Doubler wrote:
careful careful wrote:Your Toronto Waterfront "cheater" could easily have just been somebody who went out too fast and cratered. There's only one missed split and those do happen occasionally to people who run the course. The first road race I ever ran was a marathon (on basically zero specific run training) and I went out in 1:24, with a second half of 1:47, and numerous short walking breaks. It's also possible that he tweaked an injury or cramped up around halfway and decided to jog/walk it in.
I don't think that there's enough evidence for the race director to DQ that guy, unless I'm missing something else.
Click on the complete splits:
7:09/km
3:29/km
7:57/km
4:37/km
10:16/km
And I did not call him out as a cheater--just that those splits need to be looked at.
On second thought, I looked at the link on your blog to the full splits and 7:09/km is not correct for his pace through halfway. The results company apparently only took the distance covered between 10km and 21.1km (11.1km) and then took the total elapsed time at this point to find the pace. If he ran the entire first half, his actual pace through his first recorded split would have actually been around 3:46 pace, which is not all that far off of his next split of 3:29, which was only 3.9 km so, if there was a nice downhill or a tailwind on that section, speeding up by 17s per km is not out of the realm of possibility. After that, the splits do get funny but he could have walked a good portion of his 7:57 split and then jogged most of his next 4:37 split, while walking the last 2.2 km of the race. This wouldn't be too unusual for somebody who goes out too fast, blows up or suffers cramps, but then decides to finish anyhow.
I'm not saying that he definitely didn't cheat, but I think that you should take his name off of your blog, unless you have more evidence than this as, like the other poster said, it's called "Marathon Cheats".