Protected: The Evidence Is Conclusive: Mike Rossi – The Viral Boston Marathon Dad – Is A Marathon Cheat And Should Never Have Been On The Starting Line In Boston
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The 3:11:45 Marathon Qualifying Time That Rossi Put Up At The 2014 Lehigh Valley Marathon Was Too Good To Be True
by LetsRun.com
May 29, 2015
(Editor’s note: We were about to publish this story this afternoon when we got an emailed statement from the organizers of the Lehigh Valley Marahton that they for now won’t be disqualifying Mike Rossi. We address that development at the end of the article).
By now, most of you have heard of Mike Rossi – the Viral Marathon Dad. The 47-year-old Pennsylvania resident gained international fame when he posted a proposed snarky response on Facebook to a letter he received from the principal at his kids’ school scolding him for their unexcused absences before and after the 2015 Boston Marathon.
Rossi’s letter began,
Dear Madam Principal,
While I appreciate your concern for our children’s education, I can promise you they learned as much in the five days we were in Boston as they would in an entire year in school. Our children had a once-in-a-lifetime experience, one that can’t be duplicated in a classroom or read in a book.
and included this statement
They watched their father overcome, injury, bad weather, the death of a loved one and many other obstacles to achieve an important personal goal.
and before you knew it Rossi was doing television interviews and being featured in newspaper/Internet articles all over the world.
One small problem. Mike Rossi didn’t legitimately qualify for the 2015 Boston Marathon and thus didn’t legitimately “achieve an important personal goal” of qualifying for and running in the Boston Marathon.
Let us be clear: The evidence is overwhelming that Mike Rossi cheated his way into the 2015 Boston Marathon by cutting the course at the 2014 Lehigh Valley Marathon where he was given a 3:11:45 finishing time and he should be DQd from Lehigh Valley.
Rossi should never have been on the starting line at the 2015 Boston Marathon as the evidence is overwhelming that he didn’t legitimately qualify for the race (or go through the process to secure a charity entry).
Philly.com's headline on Rossi
Philly.com’s headline on Rossi
After questions about Rossi’s qualification started to gain momentum online, the press has covered it but their articles have beaten around the bush by asking if Rossi legitimately qualified. The hemming and hawing has driven us nuts. There should be zero doubt in the mind of any rational person who understands running and physiology that Mike Rossi, like Rosie Ruiz before him, is a marathon cheat.
How do we know? Very simply.
1) Mike Rossi’s running background clearly indicates he was not physically capable of running a 3:11:45 marathon.
2) Mike Rossi is the only finisher in the marathon who was not photographed on the course.
3) Mike Rossi has provided zero evidence to support his assertion that he overcame Powerball odds and ran the race of his life while managing not to be seen on the course at Lehigh Valley. In fact, some of his social media posts incriminate himself.
Let us explain.
1) Mike Rossi’s running background clearly indicates he was not physically capable of running a 3:11:45 marathon.
According to Athlinks an Internet website that track race performances, Rossi, a frequent racer who had 13 races in 2014, went into the 2014 Lehigh Valley Marathon on September 7, 2014, with the following PRs at shorter distances.
5k – 21:52
Half Marathon – 1:40:42
Those two times are pretty close to each other on equivalency charts. His half-marathon personal best is slightly better in equivalent terms than his 5k PR as 1:40:42 is equivalent to a 21:45 5k according to coach Greg McMillan‘s conversion calculator. But a 1:40:42 half-marathon/21:45 for 5k is only equivalent to 3:31:56 for the full marathon.
The problem for Rossi is that it’s physically impossible for someone with 21:52 5k or 1:41:15 half marathon fitness level to have the “race of their lives” and run 3:11:45 for the marathon. A 21:52 5k comes out to 7:02.3 mile pace. A 3:11:45 marathon comes out to 7:18.8. Physiologically, humans can’t run a marathon only 15.5 seconds per mile slower than they can run a 5k. The world record for the marathon is 37.9 seconds per mile slower than the world record for 5k.
