I Called out a Cheat and Realised Running has a WAY Bigger Problem transcript

Okay, it went a little something like this. A couple of weeks ago, I made a short video on Instagram politely asking what the deal was with a guy that run up to me in the Sydney Marathon in my video who had clearly cheated [music] to get there. And oh woo! The reaction made me realize pretty quickly that running has got a bigger problem. Like that incident was the tip of the iceberg. So, three things are going to happen in this video.

I'm going to tell you this story and where I stand on it. I'm going to introduce you to a theory that if we use it correctly, it's going to make the running world that we inhabit an amazing place to be. And then, we're going to use the very same theory and apply it to our own running. And I promise you, it will positively impact you and your running. Okay, to the story. So, it went like this. I was running in Sydney Marathon at about 39 km, my calf went.

And I had to walk run. And that's [music] fine, it is what it is. But, in my video, you can see that there is a guy running up behind me, um, possibly in my mind he was like also in the same situation as me cuz at that point I was on for a sub three with 3 km to go. So, I'd been been running pretty well. So, yeah, as I say, he runs up behind me very, very slowly and I'm thinking, "Oh man, this dude's having a bad day like me." But, as he gets closer, it feels something was not quite right.

Like, you know, that [music] there was this person that really had no business being up and around the sub three judging by how he was running, what [music] he looked like running. So, he came into the video though. So, he came and said hello and blah blah blah, you know, and and people started asking questions in my video like the comments to it a few, uh, a few weeks [music] ago. So, I thought, "Ah, I'm going to look into this a little bit." So, what I did was I took [music] his number, I put it into the results page, and I could see that he had been disqualified.

He ran a 2:38 but DQ'd. >> [music] >> And I thought, "Ah, I wonder how he got to where I was." So, I looked back at my race on TrainingPeaks, I could see the route that I was running, and you can see quite clearly at about 14 km, which I'm showing you here, there is this point at which you run, and you just completely carry on running south, but you get back to that exact point at km 38. Now, looking at this guy's results, he had triggered the timing mat at I think 12 km, and he had triggered the timing mat at I think about 40.

So, what he had clearly done was he'd gone from about the 14 km, and he just completely cut the course to 38 km. Now, even at that point, I wasn't assuming that this guy had done it for any really nefarious or negative reasons. He could have been having a terrible day. I didn't know. So, I asked the question. So, I put it out there on a short video saying, "What's going on? Does anybody know the story?" Oh, wowee. This was the bit that really shocked me.

It was the amount of comments, majority of which were kind of saying, "Yeah, you're right to call it." But, there was a not small amount of people that essentially were saying, "Just leave him be. Let him cheat. It's fine. He's not hurting anybody. Why is it any of your business? And mind your own business." But, the one thing is, I don't think this guy would dispute [music] that he was cheating. Um I think it was very clear that he was.

I think he knew [music] what he was doing. I'm not necessarily saying he was doing for a negative reason. So, I think it was okay for [music] me to ask the question about why he was cheating. Oh, let's get Mary in the background of this bit. So, to kind of explain my position on this kind of small-scale cheating, I have to explain the theory that [music] I've been talking about, which is called Broken Windows Theory.

In 1982, two social scientists called James Wilson and George Kelling came up with their Broken Windows Theory. And the theory went that if you had an abandoned building in a city or a town, and someone smashed one of those windows, if the window itself wasn't repaired, it gave others subconscious permission to smash more windows, sending a signal that this area is not cared for. Community standards then dropped, inviting [music] firstly antisocial behaviors and petty crime, and then eventually bigger crime, turning the area into a completely undesirable place to be.

But, fix that window when it gets broken, and that chain reaction is far less likely to happen. You see, most people don't want to be the first person to do something bad, and although historically the theory has been applied poorly, at least in the US, what I actually take from the theory is that the small stuff matters. Small things lead to big things, both negatively and positively, and we're going to explore both angles.

So, let's set the vibe right here, set the tone for this part of the video. What I am not doing is commenting on the person, good or bad. I That's not really any of my business. What I am doing is commenting on their actions, good or bad, as I see them and in my opinion, which I think is a subtle but important distinction. And you can disagree with me. I've got no problem with that. In fact, I think it's bonkers that anybody in this world thinks everybody should believe the same things that they do.

