Running and Cheating

The 2019 L.A. Marathon course started at Dodger Stadium and ended at the Pacific Ocean. The route snaked along the outskirts of downtown Los Angeles, down a section of Rodeo Drive, and past Echo Park, the Disney Concert Hall, and Hollywood, before ending at the Santa Monica Pier. The gun went off at 9:30 am on March 24, the thousands of runners starting the slow, flat crawl under a hazy gray sky.

Elisha Barno of Kenya won the 2019 L.A. Marathon with a time of 2 hours, 11 minutes, and 46 seconds, 10 minutes slower than the world record set 6 months before by Elluide Kipchoge in Berlin. Barno is one of the world’s best marathoners, and watching videos of him cruising over the paved streets in the southern California heat, it shows. He runs with a rhythm, his feet hitting the ground like a bass drum, each jolt dissipating through his thin, wiry muscles. His back is straight and his arms are flexed. He holds his head level as if it were resting on a pillar. His joints all fit together at the right angles, his body pared down to the bare essentials. Even in the last mile of the race, his running looked effortless.

Forty minutes behind Barno, another runner crossed the finish line, with a time of 2 hours 53 minutes and 48 seconds. His name was Dr. Frank Meza. He was seventy years old, nearly forty years Barno’s senior. Breaking a three hour marathon time is an impressive accomplishment for any runner. For the 70-74 age group, Meza’s time was a world record – although it couldn’t be officially recorded as such because the course wasn’t properly certified. The next best time in the 70-74 age group was well over four hours.

There weren’t any videos of Meza during the race, as there were of Barno. Barno, who had come within ten minutes of a world record, was a celebrated professional runner, but Meza, who had broken a world record, was mostly unknown to the marathon community. Had Meza really run the whole race, or had he cheated?

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It turns out that there is a whole online community dedicated to hunting down runners suspected of cheating. The website Marathon Investigation, run by Derek Murphy, is the face of the community. Murphy, who recently turned fifty, is a financial analyst from Cincinnati, who, and I mean this with absolutely no intended offense to middle aged business analysts from Ohio, looks exactly what I thought a fifty year old with that job in Cincinnati would look like. His hair is brown and thin but neatly parted down the middle, and his face is round and large, making room for a big smile that’s full of teeth. In most photo’s he’s wearing a plain beige quarter zip sweater that almost covers up a small paunch. Oftentimes he’s pictured with his laptop, and sometimes with a Diet Coke.

For much of his early life, Derek Murphy was a recreational runner, enjoying the sport for the scenery it afforded, and as a means to a more fit end. He competed in marathons throughout his twenties and early thirties, but never broke five hours, and after having kids, he mostly stopped running in races. Decades later in 2015, after reading a forum post accusing a DJ of cutting the Philadelphia marathon course, Murphy decided to use his analyst skills to contribute to the running community. That year, the Philadelphia marathon started publicly posting race data containing the participants names and respective checkpoint times. Murphy loaded the file into Microsoft Excel and quickly found anomalies in the DJ’s times. He replied to the original post with his findings, and commenters applauded his work. In that familiar case of mild-mannered analyst turned vigilante-operative, Murphy was hooked.

Cheating is not a recent phenomenon in long distance running. In the 1904 Olympic marathon in St. Louis, with 90 degree heat and near 100% humidity, American runner and bricklayer Frank Lorz gave up and started walking nine miles in. The course wasn’t closed off to automobile traffic, and Lorz, spotting a truck, hopped in the back, waving to spectators as the truck surged ahead. Four miles from the finish line, Lorz, who at that point had caught his breath, jumped out and continued on foot, miles ahead of the next runner. He was initially declared the winner, but just as Theadore Roosevelt’s daughter was about to hand him the gold medal, officials pressed Lorz on his unusually strong performance. He admitted to cheating, laughing the affair off as a practical joke. (The real winner barely finished at all, almost dying after his trainer refused him water, instead giving him a nearly lethal soup of strychnine, egg whites, and brandy.) More recently at the 1984 Boston Marathon, Rosie Ruiz hopped over a barrier one mile before the finish line, breaking the ribbon banner 30 minutes ahead of the next runner, eons ahead in marathon time. She completely gave herself away at the finish line though; a reporter asked who was coaching her, and she sneezed and said she was training on her own – highly unusual for competitive marathoners even then. When another reporter pressed further and asked what type of interval workouts she did, she asked “what are intervals?”

