Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Not meeting any of them means you are not a finisher of the Barkley Marathon. Article is scant about anything other than the >60hr time. It doesn't say he would not have qualified had he come in under 60. (So the fellow who finished under 60 hours met all those other requirements to the letter? Not a single wrong turn, etc?) > Ok, so if we say 6 seconds, that's really close enough. Close enough to what? Nobody is s…
The article is pretty scant on the rules details, I agree with you on that. It's not just that he took a wrong turn (which is common and small deviations are somewhat expected), he went a couple miles off course. Laz (who runs the race) made that point in the video that was linked from the article. Laz made it even more clear in a post on facebook per [0]: “[…] gary had just come in after having run off course and mi…
That's very different; in that case, the finish line crossing time has no meaning (and perhaps shouldn't even be quoted around).
Going for another two miles to cover the missing distance could take an hour or more in that body condition (even on an ideal, flat surface, never mind the actual one). Especially given that he calculated his remaining physical resources with regard to where he thought the finish lied.
I accept responsibility for getting carried away with an article that is lacking in crucial details and helping to perpetrate the wrong story.
> Arriving after that point means you didn't finish the race in the allotted time.
In the eyes of the world, you finished. If we drop the "in the alloted time" part, the remaining statement's face value interpretation in the world at large is false. (The unqualified statement may still be understood properly in the narrow context shared by a group of people, in which the condition is implicit, but carrying that statement over to the world at large without context is equivocation.)