Marathon Man: A Michigan dentist’s improbable transformation
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
The only truly interesting detail would be the method by which he cheated, which the reporter, at long last, admits that nobody has figured out. This leaves the possibility that other people are cheating the same way, although maybe less brazenly. Again, this could be summarized in a line (it's clear that he cheated, the method is difficult to figure out). What is this, a slow news year?
This isn't being presented as "news", whatever that even means. I think you should reflect on what you're looking for from the world - I would consider this kind of work a form of art, and one I very much appreciate. You don't have to appreciate it, but you're asking it to be some other thing you'd rather have - raw facts and data, summarized into as few words as possible
Some of us would rather the world still have some art
It made me think of that classic Rumsfeld line: "There are a lot of people who lie and get away with it, and that's just a fact." http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/d/donald_rumsfeld_...
People who cheat multiple marathons are rare.
People who go as far as to invent a marathon, and to create fake runners for that fake marathon, are very rare.
The article isn't about how or why a man cheats. It's about a man who cheats; and everyone knows that man cheats; and yet he still maintains his innocence; and so he still hasn't "had his comeuppance yet".
The problem is that when you see a long piece in a respected magazine on a subject that you are interested in, it's hard to decide at some point that all the rest is garbage, and put it down.
I started reading this story expecting a tale of a middle-aged dentist who transformed himself into a remarkable marathon runner. Pretty quickly, the story veered into a tale of cheating. I could see there is another 30 pages left to go, and kept wondering what I'd learn about. A secretive group of marathon cheaters who jet around the country and subvert race after race? A group of vigilante marathoners who help bring them to justice? Maybe Kip Litton's whole life is a lie, and he is not a dentist, but a spy from Gondwana? Maybe we at least get some fascinating psychological portraits painted by the masters of investigative journalism?
No, in the end, it's a pile of boring and irrelevant details. "At 7:34 the next morning, Joe Blow leaned over his model M keyboard, and, with keystrokes echoing crisply through his split colonial house, posted a message to the forum revealing that he has a photo of Litton at the 10K timing mat". Ok, that's not a quote, but the article is very much like that. In the end, Kip Litton is indeed a dentist from somewhere in Michigan, who for some unfathomable reason decided to start cheating at marathon races for amateurs. And that's it. Nobody knows why, and in some cases, we don't know how. This is a 10,000 word article in a major magazine. 30 to 40 printed pages. Come on. I have just as much right to express my disappointment, as the New Yorker has to print this nonsense in the first place.
I shared the article with a few other non-HN people into running and they thought it was an interesting story as well.
- The data based approach to cheating detection. Random runners can look up, in seconds, stats for any other runner. Not just their times and placings, but checkpoint by checkpoint timings. Its then easy to profile the normal runner and then the cheat.
- The photo aspect. disqualifing a guy because he didn't appear in any photos shows how far we've come in having 100s of photos of every event.
- The lack of on-the-ground cheating detection. This guy presumably left and entered the route of the race, with no one noticing. Runners noticed themselves going from position X to X-1, but not ll of them complained.
- The issues of internet anonimity. We see yet another internet comminity with pseudonyms. This doesn't prevent it being a commumity. it doesn't prevent people spotting strawman accounts.
and less hackerish reasons: - The lack of clear motivation. Why did he do it?
- the weird overreach. Why did he aim for a high ranking? If he'd come 50th no one would have cared. Why did he talk to someone from the new yorker? Why did he make up a whole event?
This is what surprised me about him. If he had more respectable times, he could've run the scheme for much longer, and avoided the scrutiny of the community. Even the author at the end said his sub 4 hours times were believable and gave him credit for those.
As always, his greed got the best of him.
I've been really impressed by this recently. Even in areas where it doesn't seem like it should be hard to plausibly fake, it turns out there's a lot of subtlety that might be missed.
Here, it was the checkpoint-by-checkpoint splits and the photographs. In a fake Minecraft game [0] it's the number of blocks that have been mined versus the materials available for building tools (if sticks are rare, you're not going to waste them making pickaxes to strip mine plain stone) and the number of structures that have been built (millions of blocks got mined, but not used?) I've thought about building a "wall transparency" detector for another video game that would track a player's orientation in relation to players behind a wall from them, profile the average player, and then show that certain players are able to track others through walls.
