Thursday, April 17, 2025
On August 31, Republican Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan said in a radio interview that he ran his best marathon "under three (hours), high twos. I had a two hour and fifty-something."
As Runner's World quickly discovered and The New Yorker further contemplated, however, the only marathon Ryan has run was the 1991 Grandma's Marathon, and he ran it in 4:01:25. Through a spokesman, Ryan said he misremembered his time.
Like other serious-minded distance runners, I know there's a big difference between a 2:50-something and a four-hour marathon. Maybe because my own goal this fall is to run 26.2 miles in less than three hours for the first time, I look enviously at those who already have. Conversely, those who haven't, yet claim to have bagged a "sub 3," irk me.
Ryan may have honestly misspoken. Afterall, he ran that race more than 20 years ago. I'll cut him some slack, under those circumstances.
I'll reserve my outrage for another Midwestern man named Kip Litton who recently gained attention for dubiously claiming to have run several marathons under three hours in the past couple years. This man is in his late 40s, so older than myself.
Ryan is not in the same category as this Litton, whom I wrote about in my Editor's Letter appearing in the September 2012 print edition of Silent Sports. That column, titled "Too old to cheat," follows.
I know my chances of breaking three hours at the October 7 Milwaukee Lakefront Marathon are slim. I haven't run that fast at any of my previous 15 marathons. If the three-hour barrier was meant to fall, it probably would have before I turned 42 this year.
After all, to improve on my 3:10:12 PR, run at the 2010 Boston Marathon, I'll have to run nearly 30 seconds faster per mile, which will be no easy feat. And I write this having just completed an 18-mile training run on a flat bike path averaging 7:02 per mile. That took a lot of effort, but was still well off the 6:50s I'll need to churn out for a distance eight miles longer if I'm to reach the Lakefront finish line under three hours.
So although I haven't yet (and may never) run that far that fast, I understand how difficult a challenge breaking that barrier can be, especially for someone my age.
That's why I was astonished to read recently about a Michigan dentist in his late 40s who claimed to have run more than a dozen sub-three-hour marathons in 2009 alone.
Kip Litton of Clarkston, Michigan, posted his results on Worldrecordrun, the website he maintained to show his progress running a "world record" of sub-three-hour-marathons in all 50 states. Through this efforts, he said he was raising money for a cure to cystic fibrosis, a congenital illness afflicting the youngest of his three children.
As it turns out, two years of relentless (and mostly anonymous) crowd sourcing on the messageboard of LetsRun.com has left little doubt Litton has falsified many of his race results. And now, thanks to an August 6 feature story in
The New Yorker magazine, Litton has all but been exposed.
In his 12-page article, Mark Singer tried to understand how Litton could run so many marathons in such impressive times while rarely being seen by his competitors, let alone getting photographed between the start and finish lines. Some race directors have asked the same questions, ultimately disqualifying him at a handful of marathons.
The biggest "gotcha" moment came after Litton claimed to have run - and won - a marathon in 2010. Litton said he was the overall winner of the West Wyoming Marathon - a race, it turns out, that never took place, at least not with other runners.
"For his fabricated marathon, Litton had assembled not only a website but also a list of finishers and their times (plus name, age, gender and hometown), and created a phantom race director, who responded to email queries," Singer reported.
In a face-to-face interview with Singer, Litton claimed "the West Wyoming Marathon did actually exist," but as its only entrant, "I placed first and last." Litton blamed a friend for convincing him to add made up names to the results, according to Singer.
Litton denied ever cheating at a race or personally receiving money through his website. (Singer quoted a spokesperson for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation saying she was unaware of any donations coming in from Litton's website. She said the Litton household hadn't contributed more than $20 since 2004.)
At many legitimate races Litton did officially enter, rarely were photographs taken of him anywhere other than at or near the finish lines. At several races where he was photographed seemingly in disguise at the start (with dark sweat pants and long-sleeve shirts covering his bib numbers), Litton had apparently changed shoes and clothing somewhere before the finish, including at Boston, Singer reported. Yet he almost always crossed the transponder mats so his chips recorded (often improbable) splits.
For those who concluded Litton was somehow cutting courses, Singer said, "The paramount question was 'How?' Did he have an accomplice? Did he drive from point to point? Ride a bicycle? Devise digital subversions?"
Singer doesn't solve the mystery, however. "Somehow he had exploited the running community's faith in the very systems - transponders, chip times - that had been adopted to prevent cheating," he wrote.
Why someone would travel the country to collect unearned age-group awards, albeit ones of little monetary value, is beyond me. Less puzzling is why some people falsely claim to have accomplished physical feats few others can.
In his book The Doper Next Door: My Strange and Scandalous Year on Performance Enhancing Drugs, 40-something journalist Andrew Tilin comes to understand first hand what motivates citizen endurance athletes to cut corners. After seven months of taking testosterone and seeing his amateur bike racing performances improve, he wrote, "I'm discovering that it's harder to find fault with the steroids and easier to forget that I'm being dishonest. I'm not losing sleep over playing the equivalent of blackjack with my long-term health. I'm having fun."
Taking nothing more than glucosamine for my aging knees, I'm having much less fun dragging myself through yet another 16-week marathon training program. I'm following the approach laid out in the book
Run Less, Run Faster, which has already led me to three Boston Marathon-qualifying times.
I've taken heart from the 2012 edition of the book, particularly a testimonial in it from a 36-year-old man from Madison, Wisconsin, who thanked the authors for the 2:57:49 he ran at last year's Lakefront Marathon. I emailed the runner and he graciously replied by laying out for me his pace-based training regime.
Clearly, he cut no corners. And, following in his rapid footsteps, neither will I. The glory, if any is to be had at this stage in life, is in the authentic pursuit of the goal. There are no shortcuts.
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