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[Hari Seldon]

Pretty sure she had professional/social aspirations tied to her ability to get onto the elite team of the running club.

Why she thought she could be smarter than the average runner is beyond me.

Even casual runners like my friends and I use Garmin/Strava etc and look at each other's results.

For someone with the amount of followers she had on Instagram and blogs, there was already going to be decent amount of people wondering why there was a bunch of discrepancies in her splits, cadence heart rate, etc.

Some people think the watchdog guy is kind of lame for spending all this time busting folks, but it's unfair for legitimate runners to get screwed by cheaters - no matter how fast or slow you are.

Yeah anyone who runs knows that going from a 7:09 to a 5:25 split time is ridiculous, unless you were doing it on purpose to like pace a friend. I.e. you are so fast you can fuck off for the first half. I don't understand how she didn't think people would catch this lol. The best way to cheat is to juice, like my 'ol high school track coach did lol.

 

[True Savior]

I'm much more upset by the business analyst who moonlights as a marathon investigation watchdog blogger.

I can't take it.

How can such a nerd exist.

His blog is something else.

 

[Count Dookkake]

He is a hero.

 

[sibarraz]

I always wondered, how can you cheat in a marathon? I always though that there must be enough spectators watching (plus competitors) noticing someone suddenly leaving the track riding a bike, and then returning

 

[Ran rp]

It's a sad apology because she is still attempting to minimize the damage. She had this all planned out and went to great lengths to manufacture evidence long after the cheating actually occurred. That's not getting swept up in the moment, that's calculated cheating that is being spun into a heat of the moment mistake because the level of cheating she engaged in is unforgivable. If you are going to own your mistakes, you have to own them all. That's how apologies work.

 

[airmangataosenai]

I want to point out that the time she likely would have ended up with had she not cheated, somewhere around an hour 32 minutes, still would have been a really good time. That makes her cheating even more ridiculous to me.

She likely would hace finished in the top 1 to 2 percent regardless.

 

[GK86]

I got you man. The video is at the top of the article. Enjoy!

NBC News: Marathon Investigator Derek Murphy

YouTube link for those that prefers it

That was fascinating. Thank you!

 

[Vermillion]

I came for this.

 

[otapnam]

I always wondered, how can you cheat in a marathon? I always though that there must be enough spectators watching (plus competitors) noticing someone suddenly leaving the track riding a bike, and then returning

She came back after the race was over to fudge her Garmins recording of her run


So she rode the entire ourse. On her bike. At the pace she needed to match her cheat. After she has run 11.5 miles earlier in the day.

It was no accident

 

[DorkLord54]

Maybe someone in Bel-Air is hiring for help.

 

[autumnleaf]

I always wondered, how can you cheat in a marathon? I always though that there must be enough spectators watching (plus competitors) noticing someone suddenly leaving the track riding a bike, and then returning

26 miles is a long way, you won't find many marathons that are lined with people the entire way like say the London Marathon. There are lots and lots of Marathons and most are much smaller in scale than the big ones, fewer spectators and competitors, bigger gaps between people.

 

[Mr.Shrugglesツ]

She was alternative marathoning.

 

[CadetMahoney]

I want a picture of his smug face when he brought her down.

 

[Fistwell]

I'm much more upset by the business analyst who moonlights as a marathon investigation watchdog blogger.

I can't take it.

How can such a nerd exist.

That guy is awesome, I'm a big fan.

I want to point out that the time she likely would have ended up with had she not cheated, somewhere around an hour 32 minutes, still would have been a really good time. That makes her cheating even more ridiculous to me.

She likely would have finished in the top 1 to 2 percent regardless.

Where she'd have placed I dunno, depends on the race, but the difference between 90 and 80min is pretty significant.

 

[p2535748]

I always wondered, how can you cheat in a marathon? I always though that there must be enough spectators watching (plus competitors) noticing someone suddenly leaving the track riding a bike, and then returning

In a big marathon in the lead pack, I imagine it's very difficult. In a smaller marathon, there's probably points where you can cut where people aren't looking. I've never really been in one where there are huge gaps in the crowd, but there are a lot of marathons out there.

Also, if you're not in the lead pack, people pop in and out of the crowd all of the time. If you're out there for four hours, you might have to pee or stretch or you might want to go say hello to a friend in the crowd. I've seen people run off the course into a coffee shop and run by me later with a bagel. You stop really noticing it. If someone just popped out of the crowd in front of me late in a race, I'd just assume they had gone in there earlier.

 

[Korey]

Cheating in road races is surprisingly common, even for people running very average time.

Cheaters are often very weird or narcissistic. It makes good stories.

The best is probably the Kip Litton case. He ran a website claiming to document his quest to run a marathon in every state. It was ostensibly to raise money and awareness for his son with cystic fibrosis. Over a few years, the running community and various race coordinators began to uncover inconsistencies in his races. He had cheated in various and ingenious ways in all of them. He even claimed he won non existent races on his website, such as the West Wyoming Marathon. He never admitted anything.

