The Best American Sports Writing 2013 (41 page)

These stories reminded me of a series of messages that had been posted anonymously on LetsRun. One said:

 

My wife's friend worked at Dr. Litton's office and was recently let go. She was telling my wife about all the things that have been happening recently due to the cheating scandal . . .

In addition to his business failing, Dr. Litton's wife was so embarrassed and it caused so much strife that they have separated. His one kid got in a fight at school in response to the other kids taunting about the cheating and was suspended.

 

And another:

 

Perfect—we have him just where we want him.

Personal life destroyed—check. Business destroyed—check. Family destroyed—check. Kids—check. Just think what could happen if we keep the pressure on even more.

 

In fact, Litton and his wife were still together. And the dental practice was doing fine.

I asked Litton, “What happened in your life to get you into this situation?”

“Can you be a little more specific?”

His credibility was being seriously questioned, and the underlying facts were troubling.

“I don't know what facts you're talking about,” he replied. “But the facts I've heard and seen, most of them are inaccurate.”

As Lady Gaga's “Poker Face” played on the Wendy's stereo system, he elaborated: he had never deliberately done anything wrong, never left a race course and reentered at a different point, never received money through Worldrecordrun, and never posted anything on LetsRun; had no idea who the anonymous people might be who posted in his defense, and no clue who might have posed as a nurse claiming that “Dr. Litton's child has been given just a short time to live.” His delayed starts, he later added, were merely part of “a marketing gimmick,” on his website, to entice potential donors, who could pledge a particular sum for every runner he passed in a race. It was “a friend” who had posed online as “Richard Rodriguez”—despite the fact that Litton had used that alias in a previous race. Regarding his midrace shoe change at Deadwood: “I was doing my warm-up, and I got too far away from the starting line. As I was running back toward the starting line . . . I still had on my trainers. I couldn't get back to where my shoes were, and then back to the start of the race, so I just started the race in those shoes. And, as I ran down the race course, when I passed my shoes I stopped and swapped them out.”

Throughout our discussion, his tone remained steady and uninflected. He neither frowned nor smiled, and made no attempt to ingratiate. For a teller of tales, he was oddly unbeguiling.

He acknowledged that he had been disqualified from several races, but only for unintentional infractions. He conceded only to having “been careless, not paying attention.” When it came to specific disqualifications—say, the 2009 Detroit Free Press Marathon Relay, where he had cut the course so maladroitly that he wound up in front of the pace car—he offered deflection, not explanation. In a follow-up email, he said that he had taken a wrong turn, adding, “How mentally handicapped would someone have to be to think that cartoon-like scenario would work? Did your research reveal this absurdity? It's an excellent anecdote that could be reenacted for a scene in a top Hollywood comedy film.”

Usually, when you interview a fabulist, there comes a moment when you can visualize his or her mental gears churning. It took a long time with Litton, but he finally rose to the challenge, and began expanding his alternate universe on the fly. Early on, when Scott Hubbard had challenged Litton about the identity of “Brian Smith”—who had written to
Michigan Runner
to extol his dentist's achievements—Litton had claimed ignorance. But when I pressed him about it he paused, then said, “Now I remember more about that! I think that guy turned out to be someone who owed me money, and was hoping I didn't pursue him, by buttering me up.”

Litton told me that he had protested several disqualifications that he felt were unjust. And at Missoula in 2010, rather than being disqualified by race officials, he had disqualified himself at the finish line, informing a race official that a leg injury had forced him to take a shortcut.

“So there's no way you would have been in contention for an award at Missoula, right?” I asked.

“Right,” he said. “Okay, what about it?”

I handed him copies of two emails. The first, from him to Jennifer Straughan, the race director, was sent six days after the marathon: “Hello, Very nice race. I enjoyed it immensely. I was wondering if there was any award that I missed? I had to catch a flight right after the race. Thanks. Kip Litton, M 45-49.” The second was Straughan's reply, which said, in part, “In reviewing our records for the top finishers of the 2010 Missoula Marathon, we notice that you do not appear in photos along the course . . . I regret that we had to remove you from the finishers listing.”