That's not how the world works. It's how you share the opinion is what separates us, in my opinion. And finally, it's worth noting that Sydney did, I believe, catch all of the course cutters. So, anyone that cheated using course cutting as their method of cheating was disqualified because there were timing mats all over the course. But, that's obviously not the only way that you can cheat in a race. And that is ultimately the broken windows moment for us in running, and our culture [music] is calling the small things.

Some of them are breaking of actual rules, and some of them are just picking at what I would call, like, the [music] moral fiber of running. So, like, the anti-social behavior type stuff within running are things like people intentionally claiming their Strava times over their chip times because the Strava time looks better even though the chip time is the only time that counts [music] cuz it's an officially measured course.

Or running in another bib, you know, taking somebody else's bib and running with that. These are kind of the more minor There was one guy even in Sydney who cut out numbers, different numbers so that he could be in a different corral. a great time, uh but did get disqualified because he took those numbers off his bib at the end of the race and then had a photo to make it look like he'd always had that number just so he could move up in the corrals.

These are all like the anti-social behavior stuff. The stuff that I'm genuinely happy to call, but again commenting on the actions of the people, not the people. But what about when you step it up? Like what we would call the petty crime, like the next stage of this whole thing. There is obviously bib muling where people wear someone else's bib to qualify them to another race by running a really good time. Apparently, this is rife, which again just blows my mind, but that is just me.

There's even doping at the amateur level. There are people that openly [music] talk about their doping that there's some amateur athletes, I won't go into it, that are quite well-known that have been [music] intentionally doping but saying they're not pros so it doesn't really matter. And there was even an ultra-running doctor who blamed [music] jet lag for the fact that she got in a car that was driven by her friend and cut out a load of the course and then finished the race, accepted the third place [music] trophy, and got disqualified about a week later and blamed the whole thing on [music] confusion and jet lag.

So, these are all, you know, things that clearly are escalating and most of it is called out quite rightly, but it does happen and sometimes it's not called out and it does lead all the the to the top, which is the elites. There are some at this point in time being pinged for doping, [music] which is a sad state of affairs. We We're kind of being sandwiched in this doping behavior, and yes, it's a minority, thank goodness, but it's there.

And I do believe it's our duty to like call these things out so that the environment doesn't become so toxic that it's not a nice place to be. But even then, people got really wound up by the fact that I was just calling out the cheating. And that is where I think the problem lies because it cannot [music] be directly associated to affecting you as a person. But what about this? What if people got into the major marathons in the ballot system?

Or not even the majors, Valencia is ballot. There's a lot of ballot races. And then, they used that race to cheat. Or worse, they cheated to get into that race in the first place, maybe by someone running a faster time for them, and and you directly lost out. You didn't get into the ballot because of a cheat. Scale it up, and let's think about Boston qualifying times or New York qual- any any race that has a qualifying time.

What if that person in a different race gave their bib to someone else that ran a faster time for them, therefore qualifying them for Boston, therefore dropping the qualifying time for Boston, meaning you could miss out by 1 second or 2 seconds because of the cheat doing what they did. Would you be happy then? Someone summed it up nicely in this story. What if you were standing at the front of a queue, and you'd been queuing for a long time to get into something or buy something that you want, and someone just walked in front of you, stood at the front of the queue, and when you were like, "Whoa, what's going on here?" Everybody else said to you, "Just mind your own business.

Just do your thing." Would that still feel right to you? It's like that wonderful leopard meme phrase that I'm going to put up on the screen here. A lot of people are okay with it unless it can directly [music] be attributed to affecting them. And then they might not be. Ultimately, it is all about the small things and challenging them. [music] But I also don't think that if you're not bothered by all of [music] this cheating, that that's a bad thing either.

That's completely up to you. It's completely up to you as a person. [music] The only thing that bothers me is if you're bothered by me calling out the cheating rather than not being bothered by the cheating. [music] And therefore, you call me out instead of the cheats. In my opinion, those people are the problem. So how do we turn all this small [music] stuff turning into bigger stuff and spin it positively for our running?

