Why does anyone care? I don’t run matherons or exercise at all but why do people feel so strongly about this? No one is making money on running marathons and if people want to cheat, more power to them I suppose.
A few do. For example, the first-place prize for the Boston Marathon is US$150K. That's one race. Then there are endorsements etc. Running is big business.
> if people want to cheat, more power to them
That's just a crappy attitude in any context. Even if absolutely nobody is hurt in a particular instance, cheating should be discouraged to maintain the integrity of the system for when it does matter. Also, as it turns out, this is a race. People competing against one another is an essential part of the exercise, even if there's no money involved. That's why there are rules, and significant effort to enforce those rules, and everyone who participates pays willingly for that enforcement. Comparing their performance to others is an important part of how people motivate themselves to do better. Among people who run marathons more than once, it's why they put in those long hard hours training. It's also why cheaters cheat. They wouldn't risk disqualification and censure if they didn't believe that the competitive aspect matters very much. Apparently the people in these races, both honest and otherwise, believe in the benefits of competition. The implication that competition is meaningless sounds a bit like sour grapes TBH.
For the age group record, it matters! It should be, like, a real thing... the people who get those records work really, really friggin' hard, so they deserve to be treated fairly.
A good example is the South African women who the olympic committee told to take a testosterone lowering drug in order to compete.
Competitions aren’t fair and there’s no such thing as “natural” in the first place. If the purpose of competitions is to find the absolute limit od human ability, it’s seem silly to me to ban steroids or long legs or too much testosterone.
I guess this is a different point that cheating, though.
Moreover, life is about bettering yourself and winning. That’s why I’ve always thought that cheating in college say is irrelevent. Unless the students are being graded on a curve, I don’t think academic cheating is a big deal.
tl;dr: By cheating you are only short changing yourself and no one should care about it.
Not everyone shares that assumption. If you think there should be races where the only goal is to get from point A to point B in the minimum time with whatever aids are available, go ahead and organize one. See who comes. I suspect that the vast majority of people would prefer races where competitors stay on the course and eschew most forms of mechanical aids. Opinions on chemical aids are more mixed, but that's not at all the kind of cheating at issue here.
> Unless the students are being graded on a curve, I don’t think academic cheating is a big deal.
Again, you're ignoring some effects of cheating. Students are often competing for admissions to graduate school (including e.g. medical or law school) so even if the grades themselves aren't on a curve the students are still being compared to each other. Those who don't cheat therefore are harmed. Also professors are graded too, so there's harm there. The purpose of the exercise is learning, which often means doing exercises as laid out. You don't learn calculus by letting a calculator or program do it for you. You don't learn programming by installing prepackaged software. When students take shortcuts, those paying for their education - usually not the students themselves - are not receiving the service they paid for. There's harm all around, and no amount of rationalization by those who can only keep up by cheating will change that.
Cheating matters. The purpose of going to college, or recording track times is for measurement and comparison. Allowing cheaters isn't just cheating yourself, it devalues the meaning of the measurement. It is inherently selfish and shows a lack of ethics that is detrimental to society as a whole.
It absolutely is not "only short changing yourself", as it also has very real, direct effects when a cheater displaces an honest hard-worker for a job or college acceptance.