Any Distance wrote:
I have no dog in this fight, but that Fort Worth marathon upload looks quite sketchy and makes me think the file was tampered with:
1) Watches "acting weird" don't get elapsed time wrong. GPS tracking may be off, moving time may be incorrect if the GPS thinks you've stopped leading to skewed mile pacing, whatever. But the most basic function of a stopwatch is to get elapsed time correct. Total time on this activity is 3:06:32, his official result shows 3:08:24 gun/3:08:16 chip. His GPS starting and ending points are exactly the same spot, so it's not like he started the watch late or stopped it early.
2) A typical activity when viewed on Strava (desktop) will show what kind of device recorded it. Many of Dane's recent runs are recorded via iPhone, in others such as the Ely marathon he uses a Timex Ironman GPS watch. This activity does not show which device was used to record, which means that Strava wasn't able to tell based on the file uploaded
3) Others uploading the same race consistently report a 6:59AM start, as do the official results, but this shows noon. In a modern watch there's no way you can have an accurate GPS signal but an incorrect time - GPS only functions by computing time differences from the satellites, without time there is no location tracking. Noon is an especially fishy incorrect time, since many software systems set this as a default time. For example, if the file was uploaded manually to Strava and the time information couldn't be read out of it, they may likely default the time to 12:00 PM.
A few thoughts: first, I have had an experience where my watch got the elapsed time wrong. By like 45 minutes. I was on a ride with my Garmin Forerunner 25. About 75 minutes in, the GPS added one point way out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Just one point. The rest of the right location was correct, but that one stray point added 45 minutes to my ride. Bizzar. I think I may still have the original file, although I ended up fixing it with various tools online. I had to crop the first half of the ride, re-upload and crop the last half of the ride, then merge the files using one of the GPS tools online. The overall time is still wrong, so it looks like I took a 45 minute pit stop in the middle of the ride, which I didn't.
Second, tools online give you the ability to mark up the GPS file and change what device recorded the activity. I could take my Foreunner 25 file and make it look like a Wahoo recorded it.
This, if Dane was to cheat with the file, why not just use a tool to time shift the file to the start time of the marathon? That can be done, too , online. I could take a ride from 2017 and re-timestamp it to look like I rode it yesterday. Not that hard.