I think it is unnecessary and rather disrespectful to be quite so critical of Miles.
If you read my post again, you'll note that my criticism is not of Miles' riding, which
is impressive (it seems likely that he'll finish his year with one of the highest tallies ever recorded), but of his head-in-the-sand view of his progress, as highlighted by his response to TimC's Facebook post. He has made no out-and-out acknowledgement that he is targeting anything less than the Godwin record (look at the cover picture on his Facebook page!), so to say that he's still on target
rather undermines his credibility.
See also, for example, his Facebook post from October 17:
Should finish somewhere between 400 and 450 km's for the day.
I'm not going to go to the trouble of pointing out the exact distance he travelled on that day because I'm not sure whether he's really referring to a calendar day or a 24-hour period of riding, and to try drilling down into his Strava data would make me seem like a misanthropic, nitpicking bastard, so you might be best looking to Jo's daily summaries to get a feel as to whether this short-term target was met.
Are half of the posts in the IronOx thread unnecessary and disrespectful?
This is a well-known issue in sport. Say you are an amateur 10 000m runner. Your PB is 59m, you commonly run 65. At 5 000m you are on 29 [more like] 35m, well ahead behind of PB pace. You congratulate yourself....
FTFY
But what he is achieving is still mighty impressive and beyond what most cyclists I have met have either the hunger or ability to do.
Indeed, it's arguably more impressive to carry on churning out the big distances when/if you know in your heart of hearts that you're not going to break the record.
Go Miles!