction was to finally pronounce Garside an outright fraud: “I can’t accept his claims,” the Canadian retorted. “There is too much . . . to swallow at face value. And a thorough review of the diaries and press releases . . . only drives the point home.”
Blaikie’s tactics moved from written skepticism to near provocation; he began posting letters from his readers who sought “The Runningman” out to test him on the road. A typical challenge came from a Louisiana attorney who offered to pay Garside to compete in the Ultracentric 48-Hour Track Run, scheduled for November of that year in Dallas. The wording of the invitation, published on Blaikie’s website, showed how ugly the dispute had become: “Should be a piece of cake considering your accomplishments to date,” the lawyer wrote. “I’ll have to warn you, though, no ‘mummies’ boys.’ . . . only the laps you run, walk, or crawl will be counted.” Garside ignored the solicitation.
On September 1, 2000, Robert Garside crossed from Mexico into southern California. TV crews recorded the event. Wearing a sombrero, the runner talked excitedly about his adventure, his plans. He had no idea that everything was about to come apart.
I met Garside by accident. I’d been assigned to write a story about another long-distance daredevil—a 19-year-old from Truckee, California, who was attempting to become the first person to skateboard across the United States. The skater had briefly traveled with Garside. A person trying to run around the world would make for a good magazine article, and when my preliminary research led me to Blaikie and Garside’s likely fraudulence, the piece I was contemplating became even juicier.
The evidence against Garside seemed clear. He’d refused all chances to prove himself. And if Blaikie’s reconstruction of Garside’s route was correct, then The Runningman would be the fastest ultrarunner ever, faster even than runners competing on closed courses. As shaped by Blaikie, Garside’s claims seemed beyond outlandish: the runner, clearly, was delusional.
Garside didn’t help himself. He was the running equivalent of an NBA trash-talker, answering bluster with bluster. (In September 2000, he told the Associated Press: “I started out with $30, and I’m going to end up with $30 million. I guarantee it.”)
In recounting all this, I made a classic journalistic mistake. David Blaikie seemed credible, so I didn’t question either his methods or motives. Blaikie—who’d described himself as a “former journalist” and who’d earlier in his career worked as a political reporter on Parliament Hill—built a perfect campaign against Garside. When the runner left a series of angry voice-mails, Blaikie printed them verbatim. When somebody popped up to defend Garside, Blaikie’s online commentary was crafted respectfully, but was ultimately dismissive.
But even all that might not have been enough to condemn Robert Garside. Then, on February 11, 2001, a bombshell dropped. Garside—by then halfway across the United States—admitted in a story written by Nic Fleming and James McDonald, printed in London’s Sunday Express newspaper, that he’d falsified his 1997 diaries. It didn’t matter that the incident occurred as part of an abortive attempt. Here it was: Robert Garside was a liar, and because he was a liar, nothing he did afterward would have credibility. My story, published in the November/December 2001 issue of the now-defunct National Geographic Adventure, was headlined, simply: “The Running Scam.” By that time Garside says his sponsorships had dried up, and any company or media outlet that seemed to be contemplating an association got calls and emails from angry ultrarunners. Good Morning America canceled an announced appearance after receiving protests.
There’s a philosophical question here, and like most philosophical questions, there’s no clear answer: does Robert Garside’s lie in 1997 disqualify him? In 2001, I thought so, and so did much of the running community. What I didn’t notice (but should have) was that the dynamic between Blaikie and Garside had become so poisonous that an alternate point of view—that Garside was flawed and maddening at times, but the real deal—never even came up, and that the attacks against him simply weren’t fair. Why not wait until he was finished, when he could submit his evidence? Why the attempts to destroy him? Garside was being prosecuted for not running around the world before he’d even run around the world. In March 2001, the runner, broken and almost broke, left the United States for South Africa. “I had to go on,” he later told me, “but I didn’t know how.”
I cashed my check and congratulated myself for playing a role in guarding the purity of the sport. (I even wrote a second piece, for a media business blog, describing how the runner had fooled the press; Blaikie reprinted it on his website.) But I’d failed to ask a basic question: if Garside was faking it, what had he been doing during all the time he’d spent? Nobody—not me, not the other reporters who called Garside a fraud—had an answer for that. And as I would learn, when I finally got the chance to see the evidence, he’d clearly been to all the places he claimed to have been—and he’d moved at a runner’s pace.
Robert Garside arrived in South Africa in spring 2001. He headed north, planning to skirt the shores of the Indian Ocean. His goal was to reach the Middle East. But the attacks of September 11, 2001, changed all that. Garside, still in South Africa, continued running into Mozambique, but when he got to the Malawi border, he says, he was denied entry.
The journey was at the breaking point. Around the world, national frontiers were closing. He wasn’t sure how—or if—he could cross the Middle East; he was exhausted and almost out of money. Garside had always planned to run the long way across every continent. But the Guinness guidelines didn’t require it. So Garside flew to Morocco. He crossed the Strait of Gibraltar, and spent most of 2002 traversing Europe along the Mediterranean. He finished this leg in Antalya on the southern coast of Turkey in the fall of 2002.
