Ashley Paulson is a misdirection queen who has worked hard for the right to be mistrusted and scorned
Ashley Paulson is a misdirection queen who has worked hard for the right to be mistrusted and scorned
At a time when lying has never been more widely sanctioned, the anti-speech, pro-cheating commenters at Marathon Investigation and elsewhere need to be told to fuck themselves
The moment Ashley Paulson became the third entrant of the 2022 Badwater Ultramarathon to cross the finish line on July 13, appearing to break the three-year-old women’s 135-mile course record by three minutes and fifty seconds, a spate of experienced observers called foul—some from the race site in California, others from the hallowed judgment ground of the World Wide Web (results).
Most of the initial skepticism seemed to arise from Paulson’s questionable late-race splits, which world-class ultramarathoner and egomaniac Camille Herron eagerly compared to those of past, ostensibly superior Badwater racers of both sexes. Observers on the ground, meanwhile, reported other irregularities and oddities, including unexplained vehicles and members of Paulson’s support crew dressing exactly like her, right down to their identical bleached teeth (and, you can safely bet, bleached buttholes).
Also waving eagerly from the prosecutorial side of the metaphysical judgment hall was Paulson having served a doping suspension in 2016 and her being an out-in-the open social-media bullshitter whose unsupported testimony only a fool would trust. She is a product of self-hype and thus perfect “winner” by today’s fraying-to-nonexistent ethical standards—someone who proudly shouts through a bullhorn that every race she is in is all about her.
Derek Murphy of Marathon Investigation questioned Paulson’s startling result on July 15. In evaluating potential no-goodniks, Murphy always bases his “cheated versus did not cheat” verdicts on whatever data he can collect and analyze, deciding whether the numbers scale with commonly accepted limits on people’s capabilities. This, plus obvious strikes such as runners missing timing mats, is really the only way he can make definitive judgments. When the subject of one of his posts has a checkered past, Murphy dutifully refuses to conclude on sight that the person has cheated in the instance in question, even when he himself has caught the person definitely cheating in the past. He always reviews the data, and he always makes an effort to contact the right people.
But the background material Murphy provides is often enough to decide whether a given subject even deserves to be taken seriously as an athlete, regardless of his or her proven fitness level. Ashley Paulson, who has a history of both biochemical self-augmentation and actively perpetrating bald-faced deceits, does not. And unfortunately for fair-minded ultramarathon runners, the discipline attracts behavioral and psychological deviants the way Trump rallies attract insulin delivery trucks, and somewhat unavoidably keeps them around.
Paulson agreed to release the GPS data from her Badwater run to Murphy to analyze, which she did on July 22—a full nine days after she crossed the Badwater finish line. [7/26 8:08 A.M. MDT Note: The crossed-out prtion is incorrect. Paulson evidently did present her data on the same day—see Derek Murphy’s comment below]. To me, there was no real need for Murphy to even examine the data; Paulson is a publicity glutton who was keenly aware from the outset that her result was being widely questioned and that her shady reputation wasn’t helping, yet she took her time? To me, it was already game over.
Notably, Paulson didn’t provide Murphy with a blood or urine sample, although he probably would have been unhappy had she done so.
Even if she did run the whole way, which hasn’t been definitively established, Ashley Paulson has earned the right to have everything she does questioned, and I wouldn’t want the kind of people who vocally support her supporting anything I do. Paulson is, on sight, another in a long line of capering social-media-first runners whose raison d’etre is garnering and maximizing attention. Her Instagram account suggests she often stores her hair in a bucket of fresh blood. In addition to being an attention-hound, she’s also a 40-year-old with a primary background in triathlon.
Combining these attributes gives her about a 12 percent chance of never having used banned substances—except that Paulson already settled that question by getting suspended…er, sanctioned in 2016 for testing positive for the androgenic-steroid-like drug ostarine.
People sometimes do test positive as a result of unknowingly taking supplements containing substances that are on the World Anti-Doping Agency’s banned list or are metabolized into WADA-banned compounds; sometimes, these substances aren’t listed on the supplement’s label. But such “accidents” are rarer in endurance sports than methodical advantage-seeking, and if Paulson was taking anything in 2015 that even threatened to contain ostarine—illegal not only to use in sports, but to possess at all in the United States, and then available only on the black market—then she was already mucking around with stuff that she knew was risky. And this storyline assumes that Paulson wasn’t simply taking ostarine intentionally, which, given her 2022 holistic-credibility score, is hardly an unjustifiable assumption.
