The Best American Sports Writing 2013 (40 page)

 

The West Wyoming Marathon did actually exist. It was set up to accommodate our family trip to that area. In planning our vacation, I launched the website for the race, which was set up with race day registration. Over a dozen people indicated that they would likely come & run. I had a local resident lined up to help out. Race morning I got quite a surprise when no one showed up. I ran anyway. As the only entrant I placed both first and last. The first issue of the results contained only my name. A tech savvy friend convinced me this would look ridiculous & he could add some additional names. After thinking that this would in no way harm any other actual person, I agreed. So yes I am absolutely responsible for that. I regret making this snap decision and I realize I should not have ruined something that was meant to be legitimate.

 

Ben Millefoglie, a web designer in Michigan, set up Litton's various sites and entered all updates to them. He told me that Litton had misled him into thinking that the West Wyoming Marathon was legitimate, adding that the racing data had been provided to him, via email, by “Richard Rodriguez.”

In January 2011, Litton was disqualified from yet another race: the 2009 City of Trees Marathon, in Idaho. The following month, Hubbard extracted from Litton a promise to disclose in advance any races he entered, so that he could be monitored.

“I look forward to being monitored,” he wrote, in an email to Hubbard. “I realize that this isn't absolute vindication, but it is certainly a good first step . . . I am committed to continue my goal of running marathons in every state and raising funds for my charity. In time, I believe the questions will disappear. I welcome any and all that wish to join me.”

Later that month, he said, he would run the Cowtown Marathon, in Fort Worth. When the date arrived, he was missing. The afternoon before the race, he sent race officials this email: “I was in a car accident and am unable to run the marathon. Could I please have my packet and shirt sent to me? Thanks.”

 

Whether or not a car accident occurred was of no consequence. For a few months, at least, Litton wouldn't be going anywhere in the reality-based running community. The LetsRun message board continued to simmer with sarcasm about Litton's exploits, though the ad-hominem attacks were occasionally counterbalanced by sympathetic posts. (“He is intelligent, selfless, witty, charitable, modest, caring, generous to a fault . . . Loved by his patients and adored by his friends and family.”) One poster purported to be a runner as well as a nurse “at the hospital where Dr. Litton's child has been given just a short time to live.” Another described a predawn encounter, in which Litton had put himself through a grueling speed workout at a high school track. “Quite a Story” was the handle of someone claiming to be a journalist. After interviewing “dozens of people,” the journalist had “discovered a shocking new side to this tale”—the implication being that Litton was innocent—and welcomed information from all comers. An email address was given, I wrote immediately, and I'm still waiting for a reply.

Over a period of months, I did exchange many emails with Litton, but he refused to speak or meet in person. My questions were mainly biographical or running-related. His responses were verbose, well written, and cleverly obfuscatory in a way that left little room for doubt.

Last fall, a message, posted by someone using the handle ActuallyThisIsTheWayItIs, appeared on LetsRun:

 

Some of us are runners, and we fully understand how races operate. Kip has been very open about addressing accusations with us. They have all been discussed and he has provided logical and credible explanations, in many cases backed by evidence and/or witnesses. He has shared with us email correspondences with reporters and race directors that contradict posts here that pass for gospel. We are quite satisfied. We don't want to put words in his mouth but the chances are less than zero that he will personally respond on a forum where people are anonymous.

 

I wrote to Litton, asking whether he'd seen the post and suggesting that we “help each other.” I wanted to speak with this blogger, I said, and was eager to read excerpts from the correspondence cited in the post.

Litton replied:

 

No I didn't see it. How long ago was it from? I actually don't know who it is yet, but it certainly narrows it down—I'll have to check around. I will not be able to disclose any names unless it is ok with them. I will say you have piqued my curiosity—but I will not make the mistake I made many months ago when I checked out LetsRun. Engaging in negative rhetorical sparring with anonymous strangers may be entertaining for some, but it is not where I choose to spend my time.