Determined to make an African traverse, though one wasn’t required, Garside next flew to Cairo, Egypt. There were two false starts: first a run south along the Nile River, and a second after flying to Eritrea to run along its coast. Troubled by the dangers of crossing war-torn Sudan and frustrated at the prospect of having land gaps along his course, Garside decided to reprise his route that ended in 2001. He returned to the M
ozambique-Malawi border and ran southeast to Beira, Mozambique, on the sea. He could draw a straight line, on his Africa map, from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, by connecting the run from Cape Town.
This terrestrial hopscotching might strike some as not entirely legitimate; but other round-the-world efforts, including Kunst’s—the Guinness-certified walk that inspired Garside—skipped continents entirely. Garside did cross Africa by running from Cape Town, on the Atlantic, to Mozambique, on the Indian Ocean. He then flew to Mumbai and took a train to Kanyakumari, at the southern tip of India, in early April 2003. He ran north; in two months, he covered approximately 1,500 miles. He arrived at New Delhi—his revised starting point—on June 13, 2003. The finish was covered by the British press, but there was hardly a single account that didn’t list the runner’s effort as, at the very least, tainted, if not entirely open to question.
Even in disbelieving Robert Garside, I thought he’d done something amazing. He’d claimed to have covered about 40,000 miles. What I marveled at was not Garside’s supposed achievement, but the extent—the commitment, the years—of his fabrication. If he was a fraud, he was the greatest fraud ever. I wondered if he might be ready to admit that. In Brazil, he let himself be photographed with Ronnie Biggs, who’d participated in the biggest train robbery in British history—1963’s “Great Train Robbery,” which netted the equivalent of almost $53 million current U.S. dollars. After being captured, Biggs escaped from jail and spent three decades living well and publicly in Brazil, becoming a popular anti-hero. (He even contributed vocals to a Sex Pistols album.) If he couldn’t convince people he’d run the globe, I thought, maybe Garside could find a side door into fame by detailing his eight-year fabrication.
In early 2004, I contacted Robert Garside. I told him I wanted to hear his story. He refused. I persisted. “I’m going to fly to London,” I told him. I named a meeting place. If the runner didn’t show up, I promised, I’d never bother him again. Two weeks later, at a Starbucks in the city’s Kensington district, Robert Garside appeared. He’d gained weight since the run had ended, and he looked nervous. (I was too.) We talked for 10 cautious minutes, long enough to agree to meet the next day. It wasn’t really a shock, over the next week, to discover that I liked Robert Garside. (His ability to charm, his opponents said, was a talent he used to obscure his lies.) What surprised me was Garside’s openness. Everything I asked for, he delivered. I became the only person, up until that point, to gain full access to his logbooks, records, photographs, and travel documents.
For the first time, I understood the misery the assault against Garside had inflicted. His struggle had been blown to bits by what he saw as an angry mob. “Of course I’m crazy,” he said. “Why wouldn’t I be crazy? After being harassed for years, I’m very crazy. As crazy as anyone else after being harassed, but I don’t have a clinical condition.”
The intensity of those attacks bordered on stalking, something I confirmed when I later contacted folks who really had accompanied Garside. David Walker, owner of a microbrewery near Santa Barbara, California, shadowed Garside as he ran the Pacific coast of the United States. Walker says he saw the runner cover 60 miles in a single day, whose primary highlights were the multiple ambushes he experienced along the way. “At one point,” Walker told me, “somebody literally jumped from the bushes. He said he was a 2:30 marathoner, and kept pushing Robert to run faster and faster. Finally, Robert just sat down at the side of the road and ignored him. He just refused to say anything or even move for 15 minutes.”
But I also understood the romance, the magic, that Garside must have experienced. In our conversations, Garside would sometimes trail into a stream of consciousness: “Midnight in Tibet, 4,700 meters at a peak,” he mused over a beer, “the top of this mountain, with the moon shining in your eyes. It’s a real journey.” Then, snapping back to reality, he concluded: “Normal life? I don’t like it. I don’t like it.” (He was also funny. When I asked him about why he decided to visit Ronnie Biggs, he laughed: “[Because] he’s on the run and so am I!”)
On the last day of my visit, Garside allowed me to borrow his evidence—an entire suitcase’s worth—and make copies. As I stood in a FedEx Kinko’s not far from Piccadilly Circus, the runner’s 1996 start point, the first hints of what would bring me to the Nullarbor appeared. Maybe Robert Garside did run around the world. And if he did, I screwed him. I screwed one of the greatest runners ever.
For the next year, I stayed in constant contact with Garside. I’d persuaded this magazine to assign me a story tentatively titled “The Confessions of Robert Garside.” As my deadline approached and passed, I still hadn’t told my editors that what I was really doing was not detailing the lies of a fraud, but proving that Garside truly did circle the world.
