Yes, I know it seems unlikely, but when a guy is unfairly traduced, it’s my duty to defend him, whether he’s a smarmy, lying toady for the rich or not. So I just can’t stand silent while Ryan is unfairly called a world class liar just because he claimed to have run a sub three hour marathon and claimed to run multiple marathons when he’s actually run only one, and he almost broke four hours, but not quite.
Look, I’ve both swum and run competitively. I can easily understand how Ryan’s memory might have become a little hazy, so it’s not like he was lying this time, he was just mis-remembering.
I mean, even now, I can’t remember how many marathons I’ve run. It might be zero, or it might be six or seven. How can I be expected to remember something like that? Or take my swimming career, during which I’m fairly sure that I broke 4 minutes for the 400 yard freestyle. Maybe I’m remembering wrong. Maybe it was six minutes, and maybe I never did that, possibly, but really, when you consider that two minutes in relation to the age of the universe (which Ryan will now no doubt tell you is as much as 6,000 years), what’s the difference, and who can be expected to remember such trivialities?
The important point is that at the time he said what he said, Ryan believed it to be true, or, just as legitimately, believed that it should be true and that it could become true, if he said it. How was he to know that some reporter at Runner’s World would act like a journalist and check in to his claim, after he’d grown used to reporters in Washington?
So let’s all lay off the guy. He lives in a world in which truthiness is all, and in that world, he ran as fast as he said he did, or even faster.
Oh, and Al Gore is still a liar for saying he invented the internet, even though he didn’t say that, and that lie reveals much about his character, even though it wasn’t a lie. But as to Ryan, his conversion of fantasy to truth tells us nothing.
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