 

“I am running Boston,” Litton wrote to me, on March 7, 2012. “Training has been hit & miss. I have had nearly PR”—personal record—“runs mixed with times when I was unable to run at all.” I assumed that “unable to run” referred to the auto-accident injury that had been his pretext for not running the Cowtown Marathon.

His only race within the 2012 Boston qualifying calendar had been the Charlotte marathon, in 2010, and attached to that performance was a bold asterisk. Nevertheless, the Boston Athletic Association, aware of Litton's problematic history, had checked with Tim Rhodes, the Charlotte race director, and been told that the result stood.

Two weeks before Boston, I asked Litton to give his expected finishing time. “If all goes well, 2:47,” he wrote. “If not, a bit slower.”

I planned to be in Boston, I said—two of my sons would be running—and suggested meeting. Given Litton's prior elusiveness, I was surprised when he said, “How about after, that way I can introduce you to a few people also.” The odds of that happening, I suspected, were roughly zero. Still, I appreciated his gamesmanship.

Race day was Monday, April 16. For weeks, the prevailing sentiment on LetsRun had been that Litton would not show up. Yet, at some point over the weekend, either he or someone authorized by him had picked up his racing bib at the marathon's headquarters. I gleaned this from LetsRun—a runner in Boston had volunteered the information—rather than from Litton, who for several days had ignored my emails.

As with most major marathons, the size of the Boston field—more than 22,000 runners—required a staggered start. Some 200 wheelchair and elite female runners were first out of the gate, with the rest of the participants organized in “waves” and “corrals,” according to their qualifying times. There were three waves, each with nine corrals of roughly 1,000 runners, and Litton had been seeded in wave one, corral two. By coincidence, so had my son Reid and a couple of other runners I knew.

Monday morning was cloudless and unseasonably hot, heading to the upper eighties. I found a seat in a shaded section of the grandstand at the finish line, and felt open to possibilities. I might be on the brink of my first live Kip Litton sighting; a flock of green flamingos might happen by. My anticipation lasted less than an hour into the men's race. I'd signed up for a mobile-phone service that offered text-messaged 10-kilometer, half-marathon, and 30-kilometer split times. After receiving 10-K results for my sons and another runner in Litton's corral, but nothing for Litton himself, I allowed a decent interval before concluding that he was most likely in Davison, Michigan, drilling teeth. A phone call to Litton's office confirmed this.

My oldest son, Jeb, who is 30, somehow made friends with the heat and ran his best marathon: just under three hours and four minutes. Reid, the faster qualifier, finished a couple of minutes behind him. Post-race, I found them in a designated meeting area across the street from the John Hancock Tower. We hung out there for an hour or so, as runners in varying states of elation and walking-woundedness wandered past, wearing ribboned medallions. This was what Litton was missing: the bonhomie and collective uplift of one of the world's great athletic events, and the rewards that come to anyone who goes the full distance and crosses the finish line—never mind how long it takes.

Eventually, Jeb and Reid's perspiration dried sufficiently to allow for an exchange of manly hugs, and then I went to catch a plane.

 

Shortly before eight o'clock the next morning, Litton parked his metallic-blue GMC sport-utility vehicle (vanity license plate:
DDLOVER
) outside his dental office. I was standing at the building entrance, and as he turned a corner I introduced myself. “No, no!” he said, and moved past me into the building. I followed him, through a glass vestibule and past the reception desk. He went inside his office and closed the door. As I was about to knock, he opened it and said to his receptionist, “Call the police. It's a trespasser.” I said that I was leaving, and retreated to the Flag City Diner, down the street, where I ordered scrambled eggs and began drafting an email to Litton.

He was in a jam of his own devising, I wrote, and I wanted him to have the opportunity to explain how it had come about. He did not reply that day, but the next evening he offered to meet with me the following day, after work.

Litton chose a Wendy's a few miles from his home. Arriving before I did, he took a seat at a corner table, with his back to the wall. Hanging above the table was a framed photograph of Dave Thomas, the departed founder of Wendy's, bearing the caption “When it comes to VALUES, I've never been one to cut corners.”

