In July, 2010, Kyle Strode, a forty-six year-old chemistry professor from Helena, Montana, ran the Missoula Marathon. Completing the 26.2-mile distance in two hours and forty-seven minutes, he placed fourth out of thirteen hundred and twenty-two finishers, and won the masters division, for entrants forty and older. Strode is among the most accomplished masters marathoners in Montana, with a personal best of two hours and thirty-two minutes. When he toes a starting line in his home state, he knows who is among the class of the field, and he’s particularly aware of other masters competitors. The Missoula course, which is mostly flat, passes through rangeland and forest, crosses two rivers, and in its final miles offers a tour of the city’s tree-lined neighborhoods. Early in the race, Strode broke ahead of his usual rivals, and never saw them again. The second masters runner to cross the finish line, Mike Telling, from Dillon, Montana, trailed Strode by nearly four minutes. At the awards ceremony, however, they learned that Telling had actually placed third. The official runner-up was Kip Litton, age forty-eight, of Clarkston, Michigan. Litton, who had been at the back of the pack when the race started, began his run two minutes after the gun was fired. He had apparently made up for lost time.
Since the early nineties, technology has made it possible to clock runners with precision and to track them at measured intervals, yielding point-to-point “split” times. Runners attach to their shoelace or racing bib a transponder tag that marks how much time has elapsed when a checkpoint is reached. Often, sensor-equipped checkpoint mats span the running lanes. USA Track & Field, the governing body for major running competitions, mandates that “gun,” rather than “chip,” times determine the official results in sanctioned races. But, as a practical matter, this rule generally applies solely to élite lead runners. In a field of thousands, it might take an entrant several minutes just to reach the starting line, so it seems only fair that the diligent middle- or back-of-the-packers’ order of finish is adjusted to reflect the chip time. In Missoula, the marathon’s organizers made this allowance.
Strode didn’t have to teach that summer, and so he had time to scrutinize the race results. Because Litton came from out of state, he hadn’t been on Strode’s radar, and Litton hadn’t stuck around to claim his award. Strode learned from Telling that he hadn’t paid Litton any mind as he passed him in the homestretch, and that he had no memory of being passed by Litton earlier in the race.
A wealth of online data about competitive running makes post-race analyses relatively easy. Several days after the marathon, Strode visited a Web site that displayed photographs of runners along the Missoula route. Most participants appeared in several shots, each of which indicated, down to the second, when it was snapped. Strode noticed something curious: although Litton had posted a half-marathon split time, and there were four images of him taken at or near the finish line, Strode couldn’t locate him anywhere in the preceding twenty-six miles.
In the Missoula photographs, Litton wore sunglasses and a black baseball cap, so Strode had only a general sense of what he looked like: white, clean-shaven, and about five feet ten, with an athletic build but not the classic lean and loose-limbed runner’s physique. Athlinks, a popular online database for endurance races, sharpened the picture somewhat: in 2000, shortly before turning forty, Litton ran his first race, a five-kilometre event in Flint, half an hour from his home. His average pace was seven and a half minutes per mile: a good novice result. He ran the same race a year later and improved his pace by almost forty seconds per mile, and a year after that he whittled off fourteen more seconds, to a respectable six minutes and thirty-five seconds per mile. In 2003, he finished eleven races, including his first marathon, in Jacksonville, Florida.
In all, during the previous decade Litton had run in more than a hundred races, including twenty-five marathons. His time in Jacksonville, 3:19:57, qualified him for the Boston Marathon, the following April, where he covered the course in 3:25:06—a 7:50-per-mile pace. He returned to Jacksonville in 2006 and, for the first time, recorded a sub-three-hour marathon, winning in his age group. Four months later, he broke the three-hour barrier again, in Boston.
