and that, in a photo of Seo near the fin-
ish line, the face of her watch was visible.
Murphy bought the race photographer’s
high-resolution photo and zoomed in on
the watch. Amazingly, he could see that Seo
had run only 11.65 miles of the 13.1-mile
race. On February 21, 2017, Murphy posted
a story about Seo. The site blew up.
Seo was disqualified from the race.
Several outlets picked up Murphy’s story,
including Yahoo Sports. The Washington
Post published a piece breaking down Mur-
phy’s analysis. Within a month, Murphy’s
blog post had more than 100,000 views,
and the site’s daily engagement jumped
from 800 to 10,000 unique visitors. The
popularity of the site eventually encour-
aged Murphy to start a podcast, which he
launched in December 2018. (wired was
not able to reach Seo for comment.)
With more readers also came more tips.
“People weren’t just emailing me about Bos-
ton qualifiers,” he says. “They’d be asking
about smaller races that I wouldn’t normally
look at. But if five people reached out to me
because they were suspicious that some-
body cheated in a race, I’d look into it.”“It doesn’t matter if it’s
a big race or a small
race,” Derek Murphy
says. “The point is to
preserve the integrity
of the sport.”
One of the racers Murphy had been watch-
ing for a while was Parvaneh Moayedi, a
56-year-old woman based in San Antonio,
Texas, who held the Guinness World Record
for the most marathons run by a woman in
one year (168) and the most marathons run
on consecutive days by a woman (17). She
also claimed to be the only woman in history
to have run more than 1,000 marathons,
having completed more than 1,250 to date.
Moayedi owns and operates a race
series called I Ran Marathons, which stages
weekly marathons, half marathons, 10Ks,
and 5Ks. Moayedi holds her races on San
Antonio running trails, but she was born
and raised in Iran—thus the punny name
of her series.
Over the years, fellow runners had
flagged Moayedi’s behavior at several
high-profile races. In 2013, after logging
a suspiciously fast split time late in a 100-
mile race in Texas, she was disqualified.
She was disqualified from the 2016 Hous-
ton Marathon after her timing chip failed
to register splits at several checkpoints.
Murphy also suspected Moayedi didn’t
run all of her own races, even though she’s
often listed in the results, in order to boost
her record numbers. A few years ago, he
noticed that she was listed in the results of
an I Ran marathon in San Antonio on June
1, when her social media account seemed
to indicate she was 8,500 miles away in
Nepal, having run a marathon there on
May 29. He alerted Guinness, but officials
there reviewed the evidence provided and
wrote back saying they had “not found any
grounds to disqualify her attempts.”
Murphy was undeterred. He was set on
proving his case and decided there was
only one way to get her records invalidated:
catch Moayedi in the act. He invited me to
come along.
On February 16, 2019, I met Murphy at
6 am at a hotel in San Antonio. I’d been
talking to him on the phone, but this wasour first in-person encounter. Murphy,
who has close-cropped, receding gray
hair and a bit of a paunch, was dressed
for the occasion in black Nike running
shorts and a gray Under Armour sweat-
shirt. We made our way to the race site and
crouched behind a parked minivan, slink-
ing around like a couple of middle-aged
Hardy Boys, then fixed our eyes on a dozen
runners who had gathered at a trailhead.
They were standing near a green, white,
and red banner that read i ran marathons
start/finish.
“That’s her in the black coat,” Murphy
whispered, pointing to a short woman
with curly gray hair dressed in black track
pants, puffy coat, and baseball cap. “She
definitely doesn’t look like she’s dressed
to run a marathon.”
The run began at 7:30, but Moayedi didn’t
join the racers as they ambled off. Murphy
walked over to the start line, where several
copies of her self-published book, Iran to
America, were displayed on a folding chair,
on sale for $20. He picked up a copy and
began flipping through it.
Moayedi approached us and Murphy
greeted her with a cheerful “You did all
this!” as he held up her book describing her
record-setting runs. “You’re a legend! Can
I get my picture with you?” This struck me
as an awkward move, but I played along,
snapping a photo of Murphy and Moayedi.
Two days after the San Antonio event,
race results were posted on the organiza-
tion’s website. Though we’d seen no evi-
dence that Moayedi left the starting area,
she was listed as the 10th-place finisher,
with a time of 7 hours, 29 minutes.
Murphy sent an email to Moayedi telling
her what we witnessed and questioning her
Guinness records. Moayedi didn’t respond.
I also reached out to her, many times, by
email, voice message, and also certified let-
ter. I wanted to hear her side of the story,
but she never answered.
Murphy contacted Guinness again. The
organization responded with a nearly iden-
tical email to the one Murphy received a few
years before; there would be no disqualifi-
cation. In late April, Murphy reached out to
another Guinness employee, an adjudica-
tor who, Murphy says, might be more seri-
ous about getting old records invalidated.
I wondered if he was obsessing too much
over Moayedi. After all, she was doing good