All a misunderstanding, Litton said.

The email had been sent to the director of the Missoula Marathon—what was the misunderstanding?

“Okay,” he said. “But I probably got it from an email address that—I probably clicked on the wrong one or something. I don't know. Because I disqualified myself. I told them at the race that I did not run the whole race.”

“Why would someone who disqualified himself ask about an award?”

“It was probably another race.”

“But this was the week after Missoula.”

“There were other, smaller races that I ran.”

(In subsequent emails, Litton told me that he had witnesses to his self-disqualification—but none, unfortunately, who weren't members of his family, and he couldn't provide the name of a race official who would confirm his finish-line story.)

Litton never removed his jacket. At first, this made me apprehensive, as it seemed that he might at any time stand up and bolt for the exit. As the conversation dragged on, though, I became the interlocutor eager to be on his way. Litton's story could have been a small but admirable one: an out-of-shape Midwestern dentist who, on the cusp of middle age, had transformed himself into a competitive marathoner. But he had insisted on transforming himself further, inventing a heroic avatar, “Kip Litton,” that couldn't be sustained. The ruse, quite possibly, had begun with a noble intention: a father's desire to be an inspiration to his youngest child, or perhaps to his entire family. (Litton's friends told me that he was a devoted husband and father.) But whatever glory he felt was surely short-lived. Not only had he become a consuming object of contempt in one of the blogosphere's more obsessive neighborhoods; his family and neighbors had learned that the online tribunal had judged him a fraud. A scenario that once might have been explained away, with self-deprecating contrition, as a foolish prank had become something much darker: the story of a man running away from himself.

 

One of the LetsRun sleuths' most impressive unearthings was a photograph taken near the 30-kilometer checkpoint of the 2010 Boston Marathon. It depicted six runners wearing singlets or short-sleeved shirts, their racing bibs attached, on pace for sub-three-hour performances. At the left edge of the frame, slightly cropped, was Litton. The others were clearly in brisk midstride. Litton appeared to be walking, or slowly jogging, along the shoulder of the road, and he wore a long-sleeved black shirt, black sweatpants, a black baseball cap, and shades. He had no racing bib showing. He was credited that year with a time of 2:52:12.

At Wendy's, we did not discuss the photograph. But, a few weeks later, I attached it to an email and told him, in so many words, “Gotcha.” No non-elite runner in his late forties could run a 2:52:12 marathon—an average pace of 6:34 per mile—in mild weather wearing that kind of clothing. (Before the finish line, the long-sleeved shirt and sweatpants had been swapped for a T-shirt, shorts, and a different hat.) By not showing a bib mid-race, Litton was counting on not being photographed, or at least not being recognized as a race entrant. Sticking to the shoulder allowed him to get close enough for his chip to register at the 30-kilometer checkpoint.

Based upon his own track record and my interviews with Michigan runners who had competed against him, I told him, it seemed unlikely that he'd ever run a marathon in under three hours, with the possible exception of a 2:58:08 at Jacksonville in 2006. His other probably kosher performances, I figured, were Jacksonville in 2003 (3:19:57), Richmond in 2004 (3:08:14), and Boston in 2004 (3:25:06) and 2005 (3:23:23)—all entirely creditable.

My smoking gun turned out to be no such thing. In his response, Litton directed me to photographs that I'd overlooked: images of him at the 15-kilometer split.

“The bib is still underneath but I am in the middle of the road,” he wrote, triumphantly and accurately. “If I was trying to ‘avoid photos' or ‘not be recognized as a race entrant' why would I be in the middle of the road this time between other runners?”

The online accumulation of still photographs and video footage of Litton—walking up to starting lines when the field has already taken off, his racing bib obscured, or crossing finish lines differently attired—documented the bookends of an elaborate deception. Undocumented was what happened in between. For a year and a half, Litton's scourges on LetsRun had struggled to pinpoint the specifics of his methodology. If he traveled between checkpoints by car, he must have had an accomplice—perhaps more than one. But how did they negotiate the inevitable street closings that kept traffic far from the race course? Had Litton figured out how to hack the timing system? According to professional race timers, this was impossible. Moreover, whatever category of abnormal psychology Litton might belong to, it didn't seem to be “evil genius.”

