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How a blogger in Ohio discovered a runner in Florida cheating in a half-marathonHow a blogger in Ohio discovered a runner in Florida cheating in a half-marathonBy Travis M. Andrews February 23 at 7:19 AMFor a fleeting moment, she had everyone fooled.And why not? After all, 24-year-old Harvard graduate Jane Seo is a food and fitness writer in New York City, penning such pieces as “How I Learned to Love Running, One Race at a Time” and “Four Reasons Why I Keep Running Obstacle Races, One After Another” for the Huffington Post. So when she finished second in Sunday’s Fort Lauderdale Half Marathon with a bright smile on her face, one couldn’t help but be impressed.After all, she finished in 1 hour and 21 minutes, meaning she ran a blazing 6:15 mile. The women’s world record is held by Florence Kiplagat, for a time of 1:05:09.What was even more incredible — and what tipped race timer Josh Stern off to the fact that something fishy was afoot — was that Seo ran faster miles in the second half of the race. Though runners often try to maintain a steady pace for the whole shebang, exhaustion forces most to slow down as they near the finish line.As noted in the Miami New Times, Stern voiced his concerns to race director Matt Lorraine, but Seo convinced him that all was on the up-and-up. Her second place finish stood.Someone, though, wasn’t convinced and tipped off Derek Murphy, an independent marathon investigator. Murphy, a former distance runner himself, has dedicated his time away from work trying to bust cheating road warriors by using the 21st century’s best tools: data collected in our interconnected world. He posts his findings to his blog, Marathon Investigation, which he maintains from his home in Ohio.The work has real world consequences, too — he has caught several runners who qualified for the Boston Marathon by cheating, taking spots from honest runners.“I think most people aren’t aware of how much cheating goes on in marathons,” Murphy told NBC last month.Murphy began investigating and quickly learned that Seo had, indeed, cheated by skipping about a mile and a half of the race. As a result, she has been retroactively disqualified from the half-marathon and was expelled from the Dashing Whippets, the team with which she raced.Continued: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/02/23/how-an-ohio-blogger-discovered-a-runner-a-harvard-grad-cheating-in-a-half-marathon-across-the-county/?tid=hybrid_experimentrandom_1_na&utm_term=.89b811132ff2
after Seo, who is 24 and writes regularly for the Huffington Post,
Rosie Ruiz?
an independent marathon investigator.
What does that pay?kidding, it's obviously a side hobby