For a man or a woman of any age, a marathon performance of under three hours is considered a mark of distinction. (Typically, about six per cent of the field at the Boston Marathon runs this fast.) In the year before Missoula, Litton had averaged a marathon a month, with sub-three-hour clockings in each. He’d travelled to New Mexico, Idaho, New Hampshire, Arizona, Florida, Virginia, Missouri, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Delaware, Vermont, and South Dakota. Eight times, he’d come in first in his age group, and in the West Wyoming Marathon, a week before Missoula, he was the over-all winner.
Exploring the Web sites for each of Litton’s marathons occupied Strode for several days. Not every race was as well documented as Missoula’s, but wherever professional race photographers had been present he hunted for shots of Litton among other runners. He found images of him at the end of a course, only twice at the beginning, and never in between. And there was the chip-gun differential: with rare exceptions, Litton started two to five minutes behind the leaders. In a crowded field, wouldn’t a swift runner want to avoid weaving through clusters of slower runners?
A Google search led Strode to a Web site for the dental practice of Kip Litton, D.D.S., in Davison, Michigan. It also led to Worldrecordrun, a site, conceived and maintained by Litton, that chronicled his peripatetic habits. “World record” apparently referred to his goal of running sub-three-hour marathons in all fifty states. The quest had formally begun at a marathon in Traverse City, Michigan, in May, 2009, and Montana was his fourteenth destination. On the site, Litton had posted his finishing times and a recap of each race. He explained that his training regimen and diet, along with nutritional supplements, had “allowed me to maintain my rigorous schedule and even improve my recent performances.” His tone was alternately hortatory (“Imagine Inspire Impact!”) and emotional (“I have been blessed with the greatest wife and kids a guy could ever ask for”).
“Who is Kip Litton?” he asked. “I am a lifelong resident of Michigan and an alumnus of both The University of Michigan and UM Dental School. Currently I live in the town of Clarkston and have an office in Davison. I began running in the year 2000 to lose weight. I am an ordinary guy with an extraordinary desire to make a difference. At the onset of this mission I had run 11 marathons, all in the range of 3:35 down to 2:55. . . . After superficially committing to this mission, I soon discovered the devil was in the details. . . . Was I born to do this? Hardly. As a high schooler, I did play tennis, but HATED to run. My teammates and I never ran as far as the coach told us to or thought we had.”
There was another, poignant motivation behind “the mission.” Litton and his wife, Lisa, an attorney, were the parents of two boys and a girl. The youngest, Michael, was born, in 2001, with cystic fibrosis. A congenital illness, it most commonly clogs airways in the lungs, making breathing difficult. The average life expectancy for cystic-fibrosis patients is about thirty-eight years. Litton wrote, “The goal is to raise a QUARTER MILLION DOLLARS for CF during the course of the mission.” His site featured the logo of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, and people were invited to make donations by clicking on a link to the organization’s Web site, by writing a personal check to Worldrecordrun, or by sending money to a PayPal account.
“My hope is that I can inspire others to take inventory of their talents, find their passion and pursue it relentlessly to effect a cause or impact their community,” Litton wrote. “This is MY mission. It is the only thing I feel passionately about enough to ask you to PLEASE consider a donation to this worthy cause. I will also be bold enough to ask you to please alert others to this site or send a link to your e-mail list. When all is said and done, no one will care about the endless hours of training, my detailed workout logs or fancy awards.”
The compassion that Strode naturally felt upon learning of a child’s illness, along with admiration for Litton’s readiness to put his body on the line to raise funds for Michael’s future and for medical research, was tempered, he told me, by his belief that Litton “had cheated in almost all of his 2010 marathons.”
On July 24, 2010, Strode received an unexpected inquiry from Jennifer Straughan, the Missoula race director, who asked him to look at a photograph of a runner wearing bib No. 759. It was Litton. “There is some question as to whether he was seen along the course,” Straughan wrote. “He finished in a time similar to you so theoretically you would have noticed him.”
