Just recently, Hugh Hewitt felt the need to apologize to Paul Ryan. To mix sports metaphors, the two scored a particularly harmful own goal this August, when Hewitt, of Fox News, asked Ryan, who had recently been chosen as Mitt Romney’s running mate, about his marathon times. The point of the exchange was to show off Ryan’s masculinity, but it ended up raising questions about his veracity instead. Presidential campaigns are a blur of little exchanges and moments, only a few of which people remember. This became one of those moments:

H.H.: I’ve just gotta ask, what’s your personal best? P.R.: Under three, high twos. I had a two hour and fifty-something. H.H.: Holy smokes. All right, now you go down to Miami University… P.R.: I was fast when I was younger, yeah.

Not long after the interview, the world figured out that Ryan had run only one marathon, in 1990, and that he had finished it in 4:01. Analysis and jokes followed, as did a meme. When The New Yorker called the people who finished near Ryan in that 1990 marathon, they all remembered their times. Ryan, meanwhile, had given a specific and confident answer—but a wrong one. How fast a politician can run is irrelevant; how much a politician struggles with telling the truth is important.

Last week, Hewitt had Ryan on his show again, and the radio host said he was sorry:

H.H.: I want to begin by saying when you were on the show the first time after your nomination, I surprised you with a question. And I never clear my questions with anyone, but I surprised you with a question about your running, and I’m sorry about that, because you didn’t have a chance to check with your brother. P.R.: Well, I just forgot. I mean, it was, what, 22 years ago? I hurt my back when I was like 24 or 25, and I quit running. But I used to run a lot, and I’d literally just forgot what the time was, and I threw it off the top of my head. That was the mistake I made. I ran an ordinary time. I thought I gave you an ordinary time answer. Apparently not, because I just forgot the sense of these things.

The striking part is Ryan’s excuse: “I ran an ordinary time. I thought I gave you an ordinary time answer.” But reread the first exchange. When Hewitt says, “Holy smokes,” Ryan doesn’t say, “Aw, shucks, that’s just an ordinary time.” He doubles down and says, “I was fast when I was younger, yeah.”

Maybe Ryan did just forget, and maybe he just wasn’t alert enough to correct the enthusiasm of a very enthusiastic radio host. But there’s another plausible explanation. When someone runs a marathon, that person is often asked how fast he or she finished. This happens right after the race, and then for years—whenever marathoning is brought up in conversation. It’s partly why runners have such good recall of their race results: answer any question twenty times and you’ll reinforce the memories behind it. And perhaps, early on, Ryan would say that he had finished in something like “under four, high threes.” His marathon was crowded; runners didn’t wear timing chips on their shoes back then; and it might have taken him more than a minute to get to the start. So maybe in his mind he ran a sub-four, and maybe that’s what he told people. That would have been in the “little bit lame”—but not “ridiculous”—category into which exaggerations of running prowess are sorted.

So why would a sub-four become a sub-three? Perhaps because a memory blurred, and a four turned into a three, like a red car from twenty years ago that you now remember as green. Or perhaps because all politicians tell stories that are, to use a phrase from Dean Acheson, “clearer than truth.” They’re details that people know aren’t entirely true when first said, but, through repetition and reinforcement, just become part of the stories they tell or the answers they give. I suspect that’s how Marco Rubio’s parents escaped Castro and how Bill Clinton didn’t inhale. At some point, perhaps, Ryan tweaked his standard answer to questions about his marathon time. Maybe he tweaked it a few times, and then maybe he didn’t have the self-awareness to un-tweak it when Hugh Hewitt asked on air.

That’s just a guess about how Paul Ryan got from a 4:01 marathon to a two-fifty-something one, but it certainly seems more plausible than what Ryan told Hewitt last week: “I threw it off the top of my head.”

Photograph by Lauren Lancaster