On a warm Saturday
evening in late May,
Derek Murphy,
wearing cargo shorts
and a polo shirt, sat on
his living room floor,
his back against the couch, his legs stretched
out, his computer on his lap. A baseball game
was on the television, but Murphy, 49, wasn’t
paying much attention to it. He was too busy
scrolling through hundreds of photos and
combing over data on his computer. Occa-
sionally he’d stop to sip from a can of diet
soda. During the week, Murphy, who lives
outside of Cincinnati, worked as a data ana-
lyst for a health insurance company. But in
his free time, he pursued an unusual hobby:
exposing cheaters in endurance races.
Four years earlier, Murphy had started a
website called Marathon Investigation, and
recently he’d been looking at the results of
the 2019 Los Angeles Marathon, which had
taken place on March 24. With more than
24,000 runners competing, the LA Mara-
thon is one of the largest 26.2-mile races
in the country. It’s also a qualifying race for
the Boston Marathon, the most prestigious
in the United States. Murphy had been par-
ticularly interested in the results for a run-
ner named Frank Meza.
Meza, a prominent 70-year-old doctor
from South Pasadena, California, hadn’t just
qualified for the Boston Marathon, he’d run
an exceptional time of 2 hours, 53 minutes
that day, setting a record for the fastest mar-
athon ever run by a man his age. This stoodout to Murphy; over the years, he’d analyzed
race results for thousands of amateur ath-
letes and written about dozens who had
cheated in various competitions. He typ-
ically starts his probing by looking at race
splits—the time it takes a runner to cover a
particular segment of a course. During many
races, especially big ones like the LA Mara-
thon, radio-frequency identification chips
are embedded in runners’ bibs and record
when the racers run over an RFID-enabled
mat. Meza’s splits were consistent, showing
that for the entire race, he ran six-and-a-
half-minute miles. Still, several comment-
ers on a popular message board for running
enthusiasts, LetsRun.com, doubted Meza’s
result. They had posted photos in which it
appeared that Meza entered the run from
a sidewalk during the middle of the race,
suggesting the possibility that he cut part
of the course and then reentered.
On May 24, Murphy emailed the photos
that had been posted on LetsRun to Meza
and asked him to confirm that the picture
was of him. “The above link is the sequence
of photos that appear to show you entering
the course from the cross street,” Murphy
wrote. “I was hoping that you could pro-
vide some context. Was that you entering
from the cross street, and if so, can youexplain what happened? Did you exit the
course for some reason, and for how long?
Any information you can provide would
be helpful.”
Meza responded soon afterward: “I
looked at the photos and I can assure you
I did not cut. I cannot recall exactly where
on the course but I did pull off to pee one
time I was not able to find a portapotty so
I found a building wall maybe 20 yds from
street. In 2018 I had a similar problem so I
waited and ran into a hotel I lost 2 min this
time I was hell bent on not losing 2-3 min.”
The next morning, Murphy opened his
email to find a link to several hundred
more photos in a Dropbox folder. They
were taken, he says, with an official race
camera set to snap photos every few sec-
onds. (He won’t say who sent them.) Mur-
phy was anxious to dig in to them but had
other obligations. He closed his laptop
and took his young daughter to her soc-
cer game. Then they met up with his wife
and son for lunch. Afterward, they all went
to the park. But the entire day, he says, he
was wondering if the photos would pro-
vide concrete evidence that Meza cheated.
That night, Murphy set up his gear, and
for two hours, using editing software that
he’d bought online for $50, he spliced