In exactly 96 days, Ragen Chastain plans to swim 2.4 miles, bike 112 miles, and run a full marathon in under 17 hours at IRONMAN Arizona in Tempe, AZ. To date, she has yet to complete a triathlon of any length. Her entire endurance event experience consists of showing up woefully underprepared for IRONMAN 70.3 Arizona last October and failing to complete the swim, and gaming the rules at the 2013 Seattle Marathon to force volunteers to remain on the course until she finished in well over 12 hours “in a blur of pain”. Since she started her apparently intense daily 3-5 hour training regimen in May 2014, she has managed to drop out of a marathon, two super sprint triathlons, and cut the course at a novelty fun run 5K. Over the the last two years, her 5K PR has gone down from 1:09:50 to 1:05:51, still not quite managing to break into the elite sub-hour 5K nonagenarian class.
At the moment Ragen appears to be in a slump, coming off a long period of mysterious illness, and neglecting both her training and blogging as she did last summer. She is referring to the period between now and November as “miracle months” because she acknowledges it would take a miracle for her to have any hope of finishing the race. In over two years of training, she hasn’t shared a single meaningful piece of training data like a pace or time. Instead she continues to write meaningless “training updates” and post weekly collections of blurry close-ups of her face to somehow prove she is actually training for 3-5 hours every day and ready for an IRONMAN despite all evidence to the contrary. It is debatable how many of these photos are even genuine, given she is now stripping EXIF data and making them as generic as possible after being caught posting fake training selfies from EXIF data and even from background details. The one time Ragen has accidentally included EXIF data since then revealed that she considers gentle highway underpasses on a paved urban path to be incredibly steep hills, and that even the vague description she had given of her workout was a lie.
In honour of Fake Selfie Sunday returning to IronFat after a month-long hiatus, we’ve put together a compilation of almost every single IronFat selfie, arranged for smooth transitions. This should give you a good idea of how meaningful Ragen’s “training selfies” truly are compared to almost any other “athlete”.
Dances with Facts 
Not one selfie where it seems like she is sweating or red in the face from actually working out. Not a single one.
Sweating and red faces are only for less elite athletes.
Or for people who tie their shoes.
😄
And how amazingly dry she looks in all those “swimming” selfies. Boggles the mind.
Yeah, exactly! I know what sweaty looks like…
Are these in chronological order? If so, then over the course of two+ years of training, presumably outside in the sunshine at times, she hasn’t developed much of a tan. Odd.
No, like I mentioned in the post, they’re not in chronological order, they’re arranged for the smoothest transitions to show how similar they are. I’ve been working on a chronological version but it’s a bit more of an undertaking. Having seen most of it in chronological order there is really nothing revealing. Her skin tone and weight stay the same since she is dedicated to not losing weight and does most of her “training” in the middle of the night. It’s impossible to tell anything about her progress since they are all the same blurry close-up of her mug.
It would be a medical impossibility to be training for an Ironman 3 to 5 hours a day for 2 years and not lose weight. Even if you did continue to eat a massive amount of calories you would still be developing a lot of lean muscle and most of the weight would be strictly gut. Faces are always the 1st thing to lean out.
Was brought here because someone used her as an example of a 300lb marathon runner when I said that no fat person would ever have a lead role in a horror film because Michael Myers would’ve ended it without breaking a sweat.
Shameless plug, but I have a post about how a large woman is tired of being the butt of the joke… she starred in American Horror Story as the fat freak.
Irony.
Link please? I glanced at your website Mr Deadman, but all I saw were zombies…
http://www.deadmanstome.net
Also check out my post on Chrissy Metz saying she doesn’t want to be the butt of the joke anymore after playing the fat freak on American Horror Story.
Thanks for the link – but here I was, expecting some sort of inspirational story about how Chrissy decided to use AHS as a springboard to improve herself…
Instead it’s same ol’, same ol’ – somehow I don’t see Joss Whedon creating a Buffy-like vehicle for a morbidly obese vampire hunter; it just wouldn’t sell.
Ragen, I can take a pic in front of the White House and claim that I live there. The pic doesn’t make my story true.
We’ve discussed every possible scenario of how this could end; All we need now is a handy-dandy matrix with some odds of it happening. Let us continue the hirple towards IronManateeAZ
You know, I am a large woman. Probably about the size of Ragen. That being said, I’m not a fan. I appreciate this perspective, and understanding of distance runners, which most of my family is involved in.
