Why Do People Keep Cheating At Marathons?

When asked why he kept trying to climb Mt. Everest, the climber George Mallory famously replied, “Because it’s there.” When asked about his creative process, SimCity creator Will Wright said, “I don’t know. I thought it would be cool.” I’ve always been struck by the inscrutability of inspiration, by the notion that we can’t always explain why we do the things we do. This week’s episode of Only If You Get Caught gets into this psychic terrain by way of examining the question of why so many people cheat at marathons.

The premise of the show is that cheating can most often be understood as a rational calculation. Someone chooses to break the rules because they ultimately decide that the benefit of getting away with it outweighs the downside of getting caught. But cutting the course on a marathon doesn’t fit into this heuristic. Most marathon cheaters don’t really cheat for anything, at least not anything that matches up to the shame and derision that comes with being exposed as a cheater. This dynamic is especially true these days, when cheaters both are easier to catch and have less to gain. In late September, an influencer was caught hitching a ride on a bike at the Berlin Marathon en route to posting the unremarkable time of 4:53:46.

Taken as a whole, marathon cheating suggests that there’s an unscratchable itch, a desire to break the rules for the simple sake of doing it. To break it all down, I drafted in our old friend Dennis Young, whom you may know from his time with us at the old site or for his current work editing Front Office Sports. Dennis is great, and we had a fun time getting into it.