In July, 2010, Kyle Strode, a forty-six year-old chemistry professor from Helena, Montana, ran the Missoula Marathon. Completing the 26.2-mile distance in two hours and forty-seven minutes, he placed fourth out of thirteen hundred and twenty-two finishers, and won the masters division, for entrants forty and older. Strode is among the most accomplished masters marathoners in Montana, with a personal best of two hours and thirty-two minutes. When he toes a starting line in his home state, he knows who is among the class of the field, and he’s particularly aware of other masters competitors. The Missoula course, which is mostly flat, passes through rangeland and forest, crosses two rivers, and in its final miles offers a tour of the city’s tree-lined neighborhoods. Early in the race, Strode broke ahead of his usual rivals, and never saw them again. The second masters runner to cross the finish line, Mike Telling, from Dillon, Montana, trailed Strode by nearly four minutes. At the awards ceremony, however, they learned that Telling had actually placed third. The official runner-up was Kip Litton, age forty-eight, of Clarkston, Michigan. Litton, who had been at the back of the pack when the race started, began his run two minutes after the gun was fired. He had apparently made up for lost time.

Illustration by Peter Arkle

Since the early nineties, technology has made it possible to clock runners with precision and to track them at measured intervals, yielding point-to-point “split” times. Runners attach to their shoelace or racing bib a transponder tag that marks how much time has elapsed when a checkpoint is reached. Often, sensor-equipped checkpoint mats span the running lanes. USA Track & Field, the governing body for major running competitions, mandates that “gun,” rather than “chip,” times determine the official results in sanctioned races. But, as a practical matter, this rule generally applies solely to élite lead runners. In a field of thousands, it might take an entrant several minutes just to reach the starting line, so it seems only fair that the diligent middle- or back-of-the-packers’ order of finish is adjusted to reflect the chip time. In Missoula, the marathon’s organizers made this allowance.

Strode didn’t have to teach that summer, and so he had time to scrutinize the race results. Because Litton came from out of state, he hadn’t been on Strode’s radar, and Litton hadn’t stuck around to claim his award. Strode learned from Telling that he hadn’t paid Litton any mind as he passed him in the homestretch, and that he had no memory of being passed by Litton earlier in the race.

A wealth of online data about competitive running makes post-race analyses relatively easy. Several days after the marathon, Strode visited a Web site that displayed photographs of runners along the Missoula route. Most participants appeared in several shots, each of which indicated, down to the second, when it was snapped. Strode noticed something curious: although Litton had posted a half-marathon split time, and there were four images of him taken at or near the finish line, Strode couldn’t locate him anywhere in the preceding twenty-six miles.

In the Missoula photographs, Litton wore sunglasses and a black baseball cap, so Strode had only a general sense of what he looked like: white, clean-shaven, and about five feet ten, with an athletic build but not the classic lean and loose-limbed runner’s physique. Athlinks, a popular online database for endurance races, sharpened the picture somewhat: in 2000, shortly before turning forty, Litton ran his first race, a five-kilometre event in Flint, half an hour from his home. His average pace was seven and a half minutes per mile: a good novice result. He ran the same race a year later and improved his pace by almost forty seconds per mile, and a year after that he whittled off fourteen more seconds, to a respectable six minutes and thirty-five seconds per mile. In 2003, he finished eleven races, including his first marathon, in Jacksonville, Florida.

In all, during the previous decade Litton had run in more than a hundred races, including twenty-five marathons. His time in Jacksonville, 3:19:57, qualified him for the Boston Marathon, the following April, where he covered the course in 3:25:06—a 7:50-per-mile pace. He returned to Jacksonville in 2006 and, for the first time, recorded a sub-three-hour marathon, winning in his age group. Four months later, he broke the three-hour barrier again, in Boston.

For a man or a woman of any age, a marathon performance of under three hours is considered a mark of distinction. (Typically, about six per cent of the field at the Boston Marathon runs this fast.) In the year before Missoula, Litton had averaged a marathon a month, with sub-three-hour clockings in each. He’d travelled to New Mexico, Idaho, New Hampshire, Arizona, Florida, Virginia, Missouri, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Delaware, Vermont, and South Dakota. Eight times, he’d come in first in his age group, and in the West Wyoming Marathon, a week before Missoula, he was the over-all winner.

Exploring the Web sites for each of Litton’s marathons occupied Strode for several days. Not every race was as well documented as Missoula’s, but wherever professional race photographers had been present he hunted for shots of Litton among other runners. He found images of him at the end of a course, only twice at the beginning, and never in between. And there was the chip-gun differential: with rare exceptions, Litton started two to five minutes behind the leaders. In a crowded field, wouldn’t a swift runner want to avoid weaving through clusters of slower runners?

