marathon cut off times need to change to increase good health (Read 424 times)

Nobody's arguing for cheating here.

1. Cheating is bad (and the people who cheat in low key races are especially weird/troubling.)

2. I'm not comfortable with some random dude on the internet appointing himself the arbiter of who did and didn't cheat and becoming internet famous for it. That's in many ways weirder and more troubling than #1.

It is completely reasonable to be anti-cheating and also anti-dickhead, which is what J Edgar Dumbass is. 

And this post I will not erase.

The problem with today's internet is that everything has become either/or. You have to pick one or the other. So if one thinks Derek is a sleazeball, why, then one must be ok with cheating and dogs sleeping with cats.

Nah.

Maybe we can persuade the random dud on the internet to investigate what a verve pipe is.

Is that verve that's spewing forth from the pipes in your avi, or?

It is completely reasonable to be anti-cheating and also anti-dickhead, which is what J Edgar Dumbass is. 

And this post I will not erase.

The problem with today's internet is that everything has become either/or. You have to pick one or the other. So if one thinks Derek is a sleazeball, why, then one must be ok with cheating and dogs sleeping with cats.

 

Nah.

I commented in TAUR or some other FB group recently on one of the latest MarathonInvestigations things... one thing led to another and Derek chimed in asking me to elaborate on why I thought MI was a bad thing. I did, at length. His reply began with how big a fan of me he was. Uh... huh.

Back to the OP. I haven't read all how every many pages there are here. But. Really?? Current marathon cutoffs aren't slow enough already? Do you have any clue what the marathon world used to be like? Not that I'm complaining. More people are "running" marathons, great. That is a good thing. But, get a little perspective, please.

So it is possible to think Derek is a sleazeball for publicly outing cheaters, and accepting of people cheating the marathon and claiming they finished? I guess that works if I'm okay with colleges letting in students who don't fit academic profiles, family donates larges sums of money, or happen to be alumni.

 

I didn't say that, but you do you.

What I said (or meant, anyway) is that things do not have to be either/or and it is completely plausible to be anti-cheating AND think that Derek and how he does his thing is/are sleazy.

I don’t mind when he outs serial cheaters, folks who win prize money, or those who gloat about their performance on Instagram to make money because they are influencers. I think he mainly does stick to that, but there have definitely been stories where I go “really?”

As you put it, I don’t have to be either/or: I can view some of his stories as being over the top without fully condemning his entire set of work.

 

Even the stuff that is not over the top is always spun in an overly tawdry way.

 

If someone knows of a genuine service he has done outing someone who really deserved to be outed, and done in a responsible way, please let me know. Before you say Kelly Agnew, my recollection is that others did the legwork there and Derek made the loudest noise about it.

 

Even in such circumstances, my feeling is one of sadness rather than glee at the humiliation the cheater suffers. Did he deserve to be so loudly outed? Undoubtedly. Was it Derek's job to do that? No. The actual, responsible work had already been done, behind the scenes.

 

Most of all... what mike said. "I'm not comfortable with some random dude on the internet appointing himself the arbiter of who did and didn't cheat and becoming internet famous for it."

Correct. Similar MO with some of the more famous stuff he "reported" on. Robert Young (the UK guy crossing the US that Laz helped bust) is another example. Going back to other stuff, some of the letsrun crew kind of let him have it when he first hung his shingle because he didn't make it clear what he was reporting vs what detective work he was actually doing.

More hilariously, within the last few months he decided to out Kilian for cutting switchbacks at Speedgoat. Of note about this big scoop:

1. It happened in 2012, not 2018 or 2019

2. All the interested parties had long since made up. Kilian was DQed from the race immediately, apologized, and we all started the conversation about how people in European mountain races sometimes cut switchbacks and how we don't etc etc etc. Anyway, again 2012.

3. Derek had literally nothing whatsoever to do with this.

4. He couldn't even be bothered to get the name of the race correct. He called it 'Sky Goat'. Of course it was 'Speedgoat', named after its RD, Karl (one of the "interested parties" in #2) and for which Derek has zero knowledge. Or, rather, had. He has since corrected this little oops.

5. It's a great example of something which, while a 'cheat', had a reasonable explanation... which everyone was over and it was forgotten, but nope, not Derek who felt the need for more punishment when Kilian's weird Everest thing occurred. Derek always holds all the cards, the jail key, the blackmail, etc, and his trains are never late.

As for how he spins it, it reminds me of Danny DeVito's character in LA Confidential and his trashy true crime magazine called "Hush, Hush".

As for how he spins it, it reminds me of Danny DeVito's character in LA Confidential and his trashy true crime magazine called "Hush, Hush".

Off the record, on the QT, and very hush-hush...