The story of Kip Litton is amazing. In the August 6, 2012
issue of The New Yorker, Mark Singer
details just how amazing, as this dentist went from overweight to running
marathons. Inspired, he set out to finish a marathon in less than three hours
in each state. To cover 26.2 miles in under three hours, while not utilizing transportation
with wheels, is a difficult and significant accomplishment. To do it repeatedly is astounding.
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| www.writingaboutrunning.com |
Litton started and maintained his own website to chronicle
his feats, which initially went unnoticed. However, for about a year when he
was 48, he averaged about one marathon per month, and traveled all over the
country to race. In many of these races, he finished near the top of his age
group. Incredibly, he actually won the West Wyoming Marathon outright.
And people did begin to take notice of Litton’s
performances. People like the overall fourth-place finisher at the Deadwood
Mickelson Trail Marathon. Litton’s time put him in third place overall. But the
fourth place finisher was actually in third place at the halfway point, and he swore
he did not get passed during the last half of the race. He would have noticed,
too – the last half of the course consisted of a six-foot wide trail.
Other runners, bloggers and race directors failed to find
Litton in the myriad of photographs taken during races, except at specific
timing checkpoints. People sleuthing the internet eventually figured out Litton
fabricated the entire West Wyoming Marathon that he supposedly won, from
creating the event website, to inventing the names of the other “participants”
and their times.
Litton was exiting each course between timing checkpoints,
utilizing transportation with wheels to travel to the next checkpoint, and then
re-entering the race. Once he crossed through the checkpoint, he repeated the
process. He was cutting the course, which is a running term for “cheating.”
As Singer concludes, “Litton’s story could have been a small
but admirable one: an out-of-shape Midwestern dentist who transformed himself
into a competitive marathoner. But he had insisted on transforming himself
further, inventing a heroic avatar, ‘Kip Litton,’ that couldn’t be sustained.”
Singer continues, “But whatever glory he felt was surely short-lived” as people
exposed him as a fraud.
What stories are we spinning to impress people, stories
based on deception and cheating, which only require more cheating and more deception
to maintain? What front or what mask are we putting up for people to see, when the
truth is actually very different? Whether stories or facades, they are still
lies.
And then the story won’t be so amazing.
