“If whathappenedto Frankhappenedphysicallyand not inthe virtualworld, theywould allbe in jail.”Endurance races have proliferated in
recent years. Globally, about 1 million peo-
ple run marathons each year, up from about
500,000 in 2001. And with that explosion
in participation seems to have come a rash
of cheating. In September 2018, more than
5,000 runners were disqualified from the
Mexico City Marathon for course cutting.
Just two months later, 258 runners at a
half marathon in Shenzhen, China, were
disqualified after traffic cameras and pho-
tographers caught them cutting through
bushes. This April, three runners were dis-
qualified from Boston, one for recruiting a
faster competitor to run as a proxy (known
in racing as a mule) and two for forging their
personal-best certificates to meet the Bos-
ton Marathon’s qualification standard. Mur-
phy argues that his work helps understaffed
race officials catch the cheating that seems
to have become endemic in the sport.
Murphy mostly blames social media
for the compulsion to cheat. “Amateur
athletes cheat for the likes,” he says. But
social media likes can just as quickly turn
to hate. In 2018, Murphy accused Maude
Gorman, a runner who’d finished second
at an ultramarathon in Maine, of cutting
the course. She was later disqualified from
the race and confessed that she had, in
fact, skipped parts of the course. “Shame
is powerful,” she wrote last summer in an
Instagram post. “And after cheating in a
few ultra-marathons ... I wasn’t sure how
to deal with the overwhelming sense of
shame placed on me ... I was standing on
a bridge, ready to commit suicide.”
Later, I reached out to Gorman via Insta-
gram private message, where she described
the effect the aftermath of Murphy’s reve-
lation had on her. “I do believe [Murphy]
created an atmosphere online where cyber-
bullying and harassment became a valid
‘punishment’ for those on his site,” Gorman
told me. “This is one of the reasons I strug-
gled with wanting to commit suicide.”
One of Murphy’s sharpest critics is Scott
Kummer, a lawyer in Chicago whom Mur-
phy invited to be his cohost on his Marathon
Investigation podcast. The show explores
famous cheating cases, and often the pair
butt heads. (“I wanted somebody to debate
with on the show,” Murphy says.) “There’s a
fine line between newsworthiness and cre-
ating an internet pile-on for an otherwise
sad person,” Kummer told me. “If it’s an elite
runner who’s caught, that seems OK. But if
it’s just Joe Average, who are we really help-
ing with that? Anybody who goes to great
lengths to cheat in a marathon probably has
some issues to begin with, and having 4 mil-
lion people on Facebook talk about what a
piece of garbage they are isn’t good.”
Murphy is unyielding. “It doesn’t matter
if it’s a big race or small race,” he told me.
“If somebody is reaching the podium and
they cheated, it’s wrong. The point is to pre-
serve the integrity of the sport.”On June 28, officials from the Conqur
Endurance Group, the organizers of the Los
Angeles Marathon, emailed a statement to
the media that read, “Dr. Frank Meza vio-
lated a number of race rules during the
2019 Skechers Performance Los Angeles
Marathon, including re-entering the course
from a position other than where he left
it.” They disqualified him and invalidated
his race results.
Murphy felt vindicated. But he wasn’t
satisfied. He spent a few days looking into
some of Meza’s earlier results, and on July 3
he wrote on his website that he had several
photos of Meza from the 2017 LA Marathon
that showed him off the course.
The next morning, July 4, Murphy posted
another story, titled “ ‘Frank on a Bike’ Evi-
dence Can’t Be Dismissed.” In the post,
Murphy called out a man who headed a
running club that Meza had helped found
in the ’70s and who had said to a television
reporter, “Until I get a more deeper under-
standing, I support Frank.” It seemed Mur-
phy would not be satisfied until every last
person—friend or foe—condemned Meza.
“After multiple disqualifications, a strong
statement by the LA Marathon, and a large
amount of photographic evidence, Frank
still has his defenders,” he wrote.
In the story, Murphy included a picture
that he insisted was Meza riding a bike during
the 2014 San Francisco Marathon. “The bike
rider is Frank. 100%. It is irrefutable,” he
wrote. “No one can question the evidence.
There are no excuses to explain this.”
At about 8:30 that same morning, Meza
left his house in South Pasadena. For sev-
eral days, he’d been cooped up inside, trying
to avoid TV vans parked outside his home.
“I’m gonna go for a short run,” he told his
wife. “And then we’ll go get some lunch.”
“That sounds good,” said Faustina.
“I love you,” Meza said.
Meza’s neighbors were already pulling
out their grills and setting up decorations