I am a runner also (finished one marathon with a time that is nothing to write home about), and was looking forward to an interesting story. I read this whole article with a growing feeling of incredulity, not about the cheating that it describes (yes, I understand that there are confabulators of this type - Stephen Glass was already mentioned in the comments), but about the effort and space that a national magazine would spend on this story. I kept waiting for SOMETHING of momentous importance towards the end somewhere that would justify all this buildup, but it never came. Yup, a guy cheated in a bunch of races. Yup, he is a confabulator who will invent any number of details and fake personas to build up his fantasies. Yup, he was caught in due time. You could summarize this in five lines. This is not just beating a dead horse, this is shooting it with a howitzer, repeatedly.
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 is a very strange perspective, demanding a five-sentence summary and details on the technical aspects of the cheating, rather than this a well-written close-lens narrative of a fascinating person and his bizarre, borderline-inexplicable behavior
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
This was a piece of reporting that simply never took off. The reporter was not able to get the subject of the story to open up, and the whole article contains nothing that was not found in the endless discussions on the forum that he referenced. The result is a meandering and repetitive article which seems bloated and full of fluff. I don't see any really compelling or three-dimensional characters in it. Mark Singer should have had the guts to say "I didn't get the story. The guy wouldn't open up, I've got nothing interesting to say about him". Instead, he holds the reader's attention with every trick in the book, leaving us with nothing at the end of all the buildup. I do appreciate literature, but this just isn't literature, and it's bad reporting.
People who cheat one marathon are not common, but they do exist.
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".
It's not my favorite magazine, but I've read long New Yorker human interest pieces, and they've always had more, well, interest than this.
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'm with you. I enjoy a well written long and meandering article, but this one was just a dud. The story just wasn't that interesting. I kept expecting it to pick up right until the very end; then I just felt disappointed.
Exactly. It was very well written and held my interest to the end. But the article didn't have an ending at all. Not the fault of the author really, the real story really didn't have an ending either. It just ended like "...and I guess we'll never know. The End."
I also felt that the quality of this article didn't meet the standards I usually expect from The New Yorker. The basic calculus for a New Yorker article usually accounts for a meaningful (often globally-stated and overwrought) thesis. This article, however, read as gossip.
True. Any word from the up voters on why they enjoyed this particular article? Or did the votes come mostly because people like The New Yorker, and were expecting it to be good?
I upvoted it because I like "long meandering human interest pieces". I thought it was fascinating the extent to which a pathological liar will go to maintain such an elaborate false identity.
I shared the article with a few other non-HN people into running and they thought it was an interesting story as well.
Either cheaters and liars are common (and consequently unremarkable) among the people you have met or you do not share my anger at cheaters and my pleasure when someone who is definitely a serial cheater is publicly shamed. Either way, that makes me a little sad.
I found this a pretty interesting read. hackerish reasons:
- The scale of the fraud. This guy is making up a race on the internet. complete with other runners, their profiles and so on. Its the sting come to life.
- 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?
People do step off courses--for restroom stops, to chat with friends, to have blisters tended--and then back on. I once stepped out of the Marine Corps Marathon about the 10 mile mark to chat with some friends who were near the Georgetown end of Key Bridge, for I knew already that my time would be nothing special. When I pushed back in, there were some spectators who supposed I was cheating, and why not--there is nothing so memorable in my appearance that they should have noticed me leaving the course.
"- 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.
> "The data based approach to cheating detection."
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.
Thanks for posting this, it's an interesting yarn but the two the best takeaways are:
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 hadn't heard anything about this guy until now. I wonder if he is secretly loving the attention? We all do things to get positive attention. A narcissist is different in that negative attention is an acceptable substitute when they aren't able to get positive attention.
I couldn't help but feel a little sad though, there is such a wild variety of damaged people out there.
I find Richard Feynmanns accounts of hacking (non-computer) systems at Los Amos to be fascinating - I was hoping once the cheating was revealed we were going to be treated to a story of how someone cleverly found a loophole in the system that was then closed, improving the system for everyone. Rather we got a smear article...