While Strode had been immersed in what he’d assumed was his own private Kip Litton obsession, the official timer at Missoula had been contacted by his counterpart at the Deadwood Mickelson Trail Marathon, in Deadwood, South Dakota, where Litton had turned up the previous month. Photographs taken in Deadwood showed him crossing the starting line fifth from last and finishing in 2:55:50, putting him first in his age group and in third place over all. The fourth-place finisher protested: he’d been running third at the halfway mark and said that no one had passed him after that, an assertion bolstered by the fact that most of the remaining course was a trail only six feet wide. Litton had registered a half-marathon split, and the Deadwood timer was skeptical of the protest against him—“I was trying to prove Litton was legit,” he told me—but he changed his mind after determining that Litton had, improbably, run the second half eleven minutes faster than the first. In addition, he found photographs of Litton only at the start and the end of the course. Deadwood disqualified Litton, and Straughan followed suit in Missoula.
Strode, who in a later Web post described his mind-set as “sucked in, fascinated and pissed off,” broadened his investigation. He sent an e-mail to Richard Rodriguez, who on the Web site of the West Wyoming Marathon was identified as its race director; Litton had a listed winning time there of 2:56:12.
“I’m writing to ask about the winner of your marathon a few weeks ago, Kip Litton,” Strode wrote. “He was recently disqualified from the Deadwood Mickelson Trail Marathon for cheating (not running the whole course). . . . I don’t know the guy—I just hate cheating in running. I wonder whether he may have had a legitimate performance at your race or whether he may also have cheated in Wyoming.”
Two days later, Strode received a response: “Wow, that’s quite a scenario! It would have been very unlikely for the same thing to have happened at our race, as there were only 30 participants and the lead 2 runners ran almost the entire race together. I have not received any complaints. I will keep my ears open though. If there is an update, send it my way. Take care, Richard.”
Strode began to wonder if his suspicions were misplaced, but he kept investigating. At the Providence Marathon, in Rhode Island, where Litton had finished first in his age group, photographs showed him wearing shoes and shorts at the end of the course that were different from those he was wearing at the beginning. (A costume change at Deadwood had involved shoes, a hat, and a T-shirt.) In the Delaware Marathon, Litton had finished first in his age group. After being prompted by Strode, the race’s director, Wayne Kursh, found that, among the finishers, Litton alone had failed to register split times. On an out-and-back portion of the course, Kursh had taken photographs of the top runners at the turnaround point—but Litton was not among them. He also failed to find images of Litton elsewhere on the course.
Kursh had a blog, and on August 6, 2010, he posted a blind item about Litton titled “Another Rosie Ruiz?”—a reference to the scammer who was briefly heralded as the winner of the women’s division of the 1980 Boston Marathon, before it was determined that she’d jumped onto the course less than a mile from the finish. Kursh wrote in a follow-up that he had been exchanging concerns with other race directors, adding, “I smell a rat.”
In an e-mail exchange initiated by Kursh, Litton claimed that photographs of him would be hard to find, because his shirt had covered his racing bib. He added, “Wasn’t there a timing mat at the turnaround?” Kursh ultimately decided to disqualify him, explaining, “From your comment here it is pretty obvious that you have NO idea where the timing mats were on route. They definitely were not at this turn-around point.”
On occasions when Litton responded to such pointed challenges, he never did so in a hostile or nakedly defensive manner. After a disqualification, he simply deleted the result and the recap from his Web site, as if he had never registered for the race. His default demeanor was equable mystification.
Clarkston, Michigan, is an exurban town within commuting distance of both Detroit and Flint, which ranked first and fourth, respectively, in the latest Forbes survey of America’s most dangerous cities. Those grim statistics don’t seem to impinge on Clarkston. The subdivision where Kip and Lisa Litton live with their three children—large brick and stone houses on oversized lots, with expansive lawns and S.U.V.s parked in circular driveways—is threaded with undeveloped woodlands and streams. In Davison, twenty-two miles north, Litton’s dental practice occupies a one-story brown brick building on a commercial strip, tucked behind an auto-repair shop, next door to a drive-through bank, and a short sprint from the requisite conveniences (McDonald’s, Jiffy Lube, Taco Bell). A few miles south of Flint is the comfortable suburb of Grand Blanc, where Litton grew up. In 1979, he graduated from Grand Blanc High School. A strong tennis player—as a junior, he won a state championship—he is remembered as bright and charismatic, with smart-aleck tendencies. “The first party I had after I bought a house, I invited him,” a high-school friend told me. “Part of his way of getting attention at the party was to eat all the food. Kip does odd, silly things for attention. But they’re harmless.”