These days, the marathon, as is the case with almost everything in our lives, has been permeated by technology. In most long distance running races, aside from having a number and name attached to each competitor’s jersey, runners also wear a timing chip bracelet around the ankle. Special mats are laid periodically throughout the course, and when a runner crosses the mat, the timing chip uploads the runner’s timestamp to the race officials’ data set. Yet this technology hasn’t stopped cheaters; instead, it’s made it easier for them to be caught – namely by Mr. Murphy.

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Rather than some sort of advanced cheating-detection algorithm as most news sources have described Murphy’s process, as far as I can tell his method is just a series of subtractions and divisions to calculate the split times for each runner, as well as their average pace per kilometer. Abnormalities such as large variations in pace or a split time being faster than a world record raise a red flag to Murphy that the runner may have cut the course. In other instances, he looks for a lack of data, which may mean a runner didn’t cross all the timing mats or that they tampered with their chip. Once he isolates a section of a race where he thinks the participant cheated, he turns to the ever churning running website and forum LetsRun, to see if anyone has photos from that time, or if anyone saw an athlete doing something suspicious.

If Marathon Investigation is the polished, neatly carved tip of the iceberg of online running detectives led by Derek Murphy, then LetsRun is the underwater bulge of ice holding the peak above sea level. Started by the identical twin brothers Robert and Weldon Johnson – known electronically as RoJo and WeJo respectively, the BroJos collectively – the forum functions as a local watering hole for runners, an online dumping ground for advice and for theories about anyone or anything in the running community. Despite the Johnson brothers’ Ivy League pedigrees (Princeton and Yale), they manage LetsRun with no regard to pleasantries or politeness; as they said themselves, they’re not “mumble mouthed.” The BroJos have broken pieces about runner-and-coach love affairs, embarrassing outbursts at race events, and of course their fair share of cheating scandals. But aside from the BroJos’ journalist endeavors, LetsRun has emerged as the leading forum site for runners. Mostly the brothers have adopted a hand’s off approach to moderating the forums, allowing commenters to freely accuse runners of cheating. For this reason, LetsRun has been key to Marathon Investigations success. Murphy regularly uses the site as both a source of leads for uncovering potential course cutters, as well as a sounding board when he stumbles upon an anomaly in race data, often receiving corroborating photos or videos from forum posters that he includes in his articles.

To be clear, Murphy and other online sleuths on LetsRun are not after runners using performance enhancing drugs; they’re after people who cut the course during races. Course-cutting is extremely offensive to runners, considered far worse than drug use or doping, since in those cases the athlete is still completing the same mileage and competing in the same event. Cutting the course in races also isn’t a victimless crime. The world’s most competitive marathons have qualifying standards. In the case of the Boston Marathon, as more Americans take to running, the standards of qualification have become increasingly faster with every passing year. During registration, the fastest runners from each age bracket are chosen, and in the 2019 race, more than 7000 applicants were not accepted, many who still met the basic qualifying time. If you’re not fast enough, or not willing to put in the time to train, course cutting at a qualifying marathon suddenly becomes a more realistic option.

Combing through the archives of Marathon Investigation, the vast majority of articles are on runners who cheated to gain entry into these elite races. It’s these cheaters, who take slots away from deserving runners, that prompted Murphy to make Marathon Investigation into his full time hobby – in an interview with Wired, he said he sometimes spends up to 30 hours a week on analysis for the site. But every once in a while, Murphy also uncovers stories of people who have been caught cheating with seemingly nothing to gain. There was a story about a Huffington Post writer who cut the course in the Fort Lauderdale Half Marathon, placing second before she was disqualified a few days later. Another string of posts detailed an ultra marathon runner named Kelly Agnew, who in 2019, during a 24 hour lapped running event, was caught camping out in a porta potty waiting to jump back on the course for the next lap. Neither of these runners were trying to qualify for a marathon, they just wanted bragging rights. And then there is the case of Dr. Frank Meza.

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Most photos of Frank Meza capture him mid-stride. One foot is planted, and his posterior leg is hardened and elongated, propelling him forward. His calves jut out and bulge, and his thighs ripple with power. Under his tanned skin, arm veins pop. He looks nimble and sleek in a loose synthetic shirt, bright running shorts, and light Nike shoes. His dark brown hair peeks out under his trademark black cap.