That being said, it’s hard to weed through the good information when there is quite a bit of fat shaming. Example-that video compilation of self-esteem. Even the music appeared to be chosen….I don’t know. I’m sort of at a loss.
I’m probably your target audience, if your purpose is not just to point fingers. If you’re trying to show that her goals aren’t realistic for someone my size (and they arent) , go a little easier on us that are struggling.
(And thank you for including the photos of larger women who’ve accomplished long races. That was great.)
I would appreciate if you could point out some examples of fat shaming on this blog. At least two Dances with Facts authors have struggled with significant weight issues, and I think we’ve made it fairly clear over the last couple years that none of our criticism of Ragen hinges on her weight. Some of Ragen’s goals are unrealistic because of her weight, and specifically her stated commitment to not losing weight. That’s just physics. The vast majority of Ragen’s problems are caused by the constant stream of lies she tells about her accomplishments, personal experiences, and athletic skills and training. It should be fairly obvious to almost anyone that Ragen has not been training for 3-5 hours every day for the last 27 months, despite her claims to the contrary. It should also be obvious that someone who is unable to complete a 5K in under an hour has no business entering an IRONMAN so they can claim to be an IRONMAN competitor after they DNF badly.
Ragen is insulting every single other triathlete with her insincere IronFat nonsense, thin or fat. She is constantly stealing the limelight from genuinely inspirational fat athletes by ridiculously exaggerating her athletic abilities beyond all reason. Did you realize her three amazing “national dance championship titles” are at the non-competitive social dancing level of a tiny little pay-to-win dance circuit where the “national championships” have no pre-qualifying? In two cases she only faced a single other couple to become a “national champion”. After she started blogging she did everything possible to pretend her participation ribbons were meaningful national competitive dance titles, and to this day still uses them to speak with authority.
I am happy to admit the music chosen for this video was intended to poke fun at Ragen. It’s a free Youtube audio track called “Clowning Around” which seemed highly appropriate for Ragen’s ridiculous IronFat antics.
I’m sorry, but I feel you are being defensive for no good reason. This blog does not contain fat shaming. In fact it has gone out of its way to avoid that, I’d say. It’s shaming no one but Ragen. (The comments are something else, of course),
I understand that you struggle with your weight, but one of the things people really dislike from fat people is when they interpret neutral or unrelated comments, or even facts as ‘fat shaming’. If there is shame, it is inside yourself, and not on this blog.
Well, first I’d point to the music from the selfie video. Can music be shameful? I don’t know, but it made me uncomfortable. I’d have to do some reading for other examples-I have read the entire blog, but admittedly it’s been a while.
If I have any bias, it’s against fit freaks in general. 75% of my time with my family is listening to their latest stats Maybe that comes through here.
??? So, fit folks are freaks and it’s okay for you to be biased against them? Okay.
That’s not really what I meant, whether I was in a bad mood or whatever, I should not have said fit freaks. I love so many fit people around me. I am literally the only person in my family with a weight problem, and a major one at that.
My mom silently counts what I eat. My family gets to do all these things I can’t.
It’s painful. I’m tired.
And I did mention several times that I appreciate this blog and the great post highlighting those who’ve had super accomplishments.
If I was truly offended, I’d just leave.
There were tubas before there were legions io fat people. Coincidence? Perhaps Tubas have caused the obesity epidemic and it’s time for some intersectional activism around this little known but very important issue. This sounds like a job for third wave feminism.(Actually I am a feminist and want to assure the easily duped that my preceding comment was said in jest, thus ruining the joke. Typical humorless femimist killjoy.)
How about a new post to distract us?
these 80 days can’t go by fast enough.
Whelp I’m starting a training program for my first sprint triathlon next April, and Ragen’s NON example will serve as both the carrot AND the stick as my training regimen grows more intense…
I’ve known for many years that you can’t out-train a bad diet; I pledge to faithfully report any net gain or loss. This AM: 201.3
Sorry, I don’t do selfies!
[…] have only been five IronFat updates since July 12, or once every 12 days. While we await further Miracle Months updates like the century ride report, here is a summary of the current state of Ragen’s […]
Most of these selfies look like she took them in the same room and just spun around a bit.