In 1990, two years after graduating from dental school, Litton started working in Davison with a dentist who was nearing retirement, and in 2001 he acquired the practice. Today, Litton’s office has a Web site, which notes that, “when the General Motors Company cut benefits for retirees, Dr. Litton devised a cost-sharing plan that allowed patients without benefits to continue receiving quality dental care.” One day a year, Litton says, he provides free dental care to underprivileged children; each Halloween, he offers to buy back patients’ candy for a dollar a pound, then has it “shipped overseas to the troops, along with toothbrushes.” A Google review of Litton’s practice, posted earlier this year, said, “After trying several other dentists in the area, I was so delighted to find Dr. Litton. . . . Great friendly staff, painless, lowest costs, no interest payment plans and Dr. Litton is SO funny! I finally have my fantastic Hollywood smile. I have already convinced several of my friends and relatives to come to this office, despite almost an hour drive. My search is now YOUR gain.”
Litton had attracted local media attention for his running achievements. After the 2010 Boston Marathon, the Davison Index noted that Litton was “the first finisher from mid-Michigan and the first over 40 from Michigan.” Around the same time, the Flint Journal ran a story with the headline “DAVISON DENTIST HAS TRANSFORMED HIMSELF FROM SEDENTARY MIDDLE-AGER TO SUCCESSFUL MARATHONER.” The article traced a stirring trajectory: One day, about a decade earlier, Litton, fifty pounds overweight, got on a treadmill, hoping to run three miles. “I made it a little over a third of a mile before I got so dizzy that I started to fall off the treadmill,” he told the reporter, Bill Khan. “I was completely out of shape. It was just ridiculous.” Fast-forward: “Litton now regularly races marathons, not content to merely finish 26.2 miles but to post times that few runners his age can match.” (Khan learned of Litton, he told me, when a stranger sent him an e-mail saying that “this guy has gotten himself in shape and is trying to raise money for charity.”)
Litton told Khan, “I’m starting to know every crack and pot hole on that route from Hopkinton to Boston. Once you go to Boston, there’s something special about it. Having all 26 miles with people lined up on both sides of the road, screaming their lungs out for six hours, is such an unusual experience and super cool.”
Wayne Kursh’s “I smell a rat” blog post drew the attention of Michael McGrath, a former assistant track and cross-country coach at Haverford College. McGrath had competed at Boston nine times—including the year Rosie Ruiz cheated—and his best finish was 2:49:19. Although Kursh hadn’t mentioned Litton by name, McGrath soon identified him, by comparing the lists of finishers at Missoula and Delaware. Like Strode, he found Litton a more compelling impostor than Ruiz, in no small part because his methodology was so tantalizingly elusive. Somehow, he had exploited the running community’s faith in the very systems—transponders, chip times—that had been adopted to prevent cheating.
“I am like a dog who cannot let go of a bone,” McGrath wrote to Kursh. He spent days anatomizing Litton’s races, dissecting first his 2010 showing at Boston. Litton had hit all the splits, at five-kilometre intervals. This suggested that running a sub-three-hour marathon was theoretically within his capacity. Unless, McGrath argued, the microscope was brought into tighter focus.
The Boston course has a reputation for toughness: the Newton hills, which runners encounter between miles sixteen and twenty-one, owe their notoriety to the fact that they must be climbed when the energy reserves of runners are greatly depleted. How was it, McGrath asked, that on the most leisurely stretch—just before the halfway mark, near Wellesley College—Litton’s pace was a full minute slower than it was in the hills? Litton’s Boston race in 2009 had the same incongruities.
