Another marathon cheater, this time it’s a lady cutting courses and riding her bike for 2:45 marathons

How do cheaters like her who use drugs have such a huge social following. Do her followers not know she tested positive before or what? She is definitely cheating and needs to be caught

Cheateeahsuck wrote:

How do cheaters like her who use drugs have such a huge social following. Do her followers not know she tested positive before or what? She is definitely cheating and needs to be caught

It's Instagram... What do you expect??? Most of the kids on there are not the sharpest tools in the shed... They obsessed too much about positivity, encouragement and focus on superficiality of life... As long as you post a picture a day with a motivational phrase, you'll make it there... LOL...

The worst ones are just like this lady, taking advantage of her followers "childlike" naivety and gullibility, in order to make $$$;)

Instagram is dead, I left in 2012, just after it was acquired by FB. Also, left 130,000 followers behind... Never once have I regretted it. Made a few friends that I kept in touch even after leaving but otherwise it was good riddance...

She's already acknowledged making a wrong turn and going off course this morning...it would be interesting to check out all her other races though. She has a very extensive race resume...

If you look at her Austin Marathon results from this past February, it looks like she legit can run a 2:45. She hit all the timing mats (every 5k) and was consistent with her pace and relative position throughout the race...

Attention W. wrote:

If you look at her Austin Marathon results from this past February, it looks like she legit can run a 2:45. She hit all the timing mats (every 5k) and was consistent with her pace and relative position throughout the race...

Yeah and from her pics from that race it looks like she had the "3rd place woman" bike trailing her for at least some of the time. She may be taking questionable supplements, but I don't think she's cutting courses.

Interesting, I will give a closer look after dinner.

from her instagram: anyone who knows her understands that she would *never* cheat..

even though she got popped for juicing less than 3 years ago. delusional

She's already posted on Instagram that she made a wrong turn at the 1/2 and cut off a little bit of the course. But yeah, she's legit fairly fast...but an attention ho.

Splitting my analysis up into multiple posts because of the embedded images:

I've taken a look at the 3 Strava runs for Ashley Paulson posted here and ran them through my analysis tool. My conclusion is that they are legitimate files indicating real running and that the January 14, 2018 and February 18, 2018 marathon cadences look suspicious because of yet again another example of the poor quality of Suunto firmware for their GPS watches. Compared with the Garmin recorded run data from November 3, 2018, the Suunto recording is absolutely atrocious. I cannot stress enough how poorly I view Suunto watches and would never buy one from my experiences analyzing recordings from their watches (BTW, they never replied to me when I reported the bug to them last year).

Complete analysis files here:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1Ha8uMaWTqNEcVHz7TXdcaJZJaFa72-ZU

Below are the cadence line plots showing the Suunto recording data oscillating wildly between 50-90 rpm. This is a pattern we've previously seen in past investigations and is not an indication of using a bicycle, just simply bloodly poor software quality from Suunto. Compare it to when Ashley used a Garmin watch and she is recorded as holding a cadence between 90-100 rpm, it is night and day:

Cadence line plot from January 14, 2018 Marathon Using a "Suunto" Watch

https://drive.google.com/file/d/16G0YbKGFUS9GpkKrQ17UjS1thI8mVuYL/view?usp=sharing

Cadence line plot from February 18, 2018 Marathon Using a "Suunto Spartan Ultra" Watch

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iVBLP9mMqjyis9WcVrs6delVlQnBN-Iv/view?usp=sharing

Cadence line plot from November 3, 2018 Half Marathon Using a "Garmin fēnix 5S Plus" Watch

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tyx-gWqSRdsAx60NOxMAEPLg9XpXv6UI/view?usp=sharing

Plotting the cadence data in histograms reveals the characteristic "swiss-cheese" pattern in the Suunto recording data we saw in the past where it doesn't even record certain cadence values, and instead changes them to other neighboring values. Compare the histogram of the Suunto cadence data to the Garmin recorded cadence data and it is clear why Suunto watches are so garbage (she neither ran at low cadences nor did she skip certain cadence values):

Cadence histogram from January 14, 2018 Marathon Using a "Suunto" Watch

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_g0YXWPIGrhiI8jin8hai4AzKvqr7t8d/view?usp=sharing

Cadence histogram from February 18, 2018 Marathon Using a "Suunto Spartan Ultra" Watch

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WCN5-xI2avFI_oLRlXS8E905B2FQcUQP/view?usp=sharing

Cadence histogram from November 3, 2018 Half Marathon Using a "Garmin fēnix 5S Plus" Watch

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1E2yJvISaESDq_uYnZIGAiPYSJkCIgSL5/view?usp=sharing

Note that the garbage cadence data from the Suunto watches has a knock on effect in making stride length calculations useless. However, the speed line plots help to positively identify the activities as runs in both the Suunto and Garmin data because the speeds are relatively steady with plausible running speeds:

Speed line plot from January 14, 2018 Marathon Using a "Suunto" Watch

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_L0k7T84sJ3H00FXVyyxLTZzW-MFA9-d/view?usp=sharing

Speed line plot from February 18, 2018 Marathon Using a "Suunto Spartan Ultra" Watch

https://drive.google.com/file/d/14ObLJvtub0A5AfrJ98lVTePhxS9ueBiS/view?usp=sharing

Speed line plot from November 3, 2018 Half Marathon Using a "Garmin fēnix 5S Plus" Watch

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wOZfT1jgaOTcGFD3iwQnss5GJzAPyqZs/view?usp=sharing

As for the November 3, 2018 half marathon, I don't think Ashley cut the corner at mile 12. It looks like it is simply the curve smoothing Garmin watches do when recording GPS coordinates to minimize erratic noise.

For the other topic about drug use, I will let you guys debate that since there is no way for me to analyze that.

So in summary, the data indicates Ashley did the runs and Suunto is to blame (yet again) for poor watch firmware.

Cutcorner wrote:

She's already posted on Instagram that she made a wrong turn at the 1/2 and cut off a little bit of the course. But yeah, she's legit fairly fast...but an attention ho.

Ok, that makes sense then since the distance on her half marathon is less than 13.1 miles. The recording done by the Garmin is accurate in showing where she went, off course.

In conclusion: She's just faster than you.

She cut the course on purpose. I was at the race, it was clearly marked. She is taking prize money and awards from others. At least the race realized it and disqualified her.

I had a post up about Ashley Paulson cutting the course and it was deleted. I'm not sure why it was delete. The fact is she cut the course and denied it at first then when the timing pads showed otherwise she came up with the I just took a wrong turn story. She cheated.

If she didn't know that she had taken a wrong turn then her first instinct when questioned after the race would be to deny that she had done anything wrong because she was unaware of it in the first place. Women are known to be bad with directions and they can't read maps.

You must know by now that not everyone is as intelligent as you are.

My son and I ran in the half-marathon in question on November 3, 2018. He was one minute ahead of Ashley at the 15K. She never passed him on the course, but somehow came in at 1:14 when his finish time was 1:17. He could not have missed her passing him, she has a bright pink ponytail. When he finished, she approached him and made a big deal about how she had passed him and tried to wave to him. When he protested and said he hadn’t seen her, she implied that he must have been too “out of it” and “in pain” to remember it. She also said the same thing to a few other men she had been running with/behind that she magically got ahead of without them noticing. She was trying to cover what she had done, which came out later. She later admitted to running off course and cutting it short. She claims that it was an accident. I ran the race this same day in question. I was impeccably marked. She is a pro triathlete who has been in the lead in many races, having to navigate her way thru literally hundreds of races throughout her career. She also has lived in the area where this race was held. She makes it sound like she accidentally ran off course and got lost. If you are a pro triathlete and you go off course, you KNOW you must get back on the course or face being disqualified. Instead, she made the conscious choice to continue on a shorter easier route (minus the hills the rest of us had to run in the last 3 miles). She made the conscious choice to cross the finish line with her hands held high above her head even though she KNEW she cut the course. She posted victoriously on social media about her new PR. Then when others who were mysteriously passed without seeing her called her out on cutting the course, she “corrected” her social media post and admitted she got “lost” even though she has done much of her training in this area, and has lived there for many years. There is absolutely no question that she cut the course, that is proven by her Strava account. What is in question is the ethics of the runner that would choose to continue running a different way when she knew she was off course, then try to cover it up by trying to convince several other racers that she passed them and they simply didn’t notice or were in too much pain to see/remember it happening. They never saw her because she wasn’t there. She also crossed the finish line with her chip, claiming a spot in the results, when she knew she had cut the course. I measured the difference between the two routes at .24. Ethics highly in question here. Do we allow this kind of unethical behavior in our sport? She was rightfully DQ’d from this race. As for the marathons she is accused of biking, I ran in two of those 6 marathons she did this year. She legitimately ran those races. She did not bike them. Houston was 2:45. St. George 2:42. As for the doping charges, all I know is that she had a 6 month ban for legitimately positive tests. There are several articles about it available on the internet. Again, ethics are in question.

In her “correction” post on Instagram , she said she knew she was off course and pulled out her phone to find her way to the finish line. And she also claims to have stopped to ask a race official what to do. She knew she was off course before she finished the race. So she should not have crossed the finish line. And she should have immediately reported her mistake to the race timers so she didn’t mistakenly claim a spot in the results. So when “questioned” about it, her first instinct should have been to admit that she had been off course. She made the deliberate choice to continue on the wrong course. At that point you either have to try to get back on course with the related time loss, or turn it into a quality training run sans finish line, medals, podiums and prizes. She still could have posted her Strava and garmin results to her fans on IG for the adulation she craves without all the hassles of having to be called out on cutting the course and trying to pretend she didn’t.