Litton

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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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.

Maybe we’re fooling those people now, but we can’t sustain it. Frauds do ultimately get exposed. As it says in the Message translation of Numbers 32:23, “You can be sure that your sin will track you down.” 

And then the story won’t be so amazing.