McGrath learned that, in February, 2009, Litton had run a fifteen-kilometre race in Florida. According to the split times, his pace during the second half—five minutes and twenty-four seconds per mile—was almost two minutes faster than during the first half. Such a divergence is called a “negative split,” and a variance of that magnitude is as common as snow in Miami. Nor did Litton’s past performances indicate an ability to run a five-and-a-half-minute pace. The official timer of the Deadwood Mickelson Trail Marathon, reflecting upon Litton’s purported acceleration, told me, “I don’t know any Kenyans who could do that.”
Not long after McGrath began his research, he decided to go public, sort of. His medium was LetsRun, a Web site devoted to news about élite track and distance running. One of LetsRun’s salient features is its “World Famous Message Boards,” where most participants use pseudonyms, and the content quality runs the expected gamut (factual, analytical, sophomoric, inanely combative). McGrath, using the handle Anonymous.4, posted an item under the heading “Kip Litton,” referred to Litton’s disqualification at Missoula, and solicited feedback from anyone who might have more information.
One responder was Scott Hubbard, a former collegiate runner and high-school coach who was a familiar figure on the central Michigan running scene. Hubbard measured and certified courses, often worked as a race announcer, and wrote for running publications. His awareness of Litton dated to October, 2009, when Litton’s five-member relay team was disqualified from winning the Detroit Free Press Marathon Relay. Litton had recruited four topnotch masters runners, only two of whom he’d known previously, paid everyone’s entry fee, and assigned himself the second leg of the relay. The members of the second-place team were stunned by the race result—especially their second-leg runner, who had received his baton in first place, knew that no one had passed him, yet learned after handing off to his third-leg teammate that they no longer held the lead. With encouragement from Litton’s mortified teammates, who felt potentially implicated, the second-place team protested, leading to the disqualification. Afterward, Hubbard told me, he initiated a correspondence with Litton, trying to “pin him down on how he cut the course.”
Litton was initially evasive. But after about a week of questioning he offered an explanation: “Finally, he came down to ‘Yeah, I must have cut it short somewhere to come in with that time.’ I asked him where that might have happened. I knew the course, because I’d measured it. He named the place and said, ‘I must have followed someone.’ And I said, ‘No, you didn’t follow anyone. You cheated.’ ”
A few weeks later, Hubbard came across the following item in the online newsletter of Michigan Runner, a bi-monthly publication:
Hubbard sent another e-mail to Litton, on the pretext that he wanted to get in touch with Brian Smith. When Litton responded that he couldn’t recall all his patients, Hubbard pressed harder. “The question was posed to him pointedly: ‘Who’s Brian Smith?’ ” Hubbard later wrote on LetsRun. “He didn’t say he was a patient of his. He didn’t put up much of a fight when told it was felt he wrote the note.”
During the fall of 2010, Litton entered marathons in Rochester, New York; Portland, Maine; Huntington, West Virginia; and Charlotte, North Carolina. In Rochester, he posted a chip time under two hours and fifty-eight minutes, winning the masters division. Photographs at Rochester showed him wearing a gray-green sweatshirt, a cap with a bright-yellow logo, and no visible racing bib. At the finish, he wore a different shirt and hat. This proved too much for Hubbard, who issued an ultimatum to Litton: take down the Worldrecordrun site or risk an exposé in Michigan Runner, for which Hubbard wrote a column.
Worldrecordrun was gone within days. (According to Litton, the site had become more trouble than it was worth, and Hubbard’s threat wasn’t a factor.) Cathy Zell, who at the time was the executive director of the local chapter of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, told me that she didn’t know of any donations that had been obtained through the link on Litton’s Web page. “We started getting phone calls saying, ‘I don’t know if he’s legit,’ ” she said. “I never had proof one way or the other.” Litton, she added, “basically is the one who said, ‘This isn’t giving you guys a good name.’ ” Laurie Fink, a spokesperson for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, says that since 2004 the Litton household has contributed twenty dollars to the organization.