I’d reconstructed Garside’s run and found that Blaikie’s extrapolations didn’t add up. His basic technique was to combine various scraps of time-based evidence—news accounts, direct diary entries by Garside, and the file modification dates in the code underlying Garside’s website—to reconstruct the runner’s route using a global atlas. I didn’t necessarily see Blaikie’s methodology as illegitimate, but it was by no means authoritative. I had the real data: Garside’s passport stamps and logbooks. I made over 100 overseas phone calls. Many witnesses didn’t remember Garside, but of those who did, none said he was anything but a dedicated runner. Walker, the brewery owner, ran alongside Garside for 20 miles, then followed him in a car for another 40. The runner’s average pace, Walker says, was 8.5 minutes per mile. The next day, Walker told me, Garside ran 30 miles over the steep San Marcos Pass, just north of Santa Barbara, at a similar pace. “He was the real deal,” Walker says. “I can’t be any more positive. He just ticks differently than other people.”
I was able to confirm that Garside ran in places arguably more inhospitable than the Nullarbor. I found witnesses who saw him run up the Atlantic coast of Argentina and into Brazil; who saw him in Tingri, a Tibetan town that’s often used as a staging point for Everest attempts. Garside claimed to have been arrested in China. I had copies of the police paperwork, and a friend translated them. The runner’s story panned out.
Blaikie also had challenged Garside’s background, noting repeatedly that there was no evidence Garside had ever completed a public run of any distance. His refusal to submit credentials was further evidence of deception. But Garside saw it differently: “How could I? He was there on his sofa at home. I was in the middle of nowhere.” I was able to quickly confirm three Garside marathons in 1994. And he’d done well. In April, he finished the London Marathon in 3:01. On September 18, he placed 41st in the Brussels Marathon, pulling a 2:48. Less than 10 days later, on September 25, he clocked 3:10 in Amsterdam.
When I asked Garside why he didn’t respond to the attacks by taking the high road, accepting even one challenge to prove himself, he told me that the level of vitriol had convinced him that anything he did would end up being used against him. This had turned out to be true. About two weeks after his return to London, Garside was dared by the host of a British television show to run 130 miles in 24 hours. The run took place on the 400-meter track at London’s Kingsmeadow Athletics Centre. After 14 hours and 72 miles, Garside quit. In an article published on Blaikie’s site, Ian Champion—a British race organizer—wrote: “If Robert Garside was no better organized during his alleged road running through isolated, barren countries than he was during his . . . 24-hour run, then I cannot believe he has run around the world.”
But Garside says that the assumption that running on the track is the same as running cross-country is mistaken. “I’d never run in circles like that,” Garside says. “The whole situation was demoralizing and humiliating.” And nobody, he complained, gave him credit for the 72 miles he did complete. When I asked Champion about that later, he softened his opinion: “I think if he trained for it,” Champion told me, “Garside could be a good runner.” Was it possible that Garside’s “failure,” with his mind and body in a s
tate of collapse and exhaustion, in a milieu unlike any he’d ever faced, was situational? “Yes,” Champion admitted.
When I met with him in London, Garside told me he was afraid to submit his materials to The Guinness Book of Records. A British ultrarunning statistician named Andy Milroy had founded an organization called The Association of Road Race Statisticians. (Blaikie provided Canadian statistics to the organization.) Milroy was on Guinness’s advisory committee for ultrarunning records, and already he and Blaikie had shown how powerful their influence over the records organization was. About a decade earlier, they’d brought into question an 11,134-mile run around the perimeter of the United States by a North Carolina woman named Sarah Fulcher. A Guinness editor told me that after Milroy’s inquiries, which were based on an article by Blaikie, the record had been “rested,” a sort of Guinness-speak version of shunning: a rested mark still stands officially, but it is not promoted or published.
When I read a story Blaikie wrote about Fulcher, I was struck by the way he compiled personal information about her, citing observers who noted her social behavior—Fulcher liked to party, the story implied—and questioning whether such behavior made her a fit runner. Blaikie had done the same thing with Robert Garside. As Garside ran across Australia, he was joined by McKinnon, the medical student who provided an eyewitness account of the runner’s final weeks in her country; she rode alongside him on a bicycle for 870 kilometers. On his website, Blaikie detailed Garside’s involvement with McKinnon, seeming to disapprove of the extra few weeks the runner spent in the company of a woman. “Most likely he simply wanted to enjoy himself,” Blaikie wrote, “which it seems he did, because it was at about this time that he met and became involved with Lucy.” In an emailed response that Blaikie also posted online, McKinnon—who has become a minor adventure celebrity in her own right; she’s the on-set doctor for the television show Survivor—angrily vouched for her former boyfriend: “You will be hard-pressed to prove that Robert is anything but a motivated, hard-working, driven, and honest man. I have no doubts in my mind that he will [do what he claims to be doing] despite what appears to be a . . . jealous bunch of people who call themselves ultramarathon runners.”