A Google search led Strode to a Web site for the dental practice of Kip Litton, D.D.S., in Davison, Michigan. It also led to Worldrecordrun, a site, conceived and maintained by Litton, that chronicled his peripatetic habits. “World record” apparently referred to his goal of running sub-three-hour marathons in all fifty states. The quest had formally begun at a marathon in Traverse City, Michigan, in May, 2009, and Montana was his fourteenth destination. On the site, Litton had posted his finishing times and a recap of each race. He explained that his training regimen and diet, along with nutritional supplements, had “allowed me to maintain my rigorous schedule and even improve my recent performances.” His tone was alternately hortatory (“Imagine Inspire Impact!”) and emotional (“I have been blessed with the greatest wife and kids a guy could ever ask for”).

“Who is Kip Litton?” he asked. “I am a lifelong resident of Michigan and an alumnus of both The University of Michigan and UM Dental School. Currently I live in the town of Clarkston and have an office in Davison. I began running in the year 2000 to lose weight. I am an ordinary guy with an extraordinary desire to make a difference. At the onset of this mission I had run 11 marathons, all in the range of 3:35 down to 2:55. . . . After superficially committing to this mission, I soon discovered the devil was in the details. . . . Was I born to do this? Hardly. As a high schooler, I did play tennis, but HATED to run. My teammates and I never ran as far as the coach told us to or thought we had.”

There was another, poignant motivation behind “the mission.” Litton and his wife, Lisa, an attorney, were the parents of two boys and a girl. The youngest, Michael, was born, in 2001, with cystic fibrosis. A congenital illness, it most commonly clogs airways in the lungs, making breathing difficult. The average life expectancy for cystic-fibrosis patients is about thirty-eight years. Litton wrote, “The goal is to raise a QUARTER MILLION DOLLARS for CF during the course of the mission.” His site featured the logo of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, and people were invited to make donations by clicking on a link to the organization’s Web site, by writing a personal check to Worldrecordrun, or by sending money to a PayPal account.

“My hope is that I can inspire others to take inventory of their talents, find their passion and pursue it relentlessly to effect a cause or impact their community,” Litton wrote. “This is MY mission. It is the only thing I feel passionately about enough to ask you to PLEASE consider a donation to this worthy cause. I will also be bold enough to ask you to please alert others to this site or send a link to your e-mail list. When all is said and done, no one will care about the endless hours of training, my detailed workout logs or fancy awards.”

The compassion that Strode naturally felt upon learning of a child’s illness, along with admiration for Litton’s readiness to put his body on the line to raise funds for Michael’s future and for medical research, was tempered, he told me, by his belief that Litton “had cheated in almost all of his 2010 marathons.”

On July 24, 2010, Strode received an unexpected inquiry from Jennifer Straughan, the Missoula race director, who asked him to look at a photograph of a runner wearing bib No. 759. It was Litton. “There is some question as to whether he was seen along the course,” Straughan wrote. “He finished in a time similar to you so theoretically you would have noticed him.”

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While Strode had been immersed in what he’d assumed was his own private Kip Litton obsession, the official timer at Missoula had been contacted by his counterpart at the Deadwood Mickelson Trail Marathon, in Deadwood, South Dakota, where Litton had turned up the previous month. Photographs taken in Deadwood showed him crossing the starting line fifth from last and finishing in 2:55:50, putting him first in his age group and in third place over all. The fourth-place finisher protested: he’d been running third at the halfway mark and said that no one had passed him after that, an assertion bolstered by the fact that most of the remaining course was a trail only six feet wide. Litton had registered a half-marathon split, and the Deadwood timer was skeptical of the protest against him—“I was trying to prove Litton was legit,” he told me—but he changed his mind after determining that Litton had, improbably, run the second half eleven minutes faster than the first. In addition, he found photographs of Litton only at the start and the end of the course. Deadwood disqualified Litton, and Straughan followed suit in Missoula.

Strode, who in a later Web post described his mind-set as “sucked in, fascinated and pissed off,” broadened his investigation. He sent an e-mail to Richard Rodriguez, who on the Web site of the West Wyoming Marathon was identified as its race director; Litton had a listed winning time there of 2:56:12.

“I’m writing to ask about the winner of your marathon a few weeks ago, Kip Litton,” Strode wrote. “He was recently disqualified from the Deadwood Mickelson Trail Marathon for cheating (not running the whole course). . . . I don’t know the guy—I just hate cheating in running. I wonder whether he may have had a legitimate performance at your race or whether he may also have cheated in Wyoming.”