Even after Litton dismantled the site, he continued to enter races. On December 11, 2010, at the Thunder Road Marathon, in Charlotte, his split times suggested to the race director that he had cut the course and not been overly clever about it; within forty-eight hours, he’d been provisionally disqualified. Just as swiftly, Litton responded with a pious defense, portraying himself as the victim of “a witch hunt” and “a smear campaign . . . ridiculous things which are ALL completely un-true.” He confessed only to a failure to be remarkable: “I have legally practiced dentistry for over 20 years and have 3 kids. I have never been arrested. I have never even been sued. I have never cheated in a race. I am not perfect, but probably the worst thing I have ever done is get a parking ticket. I know, boring.”
Meanwhile, the mockery on LetsRun’s message boards, as Litton pointed out, was “taking on a life of its own.” In late December, he wrote to Weldon Johnson, one of the founders of LetsRun, complaining about his treatment. He acknowledged his disqualifications at Detroit, Missoula, and Delaware, and floated fuzzy explanations for each. (“I inadvertently turned too soon & cut part of the course. . . . I was dq’d as I should have been, but only accidentally.”) He added, “I have served on my Dental Ethics Board”—in fact, he had not—“so I realize that people should take cheating seriously.” But the situation had got out of control. “If these accusations held any water, it would have certainly forced me to stop racing. As you know, I have not. I have nothing to hide.”
The connoisseurs of Litton’s audacity were galvanized. They stared at course maps: He could have cut it there—or there. Rich Heller, a former collegiate runner, collated findings on an ancillary site, Study of Kip Litton Running, including links to videos, such as one of Litton walking across the finish line at the P. F. Chang’s Rock ’n’ Roll Arizona Marathon, in January, 2010. (Chip time: 2:51:21.) “For some races the evidence is circumstantial,” Heller wrote. “For others it’s [a] SLAM DUNK.” For the conspiracy-minded, it was a juicy peach, and LetsRun contributors adopted handles like Lone Gunman and Zapruder. The paramount question was “How?” Did he have an accomplice? Did he drive from point to point? Ride a bicycle? Devise digital subversions?
Jennifer Straughan, the Missoula race director, was as mystified as anyone. “It’s expensive,” she told me. “He flies all over the country, rents cars, plans in advance, has to figure out how many chip mats there are, how you deal with those. Think about how hard you have to work to not run a race.”
The debunkers zeroed in on the West Wyoming Marathon, the one race that Litton had supposedly won outright. One of them came across a Web cache of the race’s defunct home page, which included this caveat: “With a low entry fee, there will be no goodie bags, no shirts, no photographer and no finishers medals.”
On January 11, 2011, a poster called Liptodakip wrote, “Still curious about the west Wyoming marathon. 29 runners total. And he won it. Anyone know anything about it? Is it a real race? The main page is down and now the results are gone. (was up last week). did he make up an entire race? That would be bold!”
Yes, it would. And, yes, he did. LetsRun exploded: West Wyoming was Litton’s pièce de résistance, and even his most indignant accusers had to concede their perverse admiration. In this race, the key to winning was ingeniously uncomplicated: Make the whole thing up! For his fabricated marathon, Litton had assembled not only a Web site but also a list of finishers and their times (plus name, age, gender, and home town), and created a phantom race director, who responded to e-mail queries. It occurred to Kyle Strode that six months earlier, when he had raised questions about Litton to “Richard Rodriguez,” the reply (“Wow, that’s quite a scenario!”) had omitted a crucial detail. When Richard Rodriguez looked in the mirror, Litton looked back.
