Turns out DougJ’s spidey sense about Ryan running a marathon in under three hours was correct:
Slate and Runner’s World investigated. Questions were raised, given the questions about Ryan’s honesty in his convention speech. This evening the terrific running journalist, Scott Douglas, figured out that Ryan had actually run a 4:01 in Grandma’s Marathon in Duluth, Minnesota, in 1991, when he was a college student. This is not quite so fast. A 2:55 would have put Ryan 130th out of 3277 men in that race. A 4:01 put him 1990th. It’s the difference between racing and running.
I contacted the campaign this evening about the discrepancy. Ryan, through a spokesman, responded that he’d just mixed things up. “The race was more than 20 years ago, but my brother Tobin—who ran Boston last year—reminds me that he is the owner of the fastest marathon in the family and has never himself ran a sub-three. If I were to do any rounding, it would certainly be to four hours, not three. He gave me a good ribbing over this at dinner tonight.”
It’s an easy mistake to make. Just like saying that when you want to gut Medicare and turn it into a radically underfunded coupon system for the elderly you actually are preserving Medicare for future generations. He was probably just using Megan McCardle’s calculator. Nothing to see here.
These people will lie about anything and everything. Period. There is no other way to describe people like this other than sociopaths.
Runnin’ With the Devil (just not the details)Post + Comments (214)