If cheating in races is widespread now...
...what about in the pre-chip mat, pre-GPS days?
Mid-race timing mats, which have been a feature of most major marathons for close to 20 years and now routinely crop up even in smaller, shorter events, are a handy way for PC and smartphone users to keep track of runners' progress on the course. But they are also a reliable, if imperfect, way to make sure that runners who wind up in the finish chute have actually run the whole course. Similarly, GPS watches and the websites that display the data collected therefrom are an easy tool for sharing workouts online for the benefit of coaches, rubberneckers and potential sexual partners; they are also helpful in determining whether someone did or did not complete a claimed run.
A fellow in Ohio named Derek Murphy has been operating a website for a few moons now, Marathon Investigation, with the aim of rooting out course-cutters, bib-swappers and other malignant elements as well as confirming the occasional disputed but legitimate finish. I won't dive deep into anything on the site, but understand that Derek, who does this work in his spare time, has been placed on a pedestal by the running community at large while becoming a target of vitriol of the cheaters he nails. At least one such cheater recently used an unjust accusation of copyright infringement to have, Derek's site pulled offline for a brief spell (the general practice of ISPs is to treat such claims as legitimate until shown otherwise, making them a useful tool for spiteful pieces of shit to temporarily scrub evidence of their malfeasance from the Web.
No one likes to be proven wrong, but Derek faces a special kind of blowback because most of his targets are not merely fibbers but extreme liars and whack-jobs. Almost no sane and alert person these days expects his or her chicanery to survive the earnest efforts of cheating opponents; they're simply hoping that no one bothers looking into the results of people who "complete" races toward the back of the back. Perhaps these people are unaware of how easy it is to set up database queries that identify outliers based on simple information that can be pulled from almost any set of posted results, or maybe they reckon that the psychological payoff they get from both the lie itself and the accolades the lying attracts (at least temporarily) outweighs the risk of being caught and publicly censured. Compulsive liars are usually narcissists; narcissists in turn are a thoroughly vengeful lot. Thus, on a per-incident basis, Derek is far more likely than most Internet sleuths to be pilloried by whatever asshole or assortment of assholes he nabs next.
Of course, everyone can empathize. We've all had some loon try to force the removal from the Internet of true and unflattering information about them, right? And do this despite whatever they are trying to hide constituting about 2 percent of the total available evidence of what shitbirds they are? No? Oh. Well, it's unheard of. Of course, in my case, it was personal and I waited for a full year after my adversary started unloading her fictitious claims of plagiarism, abuse, theft of services and so on before posting my response, which I'd been quietly assembling for months. And, as many here are aware, this did little good initially and in fact only engendered a massive dishonesty spike on the part of my uncommonly warped interlocutor. If even half of the cheaters Derek deals with were even half as fucked up as my own lowlife is, they wouldn't even be able to hold marathons in public and Derek would be in the WITSEC program by now.
Some people believe that cheats should be banned from USATF-sanctioned events for life. This is a little unwieldy for my tastes. I think they should be put in a special section of the ADX federal "Supermax" prison down in Florence, medicated against their will using experimental antipsychotics, and invited to confess all of their sins. Then, after the effects of the drugs on their mind are assessed for the benefit of the herd, they should be loaded onto massive catapults and launched bellowing in the general direction of Cassiopeia. None of these kinds of gadabouts ever turn out to be contributors to their communities and a lot of them are seriously audacious thieves at various levels, not just in a running sense. Maybe some of these generators of far-flung monkeyshines might think twice about committing a cheating sin if they knew in advance getting caught would earn them a fatal rocket ride; maybe not. Either way, the rest of our sorry, unwiped asses would be better off.
Anyway, I went flailing into the weeds on purpose just now, but my point is that it seems extremely likely that before GPS, chip timing, and the Internet itself, any fairly competent person who wanted to get away with cheating in a mass marathon with a loop course most likely got away with it, and most dimwits probably did too. I'm not talking about cheating to win a race but to qualify for Boston once the standards became harder in the 1970s or to simply record a finish that his or her friends and associates would find impressive. Pathetic, yes. Deserving of some kind of wild-eyed violence administered by the most brutish psychopaths available? Absolutely (I like the idea of high-voltage shocks to the nipples myself). Some of these old-school scalawags are no doubt still with us, silently watching the increasingly high detection and punishment rate and thanking the invisible entity of their choosing that their quasi-running "careers" fell early enough on the overall timeline to keep them from ever being exposed.
2/25/2019 4:02 p.m. addendum: It looks like the Federal Bureau of Investigation is now participating in the fight to catch marathon cheats as well. At least that's the explanation I'm going with for the fact that someone at the FBI read this post this morning.
Track world records are for young men but only young-ish women. I am too lazy to perform a formal analysis, but look at the running events and the ages at which these records were set, indoors and out. While distance runners usually peak later than sprinters do, this effect, if it's even evident here at all, as much smaller than the effect of gender on the likelihood of setting a world record at a given age. Of course, the fact that a number of the women's records are drug-aided, held by people who might not have passed a sex test, or both throws an unmanageable wrinkle into the mess. The point is that with the exception of road events, your chances of setting a world record drop to almost zero once you hit age 27 or 28. Yes, plenty of Olympic champions are in their 30s -- even in the sprints. And plenty of track athletes remain very close to their best lifetime form for years on end (or, to be more precise, a specific season within many consecutive years). But if you want to record the very best mark ever in a given event, you probably want to squeeze that into your first 25 trips around the sun or you can pretty much forget about it.
I was thinking about buying some new running shoes, but I realized with a surge of encouragingly sharp wisdom that I never need to spend money on anything running-related again. I have about eight pairs of shoes in various states of decay, and I expect to be destroyed myself, probably in a gunfight or other public display of vengeance and violence, long before the most resilient of these becomes utterly unserviceable. I find it hard to believe how much some shit in the running world costs now, and why anyone would want a lot of the garbage being peddled even if it were free (e.g., breathing strips, most sports drinks, most specialty clothing). I might try compression socks out of curiosity if given a pair, but I bet those are complete horseshit too -- something invented to help CHF patients with piss-poor venous return is probably as helpful to a person with an overly robust cardiovascular system as sunscreen is to a Calgary resident in January. In the back of my mind, I am not so much being a cheapskate as I am behaving as recklessly as I dare to as a way of increasing my chances of being unable to run altogether soon. This would be bad but not without a few silver linings.
Finally, I didn't kill anyone -- skateboarding minors or other human detritus -- this week. I did, however, have sex outside with a complete stranger between two parked cars when I was winding up a run through the park north of my home. Some woman who was, I dunno, 18? 38? came scurrying off the bench where she'd been sitting alone because she'd spotted Rosie and wanted to say hi. It was maybe 20 degrees out, but the next thing I knew, we had sneaked off to the edge of the park -- I had tied Rosie to the nice new-ish jungle gym in the middle of it -- and just started going at it like crazy people, mostly in the "doggie" position, sometimes with me in the rearmost position and sometimes not. One of us produced a cowboy hat and some spurs from somewhere, maybe from one of the cars we were kind of hiding among in this cul-de-sac. I don't even remember if she consented to any of this, or if I did, and it wasn't the kind of encounter that ended with an exchange of phone numbers, only red-faced satisfaction followed by crippling shame. She was well over six feet tall and looked like something right out of a Victoria's Secret catalog, so if she shows up in my neighborhood again it's not like she'll be able to hide easily. But I am not one to kiss and tell, so I won't say anything more than that, even though the GPS data for this run is absolutely hilarious.