Meza was a lifelong resident of Los Angeles, born in Eleyansain Heights (just north of Downtown L.A.) in 1950, a time when the city was expanding unchecked into the San Fernando Valley. The son of Mexican immigrants, his father died when he was eight. When Dodger Stadium was built at the end of the 50s, Meza’s widowed mother, a garment worker, moved the family further north to Elysian Valley. In high school, he spent hours near the L.A. river, jogging alongside it, and sometimes wading in it, looking for what little wildlife it contained. Volunteering for a local underfunded health clinic for two years before earning a bachelors at UCLA, Meza ultimately attended the UC Davis School of Medicine and became a family physician. He practiced medicine for 43 years, rising to the role of medical director for a local east L.A. hospital, before eventually becoming a Chief Medical Officer of AltaMed, one of the nation’s largest non-profit community health networks, operating throughout Los Angeles and Orange Counties.

Apart from competing in track and field during highschool, it wasn’t until his residency in Los Angeles that Meza started his marathon career. His wife, Dr. Tina Nevarez, who he had recently started dating at the time, remembers him wearing jogging clothes under his medical uniform, so that he could get in a run during shifts. After getting married and earning their medical licenses, the couple moved back to south Pasadena in east Los Angeles, a 40 minute drive from his birthplace. He volunteered as the assistant coach of the Loyola High School cross country team, and in the 1970’s founded a running club for young Latinos called the Aztlan Track Club that is still active today. Apart from work, running was all he did, Tina said. So, when Frank made his way to the starting line of the L.A. Marathon in March of 2019, he was anything but a newcomer to the sport. Still, his time in the race was incredible for any 70 year old, and too incredible for Derek Murphy not to notice.

Murphy had already heard of Meza in 2017, while talking with an L.A. Marathon race official. Meza, Murphy had learned, had been disqualified in the 2014 and 2016 California International Marathons hosted in Sacramento for having unrealistically fast splits for the final 10 km of each race. Meza didn’t dispute that these split times were unrealistic, acknowledging “I would disqualify me too. I can’t run a 10K that fast,” blaming timing chip technology. Still, he was given a lifetime ban on California International Marathon events. Meza had also raised suspicions when he ran the L.A. Marathon in 2015 and 2017: in back to back 5 km sections in the 2015 race, his time decreased six minutes, down to 18 minutes and 34 seconds. (This was a little faster than my average 5 km time I ran in high school, although I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a sizable crowd of seventy plus year olds out there who could beat me anyhow.) He hadn’t been disqualified from his previous L.A. Marathon events, but as Murphy put it, “Anyone with half a brain knows those splits are absolutely impossible.”

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Three days after Meza ran the 2019 L.A. Marathon, Amby Burfoot, a seventy five year old journalist and runner, reached out to Murphy in regards to multiple threads on LetsRun that discussed if Meza had cheated. In particular, Burfoot pointed Murphy to a photo from the race that clearly shows Meza in the background mid stride, entering the course from a side street. Together with the questionable pace times, Murphy published a first article about Meza on May 28th, accusing him of misconduct during the 2019 L.A. Marathon, and also casting doubt on the validity of his previous races, noting Meza’s previous disqualifications in the Sacramento marathons. The piece contained a statement from Meza, saying that he positively “did not cut,” that he had pulled off the course to pee, unable to find an unoccupied race porta-potty. Meza added that in the future he would be obtaining legal counsel on the matter. Murphy admitted at the end of the article that the photos were not “100% conclusive.”

In late June, David Wharton, a lead sports writer for the L.A. Times, wrote an article titled “Is this 70 year old marathon runner from East L.A. a record setter or a cheater?” that landed in the Must Reads section of the newspaper. The piece gave Meza’s side of the story, who said that he wasn’t aware of the thousands of posts on LetsRun until his daughter told him. When he visited the website and saw all the posts accusing him of cheating, he was shocked. “This is supposed to be fun,” Meza said. “I’m kind of losing sleep over it. Obviously your mind is going to run wild. What happens if everyone starts believing this?”

Also in the article, friends and former mentees of Meza came to his defense. Lalo Diaz, the head coach at Loyola Highschool who coached alongside Meza for decades, mentioned Meza’s dedication to the team and to mentorship. Diaz noted that state and national champions have come out of the Loyal highschool under Meza’s mentorship. Moreover, he pointed out Meza has trained with elite highschoolers for much of his career. “When Frank is training with the team, he’s training with some of the best runners Los Angeles has ever seen,” Diaz says. “People ask who [Frank] is running with … that’s who.”

