A letter to the real Sarah Stanley

Dear Sarah,

We are writing to you to provide you with an open and public forum for dialogue, discussion and possibly resolution. Although the @FakeSaraStanley account was created initially to present an alternate perspective that your actions as admired by the many that follow, in fact, lack integrity and could be deemed as unethical. Public scrutiny and critical analysis are to be expected when you embrace and promote your public persona as a health, wellness and fitness expert.

There are many people that come with various degrees of complaints about you.  Some are fair, some are not believable and some are very valid.  At this point it has become apparent that the best way to allow this situation to work itself out for the benefit your professional future is to maybe discuss the nature of those complaints and allegations, some that are very serious, so that you are better aware of how you are perceived and have a chance to respond on your blog.  

First, the little ones:

• As you know the running/endurance community is very supportive of each other and nobody likes a blowhard.   You should understand that you can come off incredibly arrogant with your endurance ideas to the rest of the endurance world.  Things like running a “Double Boston” or naming the bike ride after your birthday and blowing it up all over like you are special belittles thousands of other athletes who put in 100 mile weekends or multi day bike rides.  People work very hard for their goals, some that are much bigger than yours, and for you to boast about yours like its extra ordinary is incredibly self centered.

• A minor annoyance on everyone’s mind is your liberal use of the terms professional/sponsored athlete.  While it’s great that a few people decided to allow you to promote their wares through your races and your website, a professional athlete this, in the reality use of the word, does not make.  Yes, you’re sponsored.  No you are not Scott Jurek and Brooks, and when you blast it out there that you are a sponsored athlete, it creates a false image in people’s minds of a real professional athlete.  While you are to be commended for your endurance achievements and even getting out there, you are not a top notch athlete (or at least how you present yourself) to be associated, again, in people’s minds with real professional endurance athletes.  This certainly does not give you the right to ask unsuspecting race directors to waive your fees when you present yourself as a “sponsored athlete.” You should also note that even the best professional endurance athletes have day jobs but we will come back to that later.

• The parenting advice.  Stop it. You are not a parent. Telling parents how to raise their kids is incredibly offensive to many.  No ifs, ands or buts.

• You are not a fitness expert.  You do not have any professional certifications, or at least credible ones and when you give people advice or tweet as a “fitness expert” it creates another false image.  We applaud your efforts to help but frankly sometimes you give really BS advice and make those people who are real fitness experts with years of experience helping others, cringe.    

• The things you are definitely not are: a dietitian, a physician or a nutritionist.  There is nothing credible about your bio, as publicly posted, that would give you the right to give people (wrong) dieting advice.  That is not only (again) arrogant but also dangerous to people’s health.  Mocking those who do not eat like yourself is highly unethical.  Questioning people’s diseases (and possibly lying about your own) is downright inhuman.

On those last three.  Just to make sure:  Tweeting about it constantly still does not make you an expert.

On to the bigger ones: Your lifestyle and your charity work…

 *Very important to note that this is based on appearance, which may not be fact, and we would love for you to respond to set the record straight.

• The current appearance, based on witness accounts and your blog/tweets, is that you, as Sarah Stanley Inspired, and your other projects, exist solely to fund your traveling and racing lifestyle and to self promote.  It has been reported that you often ask people for cash, frequent flyer miles, free race entries (and sometimes overstay your welcome to those who are kind enough to let you stay) and pass yourself off as a charity.  On the surface of it, this appears to be illegal. On your website you have links to many organizations but its never explained where the funds go. You are not registered as a 501(c)(3) and thus there is no way for people to find out what the legal statuses of your projects are.  At best, you manage a poorly run, one-woman charity without any quantifiable or reportable achievements.  At worst you are a charity fraud and a tax cheat.  There is currently an ongoing debate whether to report this to the IRS. We will await your response.

• There are many REAL endurance athletes out there that do much more realistic endurance events such as daily marathons, ultramans, regular Ironmans, desert races etc who have full time jobs, families and run legitimate charities.  When we mean legitimate:  those that don’t pay for their travel, fees, etc; are registered with the IRS and are open and transparent; and actually raise money for their cause.  Whatever it is you are doing makes a mockery of those people’s efforts and is very sad.

• Your cause.  This has to be said.  We apologize for the unflattering photo, and we’ve debated about putting up that picture of you.  We did not want to touch the weight issue in the FakeSaraStanley tweets but it should be brought up here, in light of your cause efforts.   At the heart of it, you appear to be an overweight woman who goes to schools and tells children how to be healthy.   You give people fitness advice while having outdated glamour shots of yourself on the website.  It seems deceiving, illogical and self defeating.  What child or parent is going to take healthy living advice from someone who does not appear to follow her own mantra?  Losing weight is hard no doubt, it’s a sensitive issue for many, and it is a struggle for many which is why this its baffling to understand how you can self-justify your tweets and your cause given your appearance. 

• Finally. Stop being mean to people. The biggest complaints about you have been: “she said this to me” or “she treated me incredibly rudely and arrogantly when we met” and you hurt people’s feelings.  If you legitimately want to call yourself a humanitarian the first thing you have to do is learn how to respect your fellow human beings and treat everyone as equals.

We hope this serves as a wake up call to change the way you present yourself to the public and you might still be able to do some good rather than continuing to blindly cause damage all around you.  We eagerly await your blog response by the afternoon of August 20^th, 2011.  Sincerely,

-          The @FakeSaraStanley project

To the commenters. We welcome feedback and other questions to Sarah. Since this is a somewhat serious letter with some real allegations we ask that you keep it professional and give the real Sarah a chance to respond.