Litton's profile on Athlinks listed several completed duathlons: races that combined running and biking. While Worldrecordrun was still extant, it had a page where he reported his annual mileage totals for both running and biking. (He owned a Felt bike.) So a bicycle it surely was. But where were
those
photographs? No matter what Litton's connection might have been to the anonymous posters who defended him online, his pursuers were confounded and exasperated most by what remained unsaid. It came down to this: at the Boston Marathon, the oldest, most prestigious, and most professionally managed event on the American racing calendar, Litton had hit every split, changed his clothes along the way, and broken three hours. No one but Litton could say how he did it.

The marathon, no matter where it takes place, remains, as ever, a solitary pursuit in which every runner ultimately competes against himself or herself. Whatever drove Kip Litton was an entirely different battle with himself, one that quite possibly escaped his understanding. One thing, though, he grasped perfectly. Like the most dazzling of magicians or the most artful of art forgers, by withholding the secret of how the illusion worked he retained a power uniquely his own: the spoils of his humiliation, perhaps, but a knowledge that no one was about to take away.

DAN KOEPPEL

FROM RUNNER'S WORLD

 

T
HE SUN SETS
on the most distant horizon I've ever seen, dropping away from what had seemed—all day—like a flat and featureless earth. One week ago, this dusty plain contained nothing but promise: of triumph, adventure, even justice. If those things were ever real, they've burned away in the desert heat, along with the soles of my feet—scorched through my shoes by searing asphalt—and my lips, so singed and scabbed that pressing them to a water bottle makes me wince in pain. I've got nothing left. I can't go on. But I have to. Even if my mind and body want to stop, I won't. This is the run I've spent a decade waiting to do, and the wait has been more tortuous than the run. I need to finish it, no matter what.

Australia's Nullarbor Plain is traversed by a stretch of road—the only road, 1,663 miles long—between the southern cities of Adelaide and Perth. The plain is bordered on the south by more than a hundred miles of cliffs that tower above the Southern Ocean. North, there's cracked and crusted desert—the Down Under equivalent of America's Death Valley. Nullarbor means “no trees,” but the region's dryness and distances also mean nearly no people. Physically, the Nullarbor is almost twice as big as the state of Florida; but the vast region is so sparsely inhabited that no official population records are kept.

However, the two-lane Eyre (pronounced “Air”) Highway is busy. Traversing the plain is the iconic Aussie road trip. Camper vans and cars pulling trailers dart between massive, triple-loader trucks known in this part of the world as road trains. Vehicle travelers are supported by a series of “roadhouses,” spaced anywhere from 45 to 125 miles apart, which offer gas, car repair, food, and dormitory-style accommodations. (Running a roadhouse is lonely but rewarding; the gas station at Penong is said to possess the most profitable petrol pumps in the world, and the mechanic's shop at Nundroo is Australia's most lucrative.) Completing the drive earns the traveler an
I CROSSED THE NULLARBOR
bumper sticker, emblazoned with images of wombats and camels (the latter now feral after being introduced to the region in the 19th century).

Those vehicles speed by me in air-conditioned bliss. Their gusting wakes are welcome, suctioning away flies and the persistent odor of roadkill kangaroo. My goal is to run the heart of the Nullarbor—the loneliest, driest, emptiest 200 miles at the plain's center. I've got two weeks.

One might think that to cross a place so formidable under one's own power would lead to acclaim, but history shows it is just as likely that you'll be ridiculed, or disbelieved, or worse. Edward John Eyre made the first east-west traverse in 1841; his partner, John Baxter, perished en route. Arthur Mason survived his 1896 journey only by eating his pet dog. That same decade, Henri Gilbert faced dehydration and injuries to his feet, according to his diaries. The truth is hard to tell, because at some point following his apparent arrival at the plain's eastern terminus, Gilbert vanished, never completing the planned global circumnavigation he'd begun several years earlier (and thus never collecting the reward—equal to about half a million current U.S. dollars—he'd been promised by wealthy backers for doing so).