Scott Dominguez was one such elite student who became a close personal friend of Meza’s after he graduated from Loyla in 1996. Now serving as the Deputy District Attorney for L.A. County, Dominguez came to Meza’s defense in the article. “Dr. Meza would run with the varsity team, running at the front of the pack,” he remembers. He added that the burden of proof had been shifted onto Meza unfairly with the Letsrun users and with Murphy. “With [Murphy and other online accusers], he is guilty until proven innocent. The burden should be on them to say this is irrefutable, this is what you did and we caught you. Why is the burden on him?”

In response to the piece in the L.A. Times, Murphy published a new article on Marathon Investigation. Since Murphy had written the first article at the end of May, he had been investigating the photo taken of Meza entering the course, which showed him trailing behind a group of younger runners. In photos of timing mats after where Meza reentered the race, he was consistently pictured behind the same group. After reaching out for leads on Letsrun, Murphy found that one of the runners pictured ahead of Meza had a public Strava profile, which had recorded GPS data from the runner’s watch. The man’s average mile time from after Meza joined behind him was 8 minutes and 23 seconds, meaning that after Meza rejoined the race, his mile pace must have been roughly similar to the runner ahead. But from the official race data, Meza’s average mile pace was 6 minutes and 43 seconds, almost two minutes faster. Since the photo of Meza reentering the course was taken with about a third of the course left to go, this means Meza would have had to run around a 5 minute and 30 second mile pace for the first two thirds of the race. The world record mile time for the 70-74 age group is 5 minutes and 32 seconds.

Murphy theorized that Meza had left the course at the previous timing mat and had ridden a bike to the spot near where he rentereted the course. Meza can be seen with two timing watches – neither GPS capable – on his wrist, and Murphy speculated that while one watch recorded elapsed time since the start of the race, the other watch was to record the time since he had crossed the previous timing mat. Once a reasonable amount of time had elapsed since he left the course so as not to have an obviously impossible split time, he reentered the where the photo was taken.

The L.A. Marathon conducted their own closed door investigation, and on June 28, Meza was disqualified from the 2019 marathon. ABC, CNN, NBC, and other national news corporations picked up the story on July 2nd. Reporters knocked the Meza’s door requesting interviews, assembling on the sidewalk outside their house. The news spread throughout the greater Los Angeles area, where Meza had lived for most of his life. Loyola High School, where he had been an assistant coach for most of his adult life, quietly asked him to take a medical leave. Friends who he used to see weekly distanced themselves and retreated.

The overpass on Riverside Drive and Figueroa Street is made out of concrete pillars and steel arches. The bridge is painted tan and white, and crosses three stories over the Los Angeles River, which is reduced to a dirty trickle in the concrete channel. The dry sides of the concrete basin are light and look chawky in the sun. There are power lines just to the north, and the road has four lanes, bordered by two sidewalks with chest high railings. This is the neighborhood where Meza grew up.

In the mid morning of July 4th, as the rest of Meza’s family was gathering at his house under the hot southern California sun for a picnic lunch, Meza’s body was spotted by a jogger under the bridge, floating face down. He had left earlier that morning to go for a long run, telling his wife Tina he was going to a favorite trail alongside the L.A. River. The coroner report concluded he suffered blunt force trauma to the head from the fall, which was given as the cause of death. Firemen from the L.A. Fire department collected his body from the muddy water, only a few feet deep under the bridge. He had recorded a video on his cellphone that he left on the passenger’s seat of the car. “I love you,’’ Meza said. His voice was shaky. “I can’t go on with life with the whole world attacking me, it feels like it’s never going to stop, and I can’t be pushed down any further. I just can’t continue like this.”

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After his death, Meza’s family blamed Murphy and the Johnson brothers for the sucicide. In an interview with Wired, Tina said “If what happened to Frank happened physically and not in the virtual world, they would all be in jail.” His daughter, wiping away tears, interjected: “What motivates [Murphy]? He finds pleasure inflicting pain and shame on others.” In the interview, Tina remembered when, a month prior to his death, their daughter had shown Meza the comments on Letsrun that called him a fraud and a pathological liar. “He shook his head and tried to smile, but turned away and was quiet.”

Other runners came forward, attacking Murphy. “Your pursuits are neither noble nor justifiable,” said a user on Letsrun. “You are a worthless loser with nothing better to do. His blood is on your hands,” read a Tweet at Murphy. “Great reporting on Frank Meza. Whose life are you destroying next?” Maria Gorhman, who Murphy had written about in 2018, and who had subsequently admitted to cheating in an ultra marathon, wrote in an Instagram post a month after Meza’s death about her own experience after being called out on the site. “I wasn’t sure how to deal with the overwhelming sense of shame placed on me … I found myself standing on a bridge, ready to commit suicide.”