The fact that Rossi’s supposed marathon PR pace is 22.4 seconds per mile faster than the WR difference may not seem like a lot for a non-runner but it’s an eternity to people who understand the sport.
“I’ve been working with runners at all levels for the last ten years. I’ve certainly seen the type of athlete that is super endurance-oriented. The type whose times are faster, comparatively, as he or she goes up in distance. But to imagine that someone could run a marathon just 15 seconds slower per mile than their 5k race pace is physically impossible and I feel very comfortable saying that,” wrote professional coach Ben Rosario, head of the HOKA One One Northern Arizona Elite professional team in Flagstaff, Arizona. “The strongest runner I’ve ever been around was (Olympic marathoner) Brian Sell and even with a 5k PR barely under 14 minutes, his marathon PR was still 30 seconds per mile slower than that 5k pace. At fifteen seconds slower he’d have run 2:04. That wasn’t going to happen.”
Exercise physiologist and coach Greg McMillan was also skeptical as he wrote, “When we test runners in the lab and what is observed in the real world is a relationship between race pace and race distance. As race distance increases, race pace slows. While there can be slight differences in just how much a runner slows as the race distance increases as compared to another runner, experts have seen that there is a somewhat predictable slow down from 5K pace to marathon pace, even in the very best runners in the world. The energetics required to run near 5K pace cannot be maintained for the marathon distance. Too much of the limited fuel stores will be used and performance limiting by-products will accumulate.”
If you don’t believe the coaches, maybe stats will convince you.
With some help from the people that visit our message boards, we took a look at the 10 people who finished directly in front of and behind Rossi at Lehigh Valley. As shown in this spreadshseet, they all have put up times significantly faster than Rossi in recent months at either 5k, 13.1 or 26.2. All of them had recently run at least one of the following times in another race besides Lehigh Valley — a 5k in 20:12 or faster (Rossi has only run 21:52 — 32.2 seconds per mile slower), half marathon in 1:30:36 or faster (Rossi has only run 1:40:42 — 46.2 seconds per mile slower), a marathon in 3:21:44 or faster (Rossi’s second-best marathon is just 3:43.52 — that’s 50.7 seconds per mile slower).
Rossi’s personal bests (and training history as we talk about below) clearly show that he’s not even remotely close to being a 3:11:45 marathoner.
Message board poster “GregTR” looked at Mike Rossi’s race results on his (now deleted) Athlinks account, converted them to their equivalent marathon time and did a statistical analysis of how likely, or should we say unlikely, it is that Rossi ran 3:11:45.
I have excluded the Via Marathon (red) and his bottom 3 races in terms of performance then looked at the averages of his races and their marathon equivalences. His average estimated marathon effort would be a 3:38:29 with a standard deviation of 7:47. What it means that running almost 27 minutes faster than the average performance is statistically improbable. This includes his performances before and after the Via Marathon at any and all distances. For someone to go from and average 62.3% age graded performance to 70.2% overnight on a hot marathon day is nothing short of a miracle.
rossistats
A miracle indeed. When another messageboard poster asked “GregTR” why Rossi didn’t run something closer to the Boston qualifying time of 3:25 so it wouldn’t be so obvious that he cheated, “GregTR” snarkily replied, “A 3:19 would bring it down from 4 std deviations to 3 std deviations from his previous race indicated performance average. So it would go from 99.9937% improbable to 99.73% improbable.”
2) There is lots of evidence supporting our belief that Rossi cut the Lehigh Valley course.
While in our minds, it’s been established that it literally would have taken a miracle for someone of Rossi’s fitness level to run 3:11:45, we know a few non-runners may not accept point #1. Okay, then please explain why Rossi didn’t show up any at of the seven photographic checkpoints on the course.