Litton wore a blue windbreaker over his work uniform: a black V-neck tunic, a red T-shirt, loose-fitting gray cotton pants. Tanned and clean-shaven, he had fluffy sandy-blond hair that fell across his forehead, brown eyes, and generically handsome Nordic features. Across the table, at last, was the man at the center of one of the strangest controversies in amateur sports history. Our common aspiration, I assumed, was that this conversation would yield a counternarrative to the caricature of the heinously unscrupulous Kip Litton suggested by the less genteel posters on LetsRun. In addition to “Why?,” the question I most hoped Litton would answer was “How?”

He told me that he was born in 1961, the third of four children, in Royal Oak, a Detroit suburb, and moved to Grand Blanc when he was seven. His father, an engineer, worked for General Motors, and his mother was a homemaker. They were frequent churchgoers, but not devout. Summer vacations were station-wagon excursions, typically to historic sites. His adolescent cohort had not been earnest strivers—“There were a lot of kids in my neighborhood that were delinquents, normal delinquents”—but that changed after his father introduced him to tennis. (“We went out and he said, ‘Hey, why don't you try this?' And he probably let me beat him, and that got me interested, like, ‘Hey, I'm good.' . . . That took me away from the crowd I was with.”) Academically, he was “a decent student, but I really had no direction.” When a high school guidance counselor suggested dentistry, he responded that it was “the one occupation for sure that I can eliminate.”

Litton arrived at the University of Michigan in 1979, planning to major in engineering. His most enduring impression was of feeling daunted by the ambitions of his dorm neighbors. “Just hanging around those people, I felt like if I wasn't going to be a neurosurgeon I would be a complete failure,” he said. “I would be the least successful person—I probably still
am
the least successful person—who lived on my hall. So that inspired me to do something more with my life.” Engineering, he said, had too few women majoring in it, so at the end of his sophomore year he switched to pre-dental. (If other factors had guided this career turn, he didn't mention them.)

In 1983, he matriculated at the University of Michigan Dental School, and five years later he completed his degree. At 28, he married Lisa Hoscila, whom he'd met on a blind date nine years earlier. She had a law degree and a job at a firm not far from Davison. After commuting for a few years to a dental office in Saginaw, Michigan, he joined the practice in Davison that he eventually took over. The older dentist who had started the practice supplemented his income by working as a salesman and distributor for Amway, the multilevel marketing company, and he recruited Litton. During the next several years, Litton said, his Amway income—from direct sales to consumers or to his own “30 or 40” new recruits—at times reached into the six figures, surpassing his professional income.

Amway still generated a lot of income for him, he said: “I don't want to say exactly, but in the thousands every month. And that's way down from where it was.”

Throughout its existence, the company has defended itself against allegations that its marketing program is essentially a pyramid scheme; in 2010, it agreed to a $56 million settlement in a class-action suit accusing it of exactly that, along with fraud and racketeering. When I asked Litton whether he'd ever been disillusioned with Amway, he said, “No. And I know a ton of people gave it a bad rap.” His wife had joined him in Amway, he said, and it made for “a nice diversion—something we could do together. She made friends in the business, I made friends in the business.”

Their first child, a son, was born in 1995, followed by a daughter in 1997. When their younger son, Michael, arrived, in 2001, he immediately received a diagnosis of cystic fibrosis and remained in the hospital for weeks.

“He knows exactly what's going on with him,” Litton said. “But he can't possibly understand the scope of it . . . He has to take tons of pills every day. He won't take pills in front of other people except family members. He has a feeding tube. There's a lot of breathing apparatuses he uses. And he will not do what he is supposed to do if there are people other than our family members over at the house. He just desperately wants to fit in.”

To sidestep questions about various running performances, Litton often invoked his personal tribulations. Some of the indignities that he said he'd recently suffered seemed straight out of high school, circa 1977: his tires had been deflated on several occasions, his house and his mailbox had been egged, threatening and profane messages had been left in the mailbox. His family felt unsafe.