Ostarine is nothing to mess with. A friend who recently changed states to dodge on-the-job Wokism is acquainted with a masters female bodybuilder whose voice apparently dropped half a register almost overnight as soon as she started using the stuff. Take enough of it and you’ll soon find your clitoris lazing banging off your vastus medialis muscles with every step, an experience allegedly both painful to the doper and distracting to spectators.
Paulson served her six months in exile, but again found herself the subject of scrutiny in 2018, when she went off the course very late in the Snow Canyon Half Marathon. As you read the two Instagram posts Paulson made after the race, keeping in mind that the first one mentioned nothing about the course deviation, ask yourself: Would you do anything like this?
Paulson says she was “a good half-mile” from the start with three minutes until gun time, meaning she ran about six-minute pace to reach the start as she “waived” (weaved) between people. That didn’t keep her from an unexpected HUGE PR.
When others noted what had happened, primarily on Letsrun.com, Paulson edited her post and made another one, describing being distracted by listening to music and using her smartphone to figure out where she was once she realized she’d strayed, and claiming a race official told her it was okay she’d gone off course because the distance from wherever she was to the finish would even things out.
O-kay.
Pretend for a moment that Paulson’s account is true. If you experienced the same thing, would you make a Instagram post about your HUGE PR rich in drama but somehow omitting the whole snafu at mile twelve point whatever? If a friend of yours did this, would you be comfortable publicly supporting her actions?
In theory, none of this factors into whether Paulson somehow cheated to obtain her 2022 Badwater result. And it’s not “needed,” because the fact that she didn’t release her GPS data immediately put paid to any notion that she should be taken seriously. That data can be manipulated using text files and the manipulation convincingly concealed. Paulson knows that everyone knows this, yet she chose to wait anyway. Whom did she consult in that time, I wonder?
When Paulson did release her data, she whined in advance on Facebook that no one would believe her anyway.
Has this bimbo ever looked at the trash she’s been writing for years all over the place? Has Paulson considered the idea that instead of scrambling to keep her image blemish-free—and it’s too late for that anyway—maybe she should stop doing things that generate ornery and snarky chatter on message boards? Like writing, “I’ve dealt with this already, so I’ll delete inconvenient questions.”
With the data-driven Murphy promising in his July 15 post to review, as always, whatever data Paulson eventually supplied before issuing his verdict, a red-herring situation was created: According to Paulson’s supporters, if her data turned out to look good, then their water-headed darling would be, like, totally off the hook—and moreover, Murphy would thus have been wrong to ever publicly question this splay-legged Internet slut in the first place.
This is bullshit. Even someone with a clean reputation would be ruthlessly hammered by the masses after so galactic an achievement coupled to a failure to immediately release data. But Paulson is just another in a long line of narcissists who will say and do anything to protect their continual lies before moving on to the next bit of contrived social-media excitement. If she were ever capable of moderating herself, she isn’t anymore. Some people will just lie and lie no matter how obvious it is they’re lying, and will play the victim in countless predictable ways when fingered. This is common among career Internet and fleshworld prevaricators, and some commenters to Murphy’s post unwittingly highlighted this when trying to shut him down using shithole guilt-trip tactics.
Some years ago, Murphy caught an elderly doctor from Los Angeles cheating. Despite the uproar this caused on Letsrun.com and elsewhere, the guy kept doing it. He was like America’s Dumbest Marathon Criminal. Obviously, he had something wrong with his thinking processes, and he eventually took his own life—plainly not Murphy’s fault, though he was understandably deeply troubled by what happened. But what was Murphy supposed to do, just drop the story after one or two cheating episodes unfurled by the same reprobate? (When he started his project, I bet he assumed he’d be dealing solely with deliberate course-cutters who, when caught, would admit to their shenanigans, however morosely. What he didn’t anticipate was how much other people’s shambling psychopathologies would affect his work.)
Marathon Investigation posters have regularly leveraged this event when they get upset at a particular Murphy accusation, telling him he’s a killer and so on. Although these are feeble, irrelevant, spiteful salvos from small-minded people, the emotional-blackmail tactic is very effective and has become extremely common. It’s akin to the bozos who haunt Ultraunningpodcast.com and issue various threats at Eric Schranz for sharing the “wrong” content. And it’s being used to suppress vital truths about the direction in which the world is headed, though recreationally bopping around in the woods to achieve meta-masochistic nirvana is not among my graver concerns.
All of these anti-speech zealots should feel free to fire a loaded pistol through their own temples—perhaps a custom-made Colt revolver with a 99-bullet chamber, being calmly passed from offender to mortally repentant offender along some Boulder County trail bathing in craft-beer-and-kale farts. I have absolutely no tolerance for anything suggestive of cancellation overtures, especially when—as is usually the case—these are being deployed to protect a level-five grifter, the illusion that men can shape-shift into women by personal fiat and conversely, or the latest blame-externalizing sociological thesis from slacktivist sleaze-merchants.