On July 6th, two days after the sucicide, Robert Johnson shut down all LetsRun forums related to Meza. That summer Murphy wrote several more articles on the Meza case, mentioning forgiveness and how poor judgment is an inherent human characteristic, and recognizinging Meza’s community involvement and more than 40 years of service and dedication as a physician. He also started going to therapy. Still, Murphy and the Johnson brothers all rejected the Meza family’s claims that they bore some responsibility for his death, that they “assassinated and targeted him” as Tina put it. Murphy said he had always tried to give Meza the benefit of the doubt and that he had relied strictly on evidence. “I didn’t show up at Frank’s door,” Murphy wrote in his final article about Meza. “Writing factual articles is not harassment by even the most liberal of definitions. Integrity matters. The tragic story of Frank Meza does not change that. Marathon Investigation is not shutting down.” And in a 2020 interview on a running podcast, he reaffirmed his stance: “If somebody is reaching the podium and they cheated, it’s wrong. The point is to preserve the integrity of the sport.” Similarly, Robert and Weldon Johnson maintained that the LetsRun forums were not a form of cyberbullying. “If anyone was a bully,” Robert said in a 2019 interview, “he was the one threatening lawsuits. The person that killed Frank Meza was Frank Meza.”

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One question that has never been posed nor answered on Marathon Investigation is why a successful person with nothing tangible to gain would cheat at a running race, the sport that is the epitome of individuality. Professor of Psychology Amos Schurr of Ben-Gurnion University in Israel is investigating motives behind cheating. His recent research has mainly focused on investigating cheaters who have nothing tangible to gain from cheating, those who cheat purely for the sake of winning. In a 2016 study, Schurr and collaborators divised two sets of tests, each with the goal of identifying a specific characteristic of these types of cheaters. The first involved two participants playing a game against each other where they had to identify household objects on a screen as fast as possible. Then, everyone was rearranged with a new partner and played a game where each person took turns rolling two dice, where only the roller could see the dices’ score. The winner of the dice game was chosen based on the two player’s average score. Statistically, the long-term predicted average score of two dice being rolled is 7. However, participants who had won the first object-identifying game reported rolling an average score of 9, whereas losers from the first game reported an average score of 6.7. Given the number of people involved in the study, Schurr and his collaborators concluded the only explanation was that a large number of people who had won their first game were lying. In the second set of tests, participants first played a trivia game instead of an object-identifying game, where being considered a winner in the trivia game only required meeting a threshold of questions answered correctly. When these participants were mixed and played the dice game again, both winners and losers of the trivia games had average dice scores of 6.8. Schurr concluded that cheating appeals to a specific kind of success, one where athletes are compared against one another, not just against a threshold value.

In an interview with the Independent after the study was published, Schurr admits that “dishonesty is a pretty complex phenomenon.” “Still” he adds, “people who win competitions feel more entitled, and that feeling of entitlement is what predicts dishonesty. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle: the more people win, the more likely they are to cheat; and the more they cheat, the more likely they are to win.” All of this indicates that runners aren’t cheating to earn a better time for themselves, but instead to earn a better time compared to everyone else.

Robert Johnson proposed a similar theory of what motivates runners to cheat. “Since the beginning of time, it has been a fight for survival. Now we’re living in a day-to-day world that isn’t that hard. So there’s lots of depression because people don’t know what to do. You raise your kids, you’re successful in your career, and then what? Particularly with the decline of religion there’s a void in people’s lives. Running gives you an artificial scorecard for life.” Professor Schuurr’s research supports this theory. We all have an artificial scorecard, and checking off as many boxes as possible is most people’s definition of success. In the case of Frank Meza, if he did cheat, maybe his motive was to be known in his community as a winner. “I think he had a very specific idea of what his life should be,” Tina said after Meza’s sucicide. “And he didn’t see a way out.”

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The 2020 L.A. Marathon was held on March 8, 2020, one of the last major events before the pandemic. The 2020 course was almost identical to that of the 2019 route, save for a few detours because of road construction – still stadium to sea. Gene Dykes (72) of Philadelphia won the 70-74 men’s age group with a time of 3 hours 25 minutes and 36 seconds. Dykes didn’t start running marathons until he was 58, but in the past fourteen years he’s been a top finisher of his age group in marathons across the country, even setting a certified marathon world record in 2018 with a time of 2 hours 54 minutes and 23 seconds in Jacksonville, Florida – two minutes slower than Meza’s time in 2019. Marathon Investigation made no mention of the race.