Runner gets caught in elaborate half-marathon cheating scheme

The internet sleuths–and one in particular–have done it again!

Thanks to some rather unbelievable splits and some incriminating photo evidence, a woman was retroactively caught cheating at last Sunday’s Fort Lauderdale A1A Half-Marathon in Florida.

RELATED: Runner banned from the Boston Marathon for falsifying her qualifying time

Jane Seo, a New York City-based food and lifestyle blogger, was the second female finisher to cross the line in a time of 1:21:46. The only problem was: she cheated.

Yet so determined was Seo to have her result stand that not only did she convince race officials to ignore her unusual splits and accept both a finisher’s medal and her second place award, but she also biked the race course later in the afternoon to create GPS data to help cover her tracks.

But one man who is seemingly obsessed with catching the cheaters found her out. Derek Murphy who runs a blog called ‘Marathon Investigation,’ exposed Seo. That ultimately got her disqualified for her cheating.

The first bit of ‘evidence’ Murphy explored was Seo’s official race splits. According to race results, she covered the first 10K in 44:22 (a pace of 4:26/K) and the last 11.1K in 37:24 which translates to an average of 3:22/K. This alone may seem suspicious to most. GPS data would be a good place to start for anyone who suspects a cheater.

Interestingly, Seo made an original post to the popular activity-sharing website Strava which stores, analyzes and displays GPS data from runners and cyclists. However, Seo’s post was a manual post with no GPS data.

A few hours later though, Seo made another entry on Strava that confirmed via GPS data she travelled the half-marathon course in roughly the same time as her result.

However, Murphy noted that her heart rate and cadence data were much lower than one would expect while running and instead more closely mimics data from a bike ride.

He even went so far as compare this to one of Seo’s other runs (Note: done at a much slower pace) which clearly shows more realistic heart rate and cadence values.

Murphy took it a step farther still. He used Strava’s unique ‘Flyby’ feature to confirm that Seo had travelled the race course, but did so later on Sunday afternoon, hours after the race was over.

The most damning evidence however, came from looking at race photos (which Murphy actually purchased in order to investigate in greater depth).

Murphy noted that in one such photo, the watch face of Seo’s Garmin 235 was clearly visible.

RELATED: The Garmin Forerunner 235–Good for running and racing; not so much for cheating

And upon closer inspection, the watch indicates that Seo only covered 11.65 miles (18.7K) in the approximate time (1:22:07) of her official finish (1:21:46).

This bit of info clearly showed that Seo had cut about 1.5 miles (2.4K) of the course somewhere along the way.

Once Murphy presented this and additional info to event officials, Seo was eventually disqualified by the race.

Seo later came clean and admitted to her deceit. She went as far as posting an apology on her Instagram account, but that post has since been taken down.

As to her motives, it became apparent that Seo belonged to a New York running club called The Dashing Whippets, which has a subgroup called “The Performance Team.” To be part of this team, a female must run a half-marathon in a time under 1:24. Seo may have hoped to use her 1:21:46 to qualify for this team. Note that Seo has since been removed as a member of The Dashing Whippets.

Seo also wrote a pro-Fort Lauderdale tourism blog post after the race (since deleted) and it was confirmed by Murphy that a portion of her trip and activities were covered.

Murphy is someone who has become quite invested in scouting out dishonest runners. (Hence the blog.) As an overall remark on this whole debacle he wrote the following:

“In this day of age, it is nearly possible to get away with cheating at a race – if anyone is looking. It is 100% impossible to get away with it when you resort to circus like attempts to cover it up.”