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Marathon Runner's Tracked Data Exposes Phony Time, Cover-Up Attempt

Accepted submission by Fnord666 at 2017-02-24 04:59:53
Hardware

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 [marathoninvestigation.com], 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 [wildsideonline.net].

Source: ArsTechnica [arstechnica.com]


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