A classic Coach Matt Rant That Is Possibly An Allegory for Things Other Than Running

The Springfield Invaders have the ball at their own 20-yard line, first and ten. The quarterback takes the snap and hands the ball to his fullback, who squeezes through a narrow gap opened up by the left tackle, then jukes further left to evade an opposing linebacker and rumbles to the 29-yard-line before being brought down by the Shelbyville Destroyers’ strong safety.

The referee spots the ball and signals second down, but the fullback objects.

“I ran more than 10 yards!” he grouses. “It says so right here on my watch—nine vertical yards plus three lateral yards equals 12 yards total. That’s enough for a first down!”

Ridiculous, no? Yet runners routinely do the same thing our fictional fullback did in this imagined scenario when they reject their official race times in favor of the “faster” times their devices capture en route. An example is Peter, a runner I coached a few years back to a sub-18-minute 5K attempt. After the race, I received a brief and celebratory text message from Peter: “I did it! 17:55!” But when I checked the online results I saw he’d actually run 18:04.

Was Peter lying? Not exactly. He just hadn’t quite reached the finish line when his watch grabbed a split time of 17:55 for 5,000 meters, and because he liked that number better than the bigger number he saw on the race clock when he crossed the timing mat nine seconds later, he decided to claim it as the true outcome of his performance. But although Peter wasn’t lying, he was cheating, for as the referee explained to the grumbling fullback in the foregoing hypothetical, “Son, that ain’t how sports work.”

The official distance of any sanctioned road race is the minimum distance a runner can possibly cover without cutting the course as measured by wheel. Running watches use telemetry to indirectly measure distance covered using signals that travel to freaking outer space and back, and as such they cannot hope to match the accuracy of physical wheel measurements, so there’s always a discrepancy. On top of that, no runner ever succeeds in covering the minimum possible distance in a road race, so even when the device estimates are accurate, a 5K runner always hit 5,000 meters somewhere short of the finish line, and the delta between real and virtual distance only increases as races get longer.

Hell, even on the track, runners always run extra distance. Scientific analyses of elite middle-distance track races have found that the winner is usually the competitor who covers the least extra distance, which shows you how important tactical positioning is to success in these events. How stupid would it be if the gold medal in, say, the Olympic 1500 meters was awarded not necessarily to the runner who finished first but to the runner whose watch showed the fastest split time for 1500 meters, captured before they finished? Pretty stupid. Races happen in physical reality, Peter, not in the virtual reality of digital electronics. If you really want to break 18 minutes for 5K, take your eyes off your fucking Garmin and use them to run perfect tangents, earning your finish time the same way we expect Olympic medalists to do.

Suppose Peter had deliberately zigzagged across the road during his race, accumulating so much extra distance that his watch grabbed a 5K split of 17:55 when he was a full 400 meters from the finish line instead of just 30 meters. And suppose he’d then stopped running, caught an Uber to the finish area, and hung around waiting for the award ceremony, expecting an age-group trophy. We’d judge these actions beyond the pale, yet they are 100 logically consistent with Peter’s actual behavior. Either the race happens on the ground that we all tread collectively or it doesn’t. You can’t convince me that a small departure from reality is more excusable than a vast departure when we’re talking about the rules that govern the sport. The categories are binary: not cheating and cheating.

A question for the audience: What is the current men’s world record for the marathon? I’ll bet Peter knows it’s 2:00:35, set by Kelvin Kiptum at the Chicago Marathon in 2023. But wait: I’ve run Chicago, and when I crossed the finish line my watch said I’d run 26.55 miles. Assuming Kiptum’s watch did the same, he would have hit 26.218 miles (the true marathon distance) at or around 1:59:05, so shouldn’t that be the world record? Laugh all you want, but if we accept 17:55 as Peter’s 5K PR then we must also accept 1:59:05 as the true men’s marathon world record. There’s just no getting around it.

Unless . . . there’s a double standard! And now, at last, we’ve come to the nub of the matter, and the reason “Garmin PR’s” expose a character deficit in those who claim them. Runners like Peter (and there are many, many Peters) are happy to accept officially ratified world records as valid, but when it comes to their own personal records, they insist on a lower standard, almost literally moving the goalposts for their unique benefit. In essence, these runners are demanding their own special finish line that’s closer to the start line than everyone else’s. The fact that lots of people do what Peter did does not make it okay, because not everyone does it. Kelvin Kiptum didn’t, nor do I. According to my watch, I covered the marathon distance at Chicago in 2:37:12, crossing the finish line two minutes and 16 seconds later. When people ask me what my marathon PR is, how do I answer? “Two thirty-nine twenty-eight.”

I’m ranting, I know, but this shit bugs me. Civilization is falling apart all around us, and the main driver of our species’ high-speed collision course with self-annihilation is the antinomian “morality” of people like Peter, who lie on their athletic resumes and leave their shopping carts where they don’t belong for hapless minimum wage-earning supermarket employees to take care of and toss nonrecyclable garbage into recycling bins and don’t use their turn signal and support “might makes right” foreign policy, feeling no obligation whatsoever to contribute to the common good, as long as other suckers do. I can’t do much to stop civilization from falling apart, but perhaps I can at least shame the Peters among us into practicing basic sportsmanship in the meantime.

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Thanks for reading 🤍
Matt Fitzgerald & the MarathonGuide team