Two days later, Strode received a response: “Wow, that’s quite a scenario! It would have been very unlikely for the same thing to have happened at our race, as there were only 30 participants and the lead 2 runners ran almost the entire race together. I have not received any complaints. I will keep my ears open though. If there is an update, send it my way. Take care, Richard.”

Strode began to wonder if his suspicions were misplaced, but he kept investigating. At the Providence Marathon, in Rhode Island, where Litton had finished first in his age group, photographs showed him wearing shoes and shorts at the end of the course that were different from those he was wearing at the beginning. (A costume change at Deadwood had involved shoes, a hat, and a T-shirt.) In the Delaware Marathon, Litton had finished first in his age group. After being prompted by Strode, the race’s director, Wayne Kursh, found that, among the finishers, Litton alone had failed to register split times. On an out-and-back portion of the course, Kursh had taken photographs of the top runners at the turnaround point—but Litton was not among them. He also failed to find images of Litton elsewhere on the course.

Kursh had a blog, and on August 6, 2010, he posted a blind item about Litton titled “Another Rosie Ruiz?”—a reference to the scammer who was briefly heralded as the winner of the women’s division of the 1980 Boston Marathon, before it was determined that she’d jumped onto the course less than a mile from the finish. Kursh wrote in a follow-up that he had been exchanging concerns with other race directors, adding, “I smell a rat.”

In an e-mail exchange initiated by Kursh, Litton claimed that photographs of him would be hard to find, because his shirt had covered his racing bib. He added, “Wasn’t there a timing mat at the turnaround?” Kursh ultimately decided to disqualify him, explaining, “From your comment here it is pretty obvious that you have NO idea where the timing mats were on route. They definitely were not at this turn-around point.”

On occasions when Litton responded to such pointed challenges, he never did so in a hostile or nakedly defensive manner. After a disqualification, he simply deleted the result and the recap from his Web site, as if he had never registered for the race. His default demeanor was equable mystification.

Clarkston, Michigan, is an exurban town within commuting distance of both Detroit and Flint, which ranked first and fourth, respectively, in the latest Forbes survey of America’s most dangerous cities. Those grim statistics don’t seem to impinge on Clarkston. The subdivision where Kip and Lisa Litton live with their three children—large brick and stone houses on oversized lots, with expansive lawns and S.U.V.s parked in circular driveways—is threaded with undeveloped woodlands and streams. In Davison, twenty-two miles north, Litton’s dental practice occupies a one-story brown brick building on a commercial strip, tucked behind an auto-repair shop, next door to a drive-through bank, and a short sprint from the requisite conveniences (McDonald’s, Jiffy Lube, Taco Bell). A few miles south of Flint is the comfortable suburb of Grand Blanc, where Litton grew up. In 1979, he graduated from Grand Blanc High School. A strong tennis player—as a junior, he won a state championship—he is remembered as bright and charismatic, with smart-aleck tendencies. “The first party I had after I bought a house, I invited him,” a high-school friend told me. “Part of his way of getting attention at the party was to eat all the food. Kip does odd, silly things for attention. But they’re harmless.”

In 1990, two years after graduating from dental school, Litton started working in Davison with a dentist who was nearing retirement, and in 2001 he acquired the practice. Today, Litton’s office has a Web site, which notes that, “when the General Motors Company cut benefits for retirees, Dr. Litton devised a cost-sharing plan that allowed patients without benefits to continue receiving quality dental care.” One day a year, Litton says, he provides free dental care to underprivileged children; each Halloween, he offers to buy back patients’ candy for a dollar a pound, then has it “shipped overseas to the troops, along with toothbrushes.” A Google review of Litton’s practice, posted earlier this year, said, “After trying several other dentists in the area, I was so delighted to find Dr. Litton. . . . Great friendly staff, painless, lowest costs, no interest payment plans and Dr. Litton is SO funny! I finally have my fantastic Hollywood smile. I have already convinced several of my friends and relatives to come to this office, despite almost an hour drive. My search is now YOUR gain.”

