Did Mike Rossi (viral marathon dad) cheat his way into Boston?

draft legal racer wrote:

By the way I am convinced he is innocent and 'ran' the time. I calculated his height and profile sizing and then looked at this running style. If you look at his finish video from Lehigh he drafts directly behind the finisher in front of him who was taller and bigger. It is hard to see him at the finish as he is blocked out by the person he is drafting. Not making this up watch the video. I think that is the same visual effect that explains lack of photos, he was drafting and invisible to the photographer until photographer had pointed the camera further along.

This is an interesting theory. We all know MR is a POS lying cheat. He drafted SO close that he actually rode out the race in the butt crack of a faster runner and was sharted out somewhere after the last relay exchange and finished on his own power. That's why the photographers didn't capture him! Are there any visible loads in the shorts of any of the runners that finished a little faster than MR?

Has anything worthwhile happened since RD's statement re non DQ?

Back after weeks away. wrote:

Has anything worthwhile happened since RD's statement re non DQ?

Letsrun released a great paper but other than that nothin pretty much

triathleteguru wrote:

Working in no scene wrote:

When you say working behind the scenes, is the RD gonna review the evidence again?

When can we expect some results realistically?

Well, I did hear from Lehigh Valley Marathon.. Not directly about Mike Rossi, it felt more like a marketing deal, they provided me this info here:

http://imgur.com/VdLe8Ic

Doing things like this diminishes your credibility greatly. There is a reason the race committee and USATF don't take you seriously.

oh course I am wrote:

Rossi & Rossi wrote:

Seems to me that Doug Simpson and Parents Disgusted are one and the same.

Good luck with this deflection. Yesterday's didn't work so well.

So you are ok with what LoserMikeRossi said too?

Sex talk about a teen girl?

Disgusting

What if he was a teenager when he watched that episode?

What if.... wrote:

oh course I am wrote:

So you are ok with what LoserMikeRossi said too?

Sex talk about a teen girl?

Disgusting

What if he was a teenager when he watched that episode?

Last time I saw Marcia was in 1988 when the Brady's all came for Christmas and she was all grown up and married. And I was all grown up as well. So who keeps bringing up these teenage rape fantasies?

Maybe YOU all need help.

Marcia Marcia Marcia!!! All you talk about is Marcia!! I could bandit the Olympic 1500 and cheat my way into Boston and then cheat that in plain view and al you people would talk about is Marcia Marcia Marcia and Mike Mike Mike. I hate you

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Tim Vandervlugt wrote:

Mid-life crisis for mike rossi, maybe patriotic gesture after the Boston marathon bombing, what ever the motivation he set the goal to run in the next Boston marathon he could qualify for.

He made attempts and came up short but, he told everyone that he was going to run Boston.

Having no running background what so ever, this 45 year old had no idea how hard it would be and equally clueless to the type of training it would take to BQ.

He backed himself into a corner and had no alternative (in his mind) so he cheated.

Yes, I used my real name.

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That makes sense dude. Good analysis. In addition to the likelihood Mike Rossi ran a 3:11 legitimately being more improbable than winning the lottery based on the LetsRun article and the opinions of two of the most well-known endurance running exercise physiologists in the nation, it's pretty clear from reading his blog and the background on this guy that the incentive was big for him to cheat to get into Boston. I mean Mike Rossi put himself in a position with his social media selfie image where he probably absolutely felt he NEEDED to get into Boston at any cost or risk his whole selfie social media project being a failure and him having to stay home in Philly, etc.

Qualifying for Boston is not easy for someone without much a running background like Rossi as there are no quick fixes in this sport. Rossi and non-runners should realize that most who qualify for Boston with relative ease (myself included and many of whom post on this board) have a competitive HS and/or NCAA xc/track background with years of training under their belts.

Read more:

http://www.letsrun.com/forum/flat_read.php?thread=6479539&page=305#ixzz3cuJz2qUO

triathleteguru wrote:

Working in no scene wrote:

When you say working behind the scenes, is the RD gonna review the evidence again?

When can we expect some results realistically?

Well, I did hear from Lehigh Valley Marathon.. Not directly about Mike Rossi, it felt more like a marketing deal, they provided me this info here:

http://imgur.com/VdLe8Ic

For some reason this attempt at burning Lehigh Valley reminds me of George Costanza and the "jerk store".

Runner's World should do an article on Rossi's training since it obviously has stood running science and physiology on their collective heads. Imagine what The Rossi Method could do for the US Olympic Team. It is breathtaking.I am somewhat serious. If Mike claims this to be true then it warrants a higher level of scrutiny. Mike on the cover of RW with his Boston gear and medal and cheeseburger. They'd eat it up, in moderation of course.

triathleteguru wrote:

http://imgur.com/VdLe8Ic

Is this real or a joke? I don't get it.