There is an incredible amount of technical knowledge even in seemingly mundane pursuits like running. That's what makes it possible to spot cheats even without spotting the exact cheating mechanism.
I guess some poor people shoplift out of desperation vs some wealthy dentists fly around and cheat on marathons out of boredom.
I wish that investigative energy would have been aimed at banks, wallstreet or billionaire tax cheats.
Problem is most Americans does not seem to care based on the votes they cast for the politicians who keeps the status quo.
1. People generally care only about the bullet points - that is, it seems all too easy to fool people with things such as resume padders because few people have the time or energy to investigate further
2. Granularity in data is everything. Even (actually, especially) when the data are bullshit. With some data science skills, it can be trivially easy to expose frauds. How hard would it be to look over all marathon results that have split times and filter for those who improved in the second half?
I couldn't help but feel a little sad though, there is such a wild variety of damaged people out there.
There's no need to know that any of this even exists in order to enjoy running, that's part of running's beauty. But there's lots to know if you want to.
p.s. I should add that Born to Run is an interesting read about a part of running that lots of runners don't know much about.
Another really good running book for those still following along: Once a Runner -- http://www.amazon.com/Once-Runner-John-L-Parker/dp/091529701...
I love all the trouble this guy went through to fake accomplish these runs. It's one of those you just put more work into cheating than just doing it the old fashioned way.
http://news.runnersworld.com/2012/08/31/paul-ryan-says-hes-r...
I am not sure why people lie about running times.
But I've run a few marathons and you definitely remember the difference between a 4 hour pace and a 3 hour pace.
In some sports it's easier to spot than in others.
I'm a fan of making fun of politicians, too, but you don't accomplish anything or convince anyone by doing so.
I'm not sure about your countrymen, but Americans have an annoying way of derailing every conversation and forum into petty, non-sequitur, assume-bad-faith attacks on politicians of the opposing party in a way that really adds nothing to the discourse. It's not that the comment wouldn't have bothered me if it hadn't been about a politician; it's that the comment wouldn't have even been made if it wasn't about a politician. There's this obsession with proving that politicians of the opposing party are terrible human beings in every possible way (so that we may feel righteous in our cause) instead of actually discussing things that matter. The end result is a sequence of catty remarks that only convince people who already agree with you, which stops any productive dialogue before it starts. It's the single most destructive thing about the American political culture.
HN is one of my few remaining refuges from that bullshit. If everyone else is suddenly fine with it, maybe it is time for me to leave.
My comment had to do with the integrity (be it professional or personal), which is the real issue of this thread and not some "guy who cheats at marathons" and it was your comments that turned it into some sort of political issue, and made you sound like an apologist for Mr. Ryan.
This piece ("it's that the comment wouldn't have even been made if it wasn't about a politician.") is not even wrong. What are you God? You think you know everything?
You made lame straw man insinuations that would offend anyone of normal IQ and then you hurry to close with "maybe it is time for me to leave" as if you wanted to prove yourself right and the issue were closed. But you are still wrong because your assumptions were never right. Sounds like a typical political "logic" to me, based on insinuations, twisting facts, and pandering to the audience. Yes, I too would like to see this place free "from that bullshit," because that's the real BS.
For what it's worth, even if it was Joe Biden, Justin Bieber, or Mark Zuckerberg who lied about running a sub-3-hour marathon, it still would have been a bad comment and I still would have made a similar response.
It may appear that people are mostly siding with you because nobody else has verbalized support for philwelch. That's because we HN veterans don't generally post "me-too" opinions, we just quietly upvote the guy who's right and downvote the guy who's wrong. In this case, I've chosen to break the silence because you seem like you might be willing to learn HN cultural norms.
Here on HN, we ask that you not take cheap shots at politicians, religions, etc. -- even those we really don't like. It makes for boring reading. Instead, make comments that other people will come away from thinking "I learned something valuable from that".
Look, I was trying to be helpful. If you want to pick a fight, go somewhere else.
How many politicians have pulled similar tricks to get elected/stay elected? Its sometimes hard to fact check these people, and the media repeatedly gets called on the carpet for not fact checking either.
Politicians are often called professional liars, so the line to Kip Litton isn't hard to draw, even if isn't always warranted.
HN is largely anti-politics, but I think in this case there has been enough politicians who have been caught telling the "big lie" that it is worth bringing it up for discussion on this.