Someone started a thread about skepticism surrounding Paulson’s Badwater result on on Reddit, which is basically where people who normally discuss things under the influence of cooking wine go after they have switched to Listerine. This poster writes a lot like Paulson, though grammatical infelicities are a highly nonspecific metric. But if it’s not her, well, I sure as hell wouldn’t want someone this casual about cheating standing up for me.
Ultrarunners, is this true? Is it typical to just consciously break a rule or two in 1 in every 50, maybe 1 in every 30 races you do?
Here’s Paulson’s sister-in-law (maybe) in the same thread, which I’m not linking to because, though jaded beyond belief, I am not a cruel man.
It strains credulity that this yutz could write “we live in a world we’re [sic] no mistakes are forgiven or forgotten” when in fact the world has never been more tolerant of nonstop “mistakes” that are actually a cascade of purposeful prevarications—as long as you can weaponize melanin, obesity, “queerness,” or motherhood. White lefty women got to latch onto Wokism using the mommy-card (see below), whereas white dudes were shit out of luck, often for mistakes they never made.
Most of the comments to Murphy’s post were of the “serial cheater is at it again” variety, while the ones that weren’t took aim at Murphy’s motives and assumed the usual trite and childish flavors: “You’re just upset a female did something unreal,” “You’re using this site to make money by slamming people,” “You’re encouraging stalking.” and the increasingly popular “She’s a mom!” One extremely determined schoolmarm type, “Steve,” even wrote:
Derek, time for you to bow out of the limelight. You are not helping anyone, just stirring up controversy and (don’t pretend you aren’t aware) getting dozens or hundreds of people to accuse someone of cheating without any evidence.
Well, “Steve,” since we’re* giving directions now, it’s time for you to get on your knees and suck every last wrinkle from my scrotum. People were already accusing Paulson of cheating before Murphy posted, and moreover, he can write whatever he wants. If you think he’s wrong, go ahead and say so, and if you can prove it, do that too.
Let’s settle the mommy defense. It’s easy. Here are four highly driven, high-achieving mothers: Ivana Trump, Jen Psaki, Kellyanne Conway, Nancy Pelosi. If you have any political leanings at all, you recognize at least two of these mothers as lying motherfuckers. (If you’re more of an anarchist, you despise all four.)
Two days ago, Murphy published his analysis of the data, concluding that he believed that Paulson’s data looked good. Given the inexplicable delay in Paulson supplying this information and Murphy admittedly not being an expert in assessing metadata, I don’t trust what she provided, although I admit that I also don’t care because I don’t think she’s clean, either. She’s a chronically unreliable witness, and it doesn’t help that the people yapping at Murphy in support of her are censorious assholes.
“Steve” was back, and this time he or she stepped all over their own dick. In scolding Murphy for what the first MI Paulson-Badwater post had “caused,” he or she reproduced a load of negative comments about Paulson from Letsrun and Reddit, noting that MI is a high-traffic site. Did this moron stop to consider that he was creating a brand-new one-stop-shop of Ashley Paulson negativity-nuggets for Google’s bots to crawl and index?
Other commenters exhorted Murphy to fall on his sword, apologize, whatever. For one thing, as Murphy repeatedly pointed out, his initial post wasn’t an accusation. For another, Paulson is, in my learned opinion, a shitbag—anyone who writes like she does, whines like she does, and pulls what she did on Instagram after the Sunshine Canyon Half-Marathon has earned a permanent reputation as untrustworthy, and she only cemented this with her behavior in the immediate aftermath of the Badwater 135.
I blame Dean Karnazes for almost 100 percent of the influx of cheaters and self-promoters into ultramarathon running, a discipline that unfortunately selects for the cheating-prone because of the sheer length of the events and the inability of race officials to fully monitor some courses. Karnazes’ book Ultramarathon Man reeked of bullshit from the first chapter and at a distance of several coffee tables, and he normalized the pursuit of embellishment-fueled glory masquerading as a higher spiritual pursuit.
If I’m wrong about that, I’m not wrong about how overrun with far more consequential bullshit the world is generally. And even if Ashley Paulson ran the whole way at Badwater and hasn’t been doping lately, she has only herself and her own words to thank for people like me dismissing her as, at best, an unworthy victor. And she and her functionally illiterate, “You shut up, y’hear?” fans can live with that, because I’m not writing to make anyone happy, especially assholes. )Well, besides me, obviously.)
As the stateswomanlike Paulson herself observes, “I’ll never silnece the haters.” No, she won’t. And fans of corrupt runners like her won’t either, so they shouldn’t try.