In concocting the fantasy, someone had gone so far as to create a post-race testimonial for the Web site Marathon Guide. “Small race, with only a couple dozen runners,” a post there said. “Bring your own gels; only water is available on course. Out-and-back route. No spectators to speak of. Sounds like a downer, but the view and the town are so worth it! Cross Wyoming off of your list and visit one of the most beautiful towns in the US at the same time.”
This was attributed to “G.S. from Nebraska,” which matched one listed entrant, Greg Sanchez, of Lincoln, age fifty-four. “Cross Wyoming off of your list” referred to running marathons in all fifty states. More people summit Mt. Everest each year than celebrate running a marathon in a fiftieth state. LetsRun’s forensic beavers established that it made no sense for Sanchez to refer to crossing states off a list, because, according to a database at Marathon Guide, this was his one and only marathon. The same was true of the other finishers besides Litton: twenty-eight men and women, from twelve states, with tellingly unimaginative names (Joseph Smith, Kevin Scott, Sue Johnson, Karen Nelson). This lapse notwithstanding, someone had invested considerable time and effort to create Athlinks profiles for several of the fictional runners.
The next day, two more imaginary races, in Orlando and Atlanta, were identified among Litton’s Athlinks performances. Inspection of the race Web sites revealed that they were hosted by the same Internet server as the sites for the West Wyoming race, for Worldrecordrun, and for Litton’s dental practice.
Along with outrage and stupefaction, the LetsRun community expressed gratitude: “This is the craziest thing I have ever read in my life. Ever. . . . WOW. . . . Better than porn. . . . Is it possible that Kip Litton doesn’t actually exist, and it is all an incredible ruse?”
Litton certainly existed, but his bizarre story posed a conundrum: Was he just a guy with Olympic-calibre chutzpah, or did he suffer the certitude of self-delusion? After his provisional disqualification at the Charlotte marathon, in December, 2010, his appeal to the race director, Tim Rhodes, brimmed with wounded resentment. He invoked the tragedy of his son’s illness. (“I have a 9-year old son with terminal Cystic Fibrosis. I run to raise funds to help cure this vicious disease.”) As Rhodes explained to Scott Hubbard, without definitive proof of a deception “our hands are tied.” In the absence of witnesses who had seen Litton leave and reënter the course, Rhodes reversed the disqualification.
Once Litton had insinuated a few dubious times into the top running databases, he must have convinced himself that he could celebrate his sham successes on his Web site without attracting hostile scrutiny. But the close call at Charlotte seemed to change his game. For the time being, it would be Litton’s final race appearance. Pressed via e-mail by Hubbard and others, he denied that he had cheated or had intended to deceive—and offered justifications that left one in awe of his gift for just making shit up. He provided this account of what happened at West Wyoming:
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 e-mail, 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 e-mail 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 e-mail: “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 gruelling 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 e-mail address was given, I wrote immediately, and I’m still waiting for a reply.
Over a period of months, I did exchange many e-mails 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:
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:
“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 16th. 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 e-mails.
As with most major marathons, the size of the Boston field—more than twenty-two thousand runners—required a staggered start. Some two hundred wheelchair and élite 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 a thousand 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 ten-kilometre, half-marathon, and thirty-kilometre split times. After receiving 10K 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 thirty, 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 e-mail 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 counter-narrative 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 counsellor 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 twenty-eight, 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 multi-level 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 “thirty or forty” 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 fifty-six-million-dollar 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.
These stories reminded me of a series of messages that had been posted anonymously on LetsRun. One said:
And another:
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 reëntered 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 Web site, 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 mid-race shoe change at Deadwood: “I was doing my warmup, 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 e-mail, 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 extoll 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. “O.K., what about it?”
I handed him copies of two e-mails. 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 e-mail had been sent to the director of the Missoula Marathon—what was the misunderstanding?
“O.K.,” he said. “But I probably got it from an e-mail 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 e-mails, 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 thirty-kilometre 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 mid-stride. 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 e-mail and told him, in so many words, “Gotcha.” No non-élite 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 thirty-kilometre 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 fifteen-kilometre 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 travelled 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. ♦
