Kevin Beck calls it the 'World's most earnest parody site'. Others are even less kind. For the person that stumbles onto Richard Gibben's running site, whether accidentally or from his force feeding of every running discussion board known to man, we hope they've done their homework.
My first experience with him was somewhere in Coolrunning where a reference was made to some nonsensical study being presented and one of the posters quickly recognized the info coming from Sir Richard and then preceeded to give us the quick rundown. It seems Richard is a runner of some experience but never really took it seriously (he sounds like an A type personality) until one day he decided that he would go out and kick the running world's butt in a concerted motion as he mowed them down in his path. No doubt he bought a gob of runner literature, read it all and decided to pound out a million miles a week, cuz somewhere it mentioned all top runners do this, and warning signs of imminent injury be damned proceeded to beat his knees and legs into useless props with a sole remaining purpose of keeping his ass from touching the ground. I don't think he races anymore, given the last result I saw from him likely had him finishing just behind Susie Q Austin's butt as she celebrated her 30 minute 5k victory shortly before the finish line was dismantled.
The whole thing seems to have left him rather disgruntled with the anyone capable of maintaining a 10 minute a mile pace for more than 10 minutes. Since surely his interpretation of training methodologies couldn't possibly have been erroneous,the fault MUST lie with the likes of Lydiard and Vigil and other top coaches. He's therefore decided to declare war on what he calls 'conventional training wisdom' and show the world that there is better path to success than hard work and dedication. Now we're not quite sure what 'conventional training wisdom' is since no two people train the same but let's not interfere with a good battle.
Somewhere in my exchanges with him on CR, he decided he didn't like my attitude (one of his favorite methods of evasion is to cry 'Attack! Attack!', declare you the latest member of his sh¡t list, and you'll never get to call his bluff again). So, to allow me to continue my hobby, I 'cleverly' signed onto his own discussion board as 'okrunner' (hee hee....I sure pulled the wool over HIS eyes) so I can get my share of shitsandgiggles when debugging ASP script becomes tedious.
His global contribution to the running world, in terms of advice, is to run 3 days a week...one interval workout, on tempo run (which he likes to call a 'power run') and a long run...and no more, and a top runner you shall surely soon be. This is remarkably like the FIRST marathon training plan published by the Furman Institute, which Sir R seemed to take quite strongly to as of late, and I have a feeling FIRST rather influenced this groundbreaking work of his. Anyway, it's easy enough to disect what comes off his fingertips into typed words and show him how his logic processing unit seems to have a short or two somewhere, but you do have to step around the dozen or so unrelated responses he usually provides to try and muddle whatever the original point was being made. But stick with it, I've learned to keep it focused for him and have even managed to get him to admit he makes things up (see his disc. brd. thread on 'FIRST Training Research Update'), but I have be oh so careful in my responses lest my alias gets bunkied up with my CR ID on his list.
I'm not sure what quite to make of him. I don't know if he's making the whole thing up and laughing hysterically at our own amusement of his brilliant work, or if he actually believes what he's peddling. Either way, like a dog that you can get to chase his tail, it's always fun to poke a stick at him now and again. Beck may have it right.
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