Well, it begins with a story about Team GB and Team Sky cycling and something called marginal gain. All right, marginal gains. I was obsessed by this idea when I was a teacher. Very small, almost unnoticed changes when they're added together can make the 1% difference needed at the top end. Small things making a big difference. This was Team Sky and British cycling's [music] core ethos under the guidance of Dave Brailsford.

His belief was that if you break [music] down everything that you can think of that goes into cycling in this particular situation and improve bits by even a fraction of a percent, then the compound improvements could equal the 1% which could be the difference between silver and gold at the Olympics or first and second in the Tour de France. Honestly, some of the gains were incredible. The team took their own mattresses and pillows everywhere to guarantee consistently high quality sleep.

They had heated warm-up shorts that they called hot pants for riders to wear whilst warming up keeping their leg muscles at optimum temperatures. They had individually stitched race suits to make sure that air flowed perfectly over their individual frames. And they even [music] drank water at individualized temperatures based on what their bodies absorbed fastest post-race. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. There was so [music] much more.

And the results, they spoke for themselves. Team Sky won six out of seven Tour de France races between 2012 and 2018. And between 2008 in Beijing and 2016 in Rio, they won 38 of the 54 total [music] medals available in the Olympics. That is utter dominance, plain and simple. But how does that help our running? Well, I'm glad you asked. So, what I've done is I've picked six things that you can do from across the spectrum of running.

So, not just directly affecting your running, but indirectly affecting your running, but in the most positive and the biggest ways that I could think of. And it starts, believe it or not, with learning how to wash your hands properly. Logically, what's the thing that sees you make the most improvement in your running? It's consistently. And logically, what things can knock you out of consistency other than injury or business at work?

It's illness, isn't it? So, something as simple as washing your hands or learning how to do it properly or wearing a mask on a flight or wiping down items on a train or a flight with those bacterial wipes. Things like that could potentially stop you getting ill, which could potentially keep you training. Whereas, it could have knocked you out if you did get ill. It Learn how to wash your hands properly. Honestly, if you're not including strides and drills into your weekly training, you need to.

These are easy to perform and can have such [music] a big impact on your running form and your running economy. They basically teach the body the correct way to move and they strengthen [music] the link between the brain and the muscles. We do them before any run with intensity and sometimes we do strides after easy [music] runs. Small things like this that have such a big bang for your buck in terms of your running.

Something we've also been passionate about and and this can make the hugest difference not only to your injury prevention, but the speed you can run is just strengthening our calves as the priority. So, even if we can't get to the gym, all we need is stairs and we're good to go. We can do calf raises, single calf lowers, soleus raises, holds. That takes like probably 5 minutes and if you do that every day, 100% you're almost putting a carbon plate in the back of your leg.

I also structure our environment very carefully. Behind me is our kitchen. What you won't find in our kitchen are snacks. That's because I am super weak and I know I will eat those snacks. [music] So we cut the snacks off at the source and actually don't buy them when we're in the supermarket. I know where my weak spots are and I craft my environment to avoid falling into the temptation trap. And that in turn just helps me healthy foods and it helps with weight maintenance.

So we have apples, we have healthy flapjacks, we have the good stuff in here. We just don't have crisps, we don't have sweets, we don't have chocolate. I cannot handle it, I'll eat all the chocolate all the time. Also, we practice race day over and over and over again in our long runs. We are intentionally practicing what we wear, what we eat, how we eat, when we eat, how we're feeling while we're running. These are our mock exams and the more we do it in training, the less fearful we are during the race.

I always call it intentional practice. We don't just go out to run, we go out to run with a purpose of making our actual race a better experience. And finally, you really should [music] be doing everything you can to prioritize sleep. If doctors could prescribe it for health and recovery, they would. It's like a superpower [music] and it's chronically underused for so many reasons. Sleep underpins everything you are trying to achieve in running.

Just 1 hour extra per night could pay some of you back tenfold. I do get it's not always as easy as that. And if you got value from the video, then consider subscribing as it helps us help more people. You'll also like one of these two videos, the eight decisions you could make that's going to kill your running progress instantly or how to use strides effectively in your training. Hope you enjoy them. See you soon.