Litton had attracted local media attention for his running achievements. After the 2010 Boston Marathon, the Davison Index noted that Litton was “the first finisher from mid-Michigan and the first over 40 from Michigan.” Around the same time, the Flint Journal ran a story with the headline “DAVISON DENTIST HAS TRANSFORMED HIMSELF FROM SEDENTARY MIDDLE-AGER TO SUCCESSFUL MARATHONER.” The article traced a stirring trajectory: One day, about a decade earlier, Litton, fifty pounds overweight, got on a treadmill, hoping to run three miles. “I made it a little over a third of a mile before I got so dizzy that I started to fall off the treadmill,” he told the reporter, Bill Khan. “I was completely out of shape. It was just ridiculous.” Fast-forward: “Litton now regularly races marathons, not content to merely finish 26.2 miles but to post times that few runners his age can match.” (Khan learned of Litton, he told me, when a stranger sent him an e-mail saying that “this guy has gotten himself in shape and is trying to raise money for charity.”)

Litton told Khan, “I’m starting to know every crack and pot hole on that route from Hopkinton to Boston. Once you go to Boston, there’s something special about it. Having all 26 miles with people lined up on both sides of the road, screaming their lungs out for six hours, is such an unusual experience and super cool.”

Wayne Kursh’s “I smell a rat” blog post drew the attention of Michael McGrath, a former assistant track and cross-country coach at Haverford College. McGrath had competed at Boston nine times—including the year Rosie Ruiz cheated—and his best finish was 2:49:19. Although Kursh hadn’t mentioned Litton by name, McGrath soon identified him, by comparing the lists of finishers at Missoula and Delaware. Like Strode, he found Litton a more compelling impostor than Ruiz, in no small part because his methodology was so tantalizingly elusive. Somehow, he had exploited the running community’s faith in the very systems—transponders, chip times—that had been adopted to prevent cheating.

“I am like a dog who cannot let go of a bone,” McGrath wrote to Kursh. He spent days anatomizing Litton’s races, dissecting first his 2010 showing at Boston. Litton had hit all the splits, at five-kilometre intervals. This suggested that running a sub-three-hour marathon was theoretically within his capacity. Unless, McGrath argued, the microscope was brought into tighter focus.

The Boston course has a reputation for toughness: the Newton hills, which runners encounter between miles sixteen and twenty-one, owe their notoriety to the fact that they must be climbed when the energy reserves of runners are greatly depleted. How was it, McGrath asked, that on the most leisurely stretch—just before the halfway mark, near Wellesley College—Litton’s pace was a full minute slower than it was in the hills? Litton’s Boston race in 2009 had the same incongruities.

McGrath learned that, in February, 2009, Litton had run a fifteen-kilometre race in Florida. According to the split times, his pace during the second half—five minutes and twenty-four seconds per mile—was almost two minutes faster than during the first half. Such a divergence is called a “negative split,” and a variance of that magnitude is as common as snow in Miami. Nor did Litton’s past performances indicate an ability to run a five-and-a-half-minute pace. The official timer of the Deadwood Mickelson Trail Marathon, reflecting upon Litton’s purported acceleration, told me, “I don’t know any Kenyans who could do that.”

Not long after McGrath began his research, he decided to go public, sort of. His medium was LetsRun, a Web site devoted to news about élite track and distance running. One of LetsRun’s salient features is its “World Famous Message Boards,” where most participants use pseudonyms, and the content quality runs the expected gamut (factual, analytical, sophomoric, inanely combative). McGrath, using the handle Anonymous.4, posted an item under the heading “Kip Litton,” referred to Litton’s disqualification at Missoula, and solicited feedback from anyone who might have more information.

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One responder was Scott Hubbard, a former collegiate runner and high-school coach who was a familiar figure on the central Michigan running scene. Hubbard measured and certified courses, often worked as a race announcer, and wrote for running publications. His awareness of Litton dated to October, 2009, when Litton’s five-member relay team was disqualified from winning the Detroit Free Press Marathon Relay. Litton had recruited four topnotch masters runners, only two of whom he’d known previously, paid everyone’s entry fee, and assigned himself the second leg of the relay. The members of the second-place team were stunned by the race result—especially their second-leg runner, who had received his baton in first place, knew that no one had passed him, yet learned after handing off to his third-leg teammate that they no longer held the lead. With encouragement from Litton’s mortified teammates, who felt potentially implicated, the second-place team protested, leading to the disqualification. Afterward, Hubbard told me, he initiated a correspondence with Litton, trying to “pin him down on how he cut the course.”

Litton was initially evasive. But after about a week of questioning he offered an explanation: “Finally, he came down to ‘Yeah, I must have cut it short somewhere to come in with that time.’ I asked him where that might have happened. I knew the course, because I’d measured it. He named the place and said, ‘I must have followed someone.’ And I said, ‘No, you didn’t follow anyone. You cheated.’ ”

A few weeks later, Hubbard came across the following item in the online newsletter of Michigan Runner, a bi-monthly publication: