At this year’s Brooklyn Half-Marathon, this male runner wore a female bib and won the women’s 35-39 age group. (brightroom.com)
(
)
Last May, a man attracted attention on the Brooklyn Half-Marathon course, and not just because he had striking facial hair, was averaging blazing, sub-seven-minute miles during the challenging race and reportedly finished in just 1 hour, 26 minutes.
He wore bib No. 14453 — a number that would have been assigned to a far slower runner, forcing him to start near the back of the pack — and he was noted by several people as being uncommonly rude and aggressive on the course.
“I imagine he had to barrel through a lot of people to have a 1:26 finish from the 15th corral,” said one online commenter who claimed to have been shoved by the man.
The case grew more intriguing when No. 14453 was declared the winner in the women’s 35-to-39 age group, and it became apparent that the man had run wearing a bib registered to someone else, of a different sex.
An online outcry ensued, and the names of the man — and the woman whose bib he wore — were promptly removed from the race results. While his motivation for cheating is unknown, it is likely he either purchased or was given the bib, possibly so he could gain entry to the sold-out race or to improve the woman’s finish time.
“The moral of the story is that if you’re a bearded man masquerading as a woman, at least be polite,” Jonathan Cane, a prominent local running coach joked on his blog.
Cheating appears to be growing in local New York road races — or at the very least it’s becoming increasingly more apparent. “I don’t necessarily think that more people are cheating,” says Cane, but “more cheaters are getting caught.”
Paul Ryan was certainly caught last August when he told a radio station he had run a marathon in less than three hours, a claim that was met with skepti
From MARATHON on Page 35
cism online. Runners World magazine investigated and found that Ryan’s time was actually 4:01:25.
“Our news staff started making phone calls to find out, because it seemed odd,” recalls one of the magazine’s editors, Jeff Dengate.
In an age where even the smallest races feature electronic-chip timing and post results openly online, it’s next to impossible to lie outright about your time and get away with it, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of other ways be sneaky in sneakers.
Sunday, some 47,500 runners are expected to start the New York City Marathon. The vast majority will finish, while a few will bow out, unable to complete the 26.2 miles due to injury or exhaustion.
Several dozen, however, will take a less noble route. While the New York Road Runners (NYRR), which puts on the marathon and is the city’s foremost running organization, is hesitant to discuss the less savory elements of the race, media director Richard Finn concedes that each year an average of 30 to 40 runners are disqualified.
Common infractions include cutting miles out of the course or assuming another person’s identity. Dengate says that with the New York course, it’s “very easy” for runners to come across the 59th Street Bridge into Manhattan and head straight to Central Park, rather than heading up into The Bronx, shortening the course by about nine miles. “You’re getting tired and that temptation is there,” he says.
NYRR’s director of race scoring, Tom Kelley, says there are numerous video checkpoints along the course and interim timing mats at every mile, every five kilometers, and at the halfway point to prevent cheaters. Of these, only 5K splits and the half-marathon times are posted online.
Cane claims the interval timing mats at every mile were added in the last few years, presumably to discourage cheating. The NYRR declined to give an exact timeline as to when new preventative measures were added.
Every year, Cane spends hours obsessively monitoring the marathon results to weed out potential cheaters. “There are usually 30 to 50 [runners’ results] that jump out as being really suspect,” he says. When searching out cheaters, Cane looks for runners who miss several of the interim timing mats along the course or who suddenly go from running 10-minute miles to seven-minute miles, based on their recorded splits.
“There’s a lot of pressure for folks to finish,” he says. Interestingly enough, he’s observed that course cutters aren’t necessarily top runners looking for prize money; they’re often just moderate runners looking to finish and get a medal to wear to the office on Monday.
They think, “This sucks, I’m not going to make it to the finish line, my family’s waiting for me at the Tavern on the Green, so I’m just going to take this little shortcut,” he says. “It’s easy in your mind [to think] who am I hurting?”
He’s noticed a higher rate of cheating among foreign runners. “I think what probably happens, you book with a travel agency, you tell all of your friends you’re flying from France, you didn’t really train enough, you’re having a crappy day, you figure ‘I’m just going to go get my finisher’s medal.’ ” He also suspects social media and running for charity programs have increased the pressure on people to finish at any cost.
Cutting courses and false identities aren’t the only scams, and Lance Armstrong and other famous professionals aren’t the only athletes using performance-enhancing drugs. Christian Hesch, 33, a small-time competitive runner based in California who has run in several NYRR races, recently admitted to using a banned substance 54 times over a two-year period, starting in August 2010. Last year, Hesch didn’t compete in the NYC Marathon but did run its 5K precursor, the NYRR Dash to the Finish Line, the day before. He finished 11th, with an average pace of 4:37 per mile. His admission has spurred whispers of other instances of doping in the city’s amateur running community.
Still, many aren’t going so far as to dope or cut the course; like Paul Ryan before them, they’re just being less than honest about their times in an attempt to impress colleagues and constituents.
Adam Marsh, 39 and an avid runner who has thrice run the NYC Marathon (best time: 3:47:45), was incensed when he received an e-mail from a colleague and finance bigwig looking for charity donations for this year’s marathon. The e-mail seemed to say that the guy was looking to break his previous marathon best of 2:46. (The precise wording of the e-mail said he had run a marathon in 2 hours, 146 minutes, but Marsh and several colleagues read it as 2:46, and some claim to have received a version that just said 2:46.)
Marsh was skeptical that a “short, fat finance” guy was capable of such a feat, and looked him up. His actual time was closer to 4:30. It “amazes me people do that crap,” says Marsh. “Running a marathon in three hours or six is an accomplishment in itself,” he says, adding there’s “no need to lie.”