Ragen Chastain is a fat acceptance activist/public speaker, an extreme advocate of HAES (Health at Every Size), and a self-described "elite athlete".
She first caught the attention of the internet for her dancing, example left. She had a blog, danceswithfat, where would call herself a three-time national dance champion, even though she can barely even get both feet off the ground. This rustled the jimmies of GOMI, fph and fatlogic, where she starred in several posts about her HAES claims and became a known figure. Further investigation revealed that her dance titles were in categories with no/few other dancers for pay-to-win non-competitive social dancing:
https://truthaboutragen.wordpress.com/2015/10/09/ragen-chastains-national-dance-championship-titles/(yes, she has her own hate site)
Then she kind of dropped the dancing thing in favour of a new endeavour: Ironfat. She purported that she would take on a full Ironman in 2016 to prove once and for all that fat people can do anything that skinny people can.
Her first attempt at running was in the Seattle marathon, which she documents here:
https://truthaboutragen.wordpress.com/2015/10/09/ragen-chastains-national-dance-championship-titles/tl;dr:
>says she trained 370 miles for a 26 mile marathon>cutoff time is 8.5 hours>actually takes her 12.5 hours >(that’s 2 miles/hour, or 3.3 km/h)>the race organizers cleaning up behind her tell her to quit early on>after realizing she won’t, they break into tears and tell her how inspirational she is>took half an hour bathroom breakShe then started to blog about her Ironman training, which included many tales of street harassment and sassy comebacks with little stats or substance. The highlight of this was when she started “Selfie Sunday” - a day intended to prove the haters wrong where she would post selfies from every Sunday of the month. Except that the haters looked up the exif data for her selfies and discovered that they were all taken within minutes of each other:
https://truthaboutragen.wordpress.com/2015/09/02/road-to-tempe-2015-fake-selfie-sunday/Or perhaps the most damning evidence of fakery:
https://www.reddit.com/r/RagenChastain/comments/3oi6az/repost_ragen_strikes_again/cvxi71wAfter this she started deleting all her metadata lol.
So around October of last year, Ragen attempts a half Ironman after 1.5 years of training. She was disqualified at the first gate (after the swim) for taking too long.
Live thread from the day of the event:
https://www.reddit.com/r/RagenChastain/comments/3p80ed/imaz_703_race_day_megathread_put_all_race_updates/You’d think that this might cause her to reevaluate her views on HAES or her own abilities but nope. Like a true narcissist, she keeps on trucking with the same delusions of athleticism.
Fast forward to this week:
Ragen participates in a leisurely 5k aimed at fat people as a “baby’s first race” kind of thing. She clocks in at over an hour, even though she was found to have cut part of the course. She was captured on video crossing the finish line from the opposite direction, then turning around and taking pictures with her friends (who bandited the race):
https://truthaboutragen.wordpress.com/2016/06/30/road-to-tempe-2016-ragen-the-cheater/She has since been disqualified and removed from their website.
She also has claimed to have been a national merit scholar and valedictorian with a perfect GPA, a professional level clarinet soloist, a cheerleading captain, winner of the annual lifeguard races 4 straight years, and a competitive figure skater & gymnast, all while in high school.
I think this cow has great potential. She posts in bursts, but when she does they’re full of hilarious delusions and bait-taking.