Here's a very interesting long piece of The New Yorker on it:
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/08/06/marathon-man

There's a whole blog dedicated to Kip Litton. I think for every weird cheater nobody there is an equivalently obsessed watcher trying to find irregularities in all public races results and pictures.

So the dude stopped running so that nobody could ever prove anything now?

The article is great but it just ends and there's zero closure at all. Nobody knows how he did it and there were no consequences at all.

 

[RelentlessRolento]

As a resident of Fort Lauderdale... I'm not surprised.

 

[Regulus Tera]

She cheated and she still only got second place? Girl pls

 

[What did he mean by this?]

Without fail I keep reading the title as Runner Cut in Half

 

[shira]

She wanted a GPS-based entry that looked like she ran the whole course at her alleged pace.

I think it would have been more impressive if she was running 50 mph

 

[norm9]

Shit happens. If she wants a second place medal that bad, just give it to her so she goes away.

 

[coklat]

Some people think the watchdog guy is kind of lame for spending all this time busting folks, but it's unfair for legitimate runners to get screwed by cheaters - no matter how fast or slow you are.

IIRC, the guy is really only looking to expose people who cheat to get good enough times to qualify for the Boston Marathon. Since there's so few bibs for that race compared to the number of people who want to participate, it seems slightly more noble to make sure that people aren't fraudulently taking places from people who genuinely run fast enough to qualify.

But it's still pretty nerdy.

 

[R-User!]

I'm at the point where I feel sorry for her. The attention this has received now seems to outweigh the moral failing and her life is going to suck for a little while. It's not in the same league as that story about a woman who was cheating in high level, more professional races for years.

also, A1A?

BEACHFRONT AVENUE!

 

[rjc571]

Could've been worse, she could have been using a football that dropped from 12.5 psi to 11.3 psi after sitting outside for two hours on a cold rainy day.

 

[CadetMahoney]

BEACHFRONT AVENUE!

lol

/not obscure

 

[nelsonroyale]

Haha this kind of thing cracks me up...As someone who has done a wilderness marathon back in the day, I find it pathetic and funny.

I got you man. The video is at the top of the article. Enjoy!

NBC News: Marathon Investigator Derek Murphy

YouTube link for those that prefers it

hahahah this man hahah

 

[Grimm Fandango]

Cheating in road races is surprisingly common, even for people running very average time.

Cheaters are often very weird or narcissistic. It makes good stories.

The best is probably the Kip Litton case. He ran a website claiming to document his quest to run a marathon in every state. It was ostensibly to raise money and awareness for his son with cystic fibrosis. Over a few years, the running community and various race coordinators began to uncover inconsistencies in his races. He had cheated in various and ingenious ways in all of them. He even claimed he won non existent races on his website, such as the West Wyoming Marathon. He never admitted anything.

Here's a very interesting long piece of The New Yorker on it:
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/08/06/marathon-man

There's a whole blog dedicated to Kip Litton. I think for every weird cheater nobody there is an equivalently obsessed watcher trying to find irregularities in all public races results and pictures.

This is worth quoting again. Great read.

 

[n64coder]

I want to point out that the time she likely would have ended up with had she not cheated, somewhere around an hour 32 minutes, still would have been a really good time. That makes her cheating even more ridiculous to me.

She likely would hace finished in the top 1 to 2 percent regardless.

It's a good time but she wanted to be part of the Dashing Whippets performance team which required her to finish with a time of one hour 24 mins or better.

 

[ghostjoke]

Her commitment to cheating is amazing in a scummy way, but the dude's commitment to revealing her as a fraud is another level.

She cheated and she still only got second place? Girl pls

2nd place is less likely to be noticed unless you got Hiratio on you trail.

 

[Dalek]

I got you man. The video is at the top of the article. Enjoy!

NBC News: Marathon Investigator Derek Murphy

YouTube link for those that prefers it

This is fantastic! Thanks for sharing.

 

[Cheech]

Glad she got caught, and the dude who busts these people is providing a crazy valuable public service.

I got negative splits at the Chicago Marathon, and it's fucking *tough*. So much so, that people who did it got a free pair of shoes from New Balance. The funny thing is I didn't do it intentionally; I was following one of the pacers in my corral for the first 12-13 miles, and straight up lost him. So I guess I was accidentally sandbagging myself... ah well.

Regardless, when this guy stops busting people, I hope somebody steps in and picks up the mantle. This kind of things really, really pisses me off. You train your ass off, only to lose to somebody who cuts the course? Fuck that. I know what it's like to lose a race by seconds (I was 20 seconds away from placing in the money at the last 5k I ran), and I would be apoplectic if it came out one of the people in front of me cheated. Talk about sucking the fun out of the sport.