Hot tip: If you're going to cheat while running a marathon, don't wear a fitness tracking band.
A New York food writer found this out the hard way on Tuesday after she was busted for an elaborate run-faking scheme, in which she attempted to use doctored data to back up an illegitimate finish time. In an apologetic Instagram post that was eventually deleted, 24-year-old runner Jane Seo admitted to cutting the course at the Fort Lauderdale A1A Half Marathon.
An independent marathon-running investigator (yes, that's a thing) named Derek Murphy posted his elaborate analysis of Seo's scheme, and the findings revolved almost entirely around data derived from Seo's Garmin 235 fitness tracker. Suspicions over her second-place finish in the half marathon began after very limited data about her podium-placing run was posted to the Strava fitness-tracking service. The data only listed a distance and completion time, as opposed to more granular statistics. (This followed the release of Seo's official completion times, which showed her running remarkably faster in the half marathon's later stages.)
Things got weirder when Seo eventually posted a "complete," GPS-tracked run of the half-marathon course. Its time-stamp looked suspiciously off, Murphy noted in his own report, so he dug up older run-data posts from her same account and noticed starkly different heart rate and cadence stats in her newer report. "The cadence data [of the half marathon] is more consistent with what you would expect on a bike ride, not a run," Murphy wrote.
[...] Seo's completion time has since been deleted from the Fort Lauderdale A1A Half Marathon's results page.
Source: ArsTechnica
(Score: 0, Troll) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday February 25 2017, @12:37AM
Of course it was a food writer, they and their fellow brethren the art critics are the most smarmy and pretentious people out there. Oh, and look, she's also a sneaky Asian to boot. Probably a Vietnamese behaving like a Chinese.
Though I was guilty of such pathetic trickery once -- To piss off my ex I sent her a picture of me sucking another girl's boob. And, worse, I altered its exif data to show that it had been created that day and not 2 years before I met that ex-girlfriend -- just in case.
(Score: 5, Funny) by bob_super on Saturday February 25 2017, @12:43AM
I need line-item modding. You keep having posts in which the start and end don't deserve the same mod..
(Score: 2) by Whoever on Saturday February 25 2017, @03:23AM
"Probably"? You know that many of the Vietnamese boat-people were ethnic Chinese, right?
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 25 2017, @12:51AM
From her perspective she ran the fastest race ever run and won by the largest margin. Huge crowds watched too, huuuge.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 25 2017, @01:28AM
You mean yuuge?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 25 2017, @01:29AM
YUUUGE http://nypost.com/2017/02/22/huffington-post-writer-admits-cheating-in-half-marathon/ [nypost.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 25 2017, @04:08AM
Fake Garmin! Gake Farmin!
You're the puppet!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 25 2017, @12:58AM
Halfway through the marathon, she stopped at a transgender bathroom, paused, then entered a men's bathroom. This proves conclusively that she was a man and should never have been allowed to run in a woman's marathon... damn that Obama for confusing everyone.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 25 2017, @06:20PM
This is Florida after all. Red state, and just another republican cheating their way to fake glory.
At least it wasn't another massacre as in Bowling Green or Sweden.
(Score: 2) by Leebert on Saturday February 25 2017, @05:38AM
That's some CSI-level stuff right there... Like, literally "She's wearing a GPS watch... let's zoom in and see what the watch says. ENHANCE!"
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Saturday February 25 2017, @05:14PM
They zoomed with the new Google algorithm... Turns out the face of her watch looks a lot like Brad Pitt.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 25 2017, @08:22AM
Seo stands for everything filthy and wrong.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 25 2017, @03:12PM
You can run but you can't hide.
(Google images for many different interpretations...)