You can run . . . but you can’t hide
Derek Murphy, the Marathon Investigator, hunts down cheaters for sport, scraping race data and qualifying times (especially for the upcoming Boston Marathon) in pursuit of fairness. Some runners hate it — but hey, it’s a hobby
Derek Murphy’s first attempt at 42.2 kilometres was his proudest — he went from not being able to run at all, to running a marathon — and the second was his fastest, crossing the line in a little over five hours.
That’s not fast, but like many recreational runners who balance training with work, life and injuries, he was happy just to finish the race.
That was a decade ago. Today, Murphy is catching up to runners who are posting three-hour marathon times.
He isn’t doing it on the road in his running shoes, but from his living room in the suburbs of Cincinnati with his laptop, after his kids have gone to bed.
Murphy, a business analyst by day for an Ohio-based company that makes compressors and power tools, is increasingly known in running circles as the Marathon Investigator.
He uses data skills, help from a few computer programmers and tips from runners to hunt down cheaters.
If he thinks the cheating is egregious enough, he exposes them publicly.
And that’s not without some controversy: the line between holding people to account for wrongdoings and public shaming can be hard to define, let alone maintain.
So, while many runners appreciate Murphy’s efforts to keep sport fair — especially in the upcoming Boston Marathon on April 17 — he also faces criticism for helping to unleash the wrath of social media on people who are cheating more for personal aggrandizement than to win a race.
Now that his Marathon Investigation website has gained enough attention that he may start to make money off his hobby, the debate around the merit of what he’s doing is likely to intensify.
It’s something he’s already thought a lot about.
“If you start looking at comments to articles you’re just asking to get wound up. I’ve learned that as long as I believe what I do is right and stand by it, then it’s okay,” he says.
“I have an obligation at this point. I can’t just walk away.”
How much social media grief lands on a marathon cheater depends a lot on what race they cheated in, how much they publicly talked about their running ahead of time and whether they tried an elaborate cover-up or fessed up immediately and asked for forgiveness.
Mike Rossi hit all the wrong buttons.
The Pennsylvania disc jockey was initially hailed as a hero in the running community for taking his kids out of school to watch him run the 2015 Boston Marathon and learn about dedication, then standing up to a school principal who criticized the move. Later, though, questions surfaced about how he qualified for the coveted Boston race in the first place with a time that was far faster than any he’d ever run before. The running community that had strongly supported Rossi just days before turned on him and turned hard.
That’s when Murphy got interested.
“Clearly he cheated (to get into Boston), but the thread just kept on going and going and going off the rails, into personalized stuff and wars between opposing DJs,” he recalls.
“I thought: Why are we spending so much time on this guy? It’s one guy. Yes, he cheated and took up a spot, but I wondered how many more people actually cheated in marathons, so I randomly picked a race and I found someone who cheated immediately with a time that would qualify them for Boston and it kind of went from there.”
Murphy is not alone in his investigative hobby. There are plenty of avid runners, coaches and others who work in a crowdsourcing structure on running websites, piecing together race times, data from GPS watches, photos and social media postings to uncover cheaters. Murphy’s story format, though, makes the information more accessible to a broader audience.
Still, in his first year, Murphy says his website only had about 20,000 page views.
Then, before the 2016 Boston Marathon, he wrote about Gia Alvarez, a running and lifestyle blogger who was preparing to run based on her friend’s qualifying time from the previous year, which is cheating.
“I had no idea how popular she was,” Murphy says. The traffic on his website shot up. And this past February when he wrote about Jane Seo, a running and food blogger who went to extraordinary lengths to cover up the fact that she’d cheated her way to a secondplace finish, he got half a million page visits in just three days. His site has now had more than 2.3 million views, he says.
That growing audience means a greater sense of responsibility, Murphy says: “It made me be more careful about what I decided to write about.”
He’s taken down older posts about people who “probably didn’t deserve that kind of attention.” When he writes about people he focuses on their running without veering into other aspects of their lives, and he doesn’t post the names of run-of-the mill cheaters.
Those would be people who tell friends they ran a marathon when they cut the course, or claim a faster runner’s time as their own, or oddities like cheating to get an early start corral at the Disney Marathon, allowing for more time on the course to get photos with characters. But people who make money from cheating — a running coach, tour operator or a sponsored lifestyle blog- ger — fall within his moral code as deserving of public exposure.
“As far as someone cutting a course or swapping a bib, I’m not going to name them if that’s all they did. If they did it for 12 years in a row and ran Boston with those times then, yeah, I might name that person if it’s really egregious and constant,” he says. The Boston Marathon is where most of his investigative passion and — he feels — obligation to uncover cheaters lies.
That race, held on the third Monday in April, is the world’s oldest annual marathon and one of the most coveted for recreational runners. It was also the target of the most fa- mous marathon cheater of all: Rosie Ruiz.
In 1980, Ruiz jumped on to the course near the end to claim the women’s title. It took days to sort out her deception before the win was rightly given to Jacqueline Gareau, a 27-year-old Canadian.
Boston is now such a popular race that just getting in takes qualifying times that most recreational runners struggle to achieve. It’s three hours and five minutes for a 30-year-old man, or 3:45 for a 40-year-old woman, for example, and even then runners have to be minutes under those standards to be assured of a spot.
Runners can train hard for years to qualify, and with only 30,000 accepted, everyone who cheats their way into a spot is keeping out a runner who sweated for it.
“I understand how hard people must work to be able to run the times necessary for Boston,” says Murphy, who ran 10 marathons but never approached that speed.
He hopes his work will ultimately help others get their chance. Ahead of this year’s race, Murphy has been scouring data and tips from qualifying races, looking for cheaters. He’s found 34 that he’s sure of and says, so far, 15 have been removed from the entry list.
The Boston Athletic Association, which runs the marathon, has said little about Murphy’s efforts.
“We rely on the race organizers and timing systems they employ to produce true and accurate results, and we also rely on the honesty and integrity of 99.99 per cent of competitors who compete fairly,” communications director T.K. Skenderian replied when asked about Murphy. “For the relatively tiny minority of participants who seek to gain unfair advantages, there is sometimes no better method of rule enforcement than from witness accounts and reporting (from) fellow participants who also believe in a clean sport.” Some cheating is easy to uncover. There was the Toronto man who seemed to think starting the Scotiabank Toronto Waterfront Marathon at the halfway point was a good idea and, having been disqualified one year for it, did the same thing the following year — only to be DQ’d again.
That type of course-cutting shows up quickly, through missed timing mats or impossible splits between the first and second half of the race.
“It’s usually only a couple people,” says Alan Brookes, director of the Toronto race, “but it’s certainly great having the marathon investigator on this, because some of the cheaters are ingenious and go to extreme lengths.”
The hardest ones to catch right now are those who use a bib-mule — that’s a fast runner carrying the race bib (with the electronic timing chip) for a slower runner. Murphy recently uncovered a French tour company that qualified people for Boston by using bib-mules at the 2016 Quebec City Marathon.
“I’m trying to be more proactive to keep (cheaters) from getting in . . . I think the large majority of runners appreciate it,” Murphy says.
“I get some comments: ‘Hey, get a life’ or ‘Who made you the police?’ ” he says.
“Everyone does something in their free time. It’s just what I do in my free time gets publicized.”