I'm not sure how you can say there isn't anything to know about running. Volumes upon volumes of books, magazines, and articles have been written about every aspect of running, from training and nutrition guides to novels and short stories.
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.
We're in agreement. I should have worded it as: there isn't anything a recreational jogger needs from running books in order to enjoy and even get decent at running. Not to say running books are completely useless, but most of the things you could get from them are better learned from experience or passed down by a coach/trainer. Exception: Running magazines (or any magazine for that matter) are only there to entertain you and sell you things. Another exception: if buying running accessories/books helps motivate you, go for it, but I don't think I really needed anything more than a running journal/log.
I haven't bought a running magazine in 25 years, I suppose. But reviews of running shoes could be useful, I thought. And they carried schedules of races.
Wow, this is literally in my backyard. I live in a town in between Davison and Clarkston, one road gets you to either. Ultimately this guy sounds like a true douche. In this area as a dentist you are making plenty of money and to try and promote fake races to raise money for your son's illness is truly uncalled for.
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.
Certain people (e.g. doctors, policemen, lawyers) seem to be defined by their jobs.
If he had been a plumber this story would probably have been titled An improbable transformation
How often this Michigan dentist's story is similar to the way some startup businesses raise funds, and some open source software projects recruit developers!
Please don't post comments like this. It doesn't really add anything to the discussion, and for that matter it doesn't really add anything to any discussion.
I'm a fan of making fun of politicians, too, but you don't accomplish anything or convince anyone by doing so.
I am not American so I have no U.S. Political bias, but the comment is on point about someone not being truthful regarding their achievements. If this was not a politician you would have not complained. Its seems like you are more concerned about this being about a politician than someone not being truthful.
The OP was about a guy who cheats at marathons. The comment was about a verbal gaffe by a recently nominated and controversial Vice-Presidential candidate.
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.
First of all, it's a bit arrogant, to say the least, to make insinuations about someone's intentions, especially if you are such a big champion of non-BS contributions : I am an independent so I have no dog in this political fight and my comment had nothing to do with anyone's political affiliation. Second, I am amused that you call it "verbal gaffe." If you want to brag about your accomplishments, you better make sure you checked your data well or else you may end up looking incompetent at the very best. If you are not sure, say so, or simply abstain from bragging. That's what I expect from a professional or anyone (who should be) concerned about his or her integrity, and Mr. Ryan is a professional politician, so I see no reason to cut him any slack. You have a high threshold of tolerance for BS when it comes to politicians, it appears, but I am afraid it comes with the price of seeing BS where it's not.
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.
The point isn't my tolerance or intolerance towards Mr. Ryan's statements. It's that loosely-relevant political pot-shots aren't really considered valuable comments on HN. I just thought it would be helpful to tell you why your comments weren't being received well. I'm sorry it didn't come across that way.
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.
Well, it appears that other people received the comment well. I thought it was fair and relevant. However, it is tedious to read threads that have been hijacked by this kind of sniping.
Dude has a net karma score of -2. That's after all the upvotes from whoever "thought it was fair and relevant". Since upvotes are easier to come by than downvotes (not everyone can downvote), this suggests the comment wasn't received well. Because philwelch is exactly right -- it simply doesn't add to the discussion.
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".
Claiming to run a sub-3 hour marathon was not a verbal gaffe; it was a deliberate statement intended to fortify his image as an athletic over-achiever. The candidate claimed it was a "verbal gaffe" only after being confronted with its falsity.
The point was that it was cited as an example of similar fraudulent claims of athletic prowress, which is directly relevant to the linked article. Whether the article itself is pertinent to HN is beside the point; emmi_guy's comment was pertinent to the discussion of the article.
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.
I have to admit, it's kind of amusing seeing the lengths people will go to on HN to rationalize a patently off-topic comment or submission as being on-topic.
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?