The Lehigh Valley Marathon didn’t have timing mats in the middle of its course in 2014. They only used timing mats at the start and finish of its race and thus would be an ideal race to cut the course. Thus if one is looking for proof of people actually running the course, they need to check the photographs that the official race photographers took.
The photographers only make money if people buy the photographs so they take a lot of photographs. Out on the course, not counting the finish line photos where Rossi shows up, they took roughly 8,000 photos. Rossi doesn’t appear in a single one of them besides the ones taken at the finish line (where there is both a video and still camera).
“But they miss a lot of runners,” you say.
No they do not.
We created a spreadsheet where we listed the 50 finishers in the race directly before and after Rossi at the 2014 Lehigh Valley Marathon (100 people in total) and the LetsRun.com community then looked to see if all of these runners appeared in non-finish line photos. They did indeed.
In fact, all 100 of the finishers closest to Mr. Rossi showed up in photos at least twice out on the course (three times counting the finish) but Rossi was only present at the finish.
Message board poster “Mileage Man” calculated how unlikely it was that Rossi actually ran the race but didn’t show up in a photo/video:
I calculated the mean and standard deviation of the “number of different locations on the course where a given runner was seen” for the 100 runners closest to Mr. Rossi. The lowest number of locations was 3, the highest was 7, and the average was 4.66 locations. The standard deviation was 0.97 locations.
I then performed a z-test, which means I assumed the data were normally distributed, and then computed the probability that Mr. Rossi would only have been pictured at the finish line assuming that he actually ran the race. (See “statistical analysis” tab of the spreadsheet for more details). The result was about 1 in 11,190.
So Rossi defied both 1/11,190 photo odds and the laws of physiology (way rarer than 1 in 11,190) in managing to run 3:11:45 at Lehigh Valley?
No way. The odds of winning the Powerball lottery might actually be lower than the odds that Mike Rossi had one of the if not the most amazing races in running history and was the only marathon finisher at Lehigh Valley not seen in a photo in the middle of the course. We’re serious. If the odds of him physiologically having a miracle day are greater than 1/15,658 and the odds of not being in the photos is indeed 1/11,190, then it’s easier to hit the Powerball than it would be for Rossi and have a miracle day AND not get photographed doing it.
If that isn’t enough to convince you, here’s some more info. LetsRun.com poster “justAnumbersGUY” created a computer program that ran the bib numbers of all 1065 of the finishers of the 2014 Lehigh Valley Marathon through the photographer’s website to see if any of them weren’t listed as having a photograph out on the course besides Rossi. 23 names including Rossi showed up, but a manual search of the race photos in “lost and found” (which is where photos show up if your bib is covered/missing, etc) found all 22 of the people not named Rossi (and didn’t find Rossi). Thus every single finisher of the 2014 Lehigh Valley Marathon was photographed out on the course except for Mike Rossi.
So it appears that every single finisher of the 2014 Lehigh Valley Marathon was photographed out on the course except for Mike Rossi.
Additionally, members of the LetsRun.com community have taken a close look at several of the photographed checkpoints that included time stamps on their photos. There is a nearly continuous run of photos at at least three checkpoints. For example, research by messageboard poster “Raysism” reveals that at one of the photo checkpoints there was on average more than 48 photos published per minute for a 13 minute stretch during which Rossi would have to run by the checkpoint (with the fewest photos in any one minute stretch being 40 photos). As shown here, all of the 20 closest finishers to Rossi (in terms of place, 10 ahead, 10 behind) were spotted at all three checkpoints and yet Mr. Rossi is absent from all three.
When one factors in all of that plus the fact that Rossi, until the controversy about his qualifier arose, was a huge publicity hound who often posed for photographers at other races (as shown below)
Rossi at the Philly Marathon
Rossi at the Philly Marathon
Mike noticed the camera here
Mike noticed the camera here
and that his bib was clearly shown when he crossed the finish line at Lehigh Valley
Ross crosses the finish line in Lehigh Valley. Photo via racephotonetwork.com