Are they really going to review the evidence again? I thought I read that a while back.

The picture linked above, it is Lehigh Valley VIA Marathon's new "Truth in Advertising" campaign that I'm helping to facilitate. As for what is happening behind the scenes, I am not at liberty to divulge that yet.[/quote]

So no reconsideration by Rd? You've got a cute meme here, but...

Basically nothing. I don't even know why I wasted my time asking I should have known.

Now I got it wrote:

So no reconsideration by Rd? You've got a cute meme here, but...

Basically nothing. I don't even know why I wasted my time asking I should have known.

Rome wasn't built in a day

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

(Editors 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 wont 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.

Rossis letter began,

Dear Madam Principal,

While I appreciate your concern for our childrens 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 cant 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 didnt legitimately qualify for the 2015 Boston Marathon and thus didnt 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 didnt legitimately qualify for the race (or go through the process to secure a charity entry).

Philly.com'sdlineRossi

Philly.coms headline on Rossi

After questions about Rossis 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 Rossis 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 Rossis 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 McMillans 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 its 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 cant 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 Rossis 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 its an eternity to people who understand the sport.

Ive been working with runners at all levels for the last ten years. Ive 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 Ive 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 hed have run 2:04. That wasnt 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 dont 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 (Rossis second-best marathon is just 3:43.52 thats 50.7 seconds per mile slower).

Rossis personal bests (and training history as we talk about below) clearly show that hes not even remotely close to being a 3:11:45 marathoner.

Message board poster GregTR looked at Mike Rossis 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 didnt run something closer to the Boston qualifying time of 3:25 so it wouldnt 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, its been established that it literally would have taken a miracle for someone of Rossis fitness level to run 3:11:45, we know a few non-runners may not accept point #1. Okay, then please explain why Rossi didnt show up any at of the seven photographic checkpoints on the course.

The Lehigh Valley Marathon didnt 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 doesnt 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 didnt 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. Were 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 its easier to hit the Powerball than it would be for Rossi and have a miracle day AND not get photographed doing it.

If that isnt enough to convince you, heres 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 photographers website to see if any of them werent 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 didnt 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.

Read more:

http://www.letsrun.com/forum/f...z3cuF4w9eI

Read more:

http://www.letsrun.com/forum/flat_read.php?thread=6479539&page=306#ixzz3cxNSYf4z

This thread deserves to be in the Let's Run Hall Of Fame and pinned to the top indefinitely.

LoserMikeRossi wrote:

This thread deserves to be in the Let's Run Hall Of Fame and pinned to the top indefinitely.

Is this a new let's run forum record for most posts ever?

What I wanna know is who is on the Lehigh Valley VIA Marathon board who made this decision, and do they have any knowledge of our sport? Did they ever take a statistics course?

Lisa Walkiewicz, the VP of communication for Lehigh Valley Marathon, released the statement saying he will not be DQ. According to Lisa Walkiewicz LinkedIn profile, her degree is in Journalism. Is she even a runner? Has she taken a stats course before?

I agree. Rossi has been rightfully attacked (and that will continue) but the RD has made out like she is just a victim.

Gotta love the "We will not be making further comments on this matter." - Lisa Walkiewicz, Bachelors in Journalism at Penn State.

To me, It's basically saying "We know there are a lot of obsessed serious runners out there at letsrun.com and at runnersWorld.com who know Mike Rossi cheated, but we don't want to hear it so just shut up. We won't listen nor will we be transparent as to what the investigation the USATF did with us revealed. We have degrees in Journalism so the running community, Greg McMillan and Jack Daniels and the Team Flagstaff Elite exercise physiologists, Robert and Weldon Johnson and everyone else can go F themselves. We won't be changing our minds."

Despicable, makes no sense wrote:

Gotta love the "We will not be making further comments on this matter." - Lisa Walkiewicz, Bachelors in Journalism at Penn State.

To me, It's basically saying "We know there are a lot of obsessed serious runners out there at letsrun.com and at runnersWorld.com who know Mike Rossi cheated, but we don't want to hear it so just shut up. We won't listen nor will we be transparent as to what the investigation the USATF did with us revealed. We have degrees in Journalism so the running community, Greg McMillan and Jack Daniels and the Team Flagstaff Elite exercise physiologists, Robert and Weldon Johnson and everyone else can go F themselves. We won't be changing our minds."

You got all that from "no further comments"?

You must got ESPN mind reading