The running community has not forgiven - nor forgotten - Mike Rossi, who continues to attempt to defend himself after he allegedly cheated in the 2014 Lehigh Valley Marathon en route to qualifying for the 2015 Boston Marathon.

Rossi, 48, of Abington, initially rose to fame when he wrote a letter to the elementary school which his children attend, after administration was allegedly upset that he pulled them out of school to come to Boston to watch him run the marathon. Patch reported on the story: Abington Man's Marathon Story Explodes Across The Internet.

But that fame swiftly turned - as fame so often does, when its origins are examined - to infamy, when the online running community took a peek into Rossi's story. And seven months later, it's becoming clear that one story is turning a man into a legend.

It's not the first time the online running community has worked hard to debunk a liar or a cheater. LetsRun is a leader in the anti-doping campaign in the running world, and is routinely a place where athletes, coaches, and fans turn when they feel they have been treated unfairly and been witness to injustice. During the 2012 presidential campaign, the LetsRun message boards made national headlines when Mitt Romney's running mate, now Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, claimed that he ran a marathon under three hours. In reality, Ryan's time was about four hours. To non-runners, that might not seem that egregious. To anyone who has run even recreationally, however, the three hour marathon is a whole world away from the four marathon, just as much so as the five hour marathon is away from the four. A sub-three hour marathoner would be the overall winner in certain marathons, and even in the biggest races, could expect to finish in the top few hundred. A sub four marathoner is more likely to place in the top few thousand.

Rossi's story was different. He came under scrutiny after his letter because the time he ran to qualify for Boston was such an outlier from all of his other performances.

His time of 3 hours, 11 minutes in the 2014 Lehigh Valley Health Marathon was deemed suspicious by LetsRun users, who carry sufficient enough mettle in the running world that the marathon began to inspect evidence from the race: photos along the course and interviews with other runners, among other things.

From the start, Rossi denied everything. "The allegation against me that I did not achieve a qualifying time at Lehigh Valley is completely false," he told NBC Philadelphia, citing a hip injury that slowed him in Boston and accounted for the time differential. "I focused my training to peak for the LV race in order to hopefully qualify for Boston."