by Glenn Stout
One of the LetsRun sleuths’ most impressive unearthings was a photograph taken near the 30-kilometer checkpoint of the 2010 Boston Marathon. It depicted six runners wearing singlets or short-sleeved shirts, their racing bibs attached, on pace for sub-three-hour performances. At the left edge of the frame, slightly cropped, was Litton. The others were clearly in brisk midstride. Litton appeared to be walking, or slowly jogging, along the shoulder of the road, and he wore a long-sleeved black shirt, black sweatpants, a black baseball cap, and shades. He had no racing bib showing. He was credited that year with a time of 2:52:12.
At Wendy’s, we did not discuss the photograph. But, a few weeks later, I attached it to an email and told him, in so many words, “Gotcha.” No non-elite runner in his late forties could run a 2:52:12 marathon—an average pace of 6:34 per mile—in mild weather wearing that kind of clothing. (Before the finish line, the long-sleeved shirt and sweatpants had been swapped for a T-shirt, shorts, and a different hat.) By not showing a bib mid-race, Litton was counting on not being photographed, or at least not being recognized as a race entrant. Sticking to the shoulder allowed him to get close enough for his chip to register at the 30-kilometer checkpoint.
Based upon his own track record and my interviews with Michigan runners who had competed against him, I told him, it seemed unlikely that he’d ever run a marathon in under three hours, with the possible exception of a 2:58:08 at Jacksonville in 2006. His other probably kosher performances, I figured, were Jacksonville in 2003 (3:19:57), Richmond in 2004 (3:08:14), and Boston in 2004 (3:25:06) and 2005 (3:23:23)—all entirely creditable.
My smoking gun turned out to be no such thing. In his response, Litton directed me to photographs that I’d overlooked: images of him at the 15-kilometer split.
“The bib is still underneath but I am in the middle of the road,” he wrote, triumphantly and accurately. “If I was trying to ‘avoid photos’ or ‘not be recognized as a race entrant’ why would I be in the middle of the road this time between other runners?”
The online accumulation of still photographs and video footage of Litton—walking up to starting lines when the field has already taken off, his racing bib obscured, or crossing finish lines differently attired—documented the bookends of an elaborate deception. Undocumented was what happened in between. For a year and a half, Litton’s scourges on LetsRun had struggled to pinpoint the specifics of his methodology. If he traveled between checkpoints by car, he must have had an accomplice—perhaps more than one. But how did they negotiate the inevitable street closings that kept traffic far from the race course? Had Litton figured out how to hack the timing system? According to professional race timers, this was impossible. Moreover, whatever category of abnormal psychology Litton might belong to, it didn’t seem to be “evil genius.”
Litton’s profile on Athlinks listed several completed duathlons: races that combined running and biking. While Worldrecordrun was still extant, it had a page where he reported his annual mileage totals for both running and biking. (He owned a Felt bike.) So a bicycle it surely was. But where were those photographs? No matter what Litton’s connection might have been to the anonymous posters who defended him online, his pursuers were confounded and exasperated most by what remained unsaid. It came down to this: at the Boston Marathon, the oldest, most prestigious, and most professionally managed event on the American racing calendar, Litton had hit every split, changed his clothes along the way, and broken three hours. No one but Litton could say how he did it.
The marathon, no matter where it takes place, remains, as ever, a solitary pursuit in which every runner ultimately competes against himself or herself. Whatever drove Kip Litton was an entirely different battle with himself, one that quite possibly escaped his understanding. One thing, though, he grasped perfectly. Like the most dazzling of magicians or the most artful of art forgers, by withholding the secret of how the illusion worked he retained a power uniquely his own: the spoils of his humiliation, perhaps, but a knowledge that no one was about to take away.
DAN KOEPPEL
Redemption of the Running Man
FROM RUNNER’S WORLD
THE SUN SETS on the most distant horizon I’ve ever seen, dropping away from what had seemed—all day—like a flat and featureless earth. One week ago, this dusty plain contained nothing but promise: of triumph, adventure, even justice. If those things were ever real, they’ve burned away in the desert heat, along with the soles of my feet—scorched through my shoes by searing asphalt—and my lips, so singed and scabbed that pressing them to a water bottle makes me wince in pain. I’ve got nothing left. I can’t go on. But I have to. Even if my mind and body want to stop, I won’t. This is the run I’ve spent a decade waiting to do, and the wait has been more tortuous than the run. I need to finish it, no matter what.
Australia’s Nullarbor Plain is traversed by a stretch of road—the only road, 1,663 miles long—between the southern cities of Adelaide and Perth. The plain is bordered on the south by more than a hundred miles of cliffs that tower above the Southern Ocean. North, there’s cracked and crusted desert—the Down Under equivalent of America’s Death Valley. Nullarbor means “no trees,” but the region’s dryness and distances also mean nearly no people. Physically, the Nullarbor is almost twice as big as the state of Florida; but the vast region is so sparsely inhabited that no official population records are kept.
However, the two-lane Eyre (pronounced “Air”) Highway is busy. Traversing the plain is the iconic Aussie road trip. Camper vans and cars pulling trailers dart between massive, triple-loader trucks known in this part of the world as road trains. Vehicle travelers are supported by a series of “roadhouses,” spaced anywhere from 45 to 125 miles apart, which offer gas, car repair, food, and dormitory-style accommodations. (Running a roadhouse is lonely but rewarding; the gas station at Penong is said to possess the most profitable petrol pumps in the world, and the mechanic’s shop at Nundroo is Australia’s most lucrative.) Completing the drive earns the traveler an I CROSSED THE NULLARBOR bumper sticker, emblazoned with images of wombats and camels (the latter now feral after being introduced to the region in the 19th century).
Those vehicles speed by me in air-conditioned bliss. Their gusting wakes are welcome, suctioning away flies and the persistent odor of roadkill kangaroo. My goal is to run the heart of the Nullarbor—the loneliest, driest, emptiest 200 miles at the plain’s center. I’ve got two weeks.
One might think that to cross a place so formidable under one’s own power would lead to acclaim, but history shows it is just as likely that you’ll be ridiculed, or disbelieved, or worse. Edward John Eyre made the first east-west traverse in 1841; his partner, John Baxter, perished en route. Arthur Mason survived his 1896 journey only by eating his pet dog. That same decade, Henri Gilbert faced dehydration and injuries to his feet, according to his diaries. The truth is hard to tell, because at some point following his apparent arrival at the plain’s eastern terminus, Gilbert vanished, never completing the planned global circumnavigation he’d begun several years earlier (and thus never collecting the reward—equal to about half a million current U.S. dollars—he’d been promised by wealthy backers for doing so).
I was following in a more modern—but equally infamous—set of footsteps. A century after Gilbert, a British runner named Robert Garside also attempted to circle the globe on foot. But Garside disappeared too; not physically—he returned to his starting point unharmed—but via an angry incredulity that led him to be seen not as a trailblazer but as a fraud. I was here because I’d doubted Garside, and in my journalistic expression of that had helped instigate a media lynch mob that contributed to the destruction of his reputation. And of all the places Garside ran, those who didn’t find him credible argued, the Nullarbor—the impossible, wasted, torrid Nullarbor—was where some of Garside’s biggest lies played out.
But Robert Garside did run the Nullarbor. At least that’s what I’d come to believe after an encounter with the runner in London a ye
ar after he finished his journey. And I realized that in the attacks I’d joined, one of the most incredible things a runner had ever done—run around the world—was wiped out. Almost eight years on foot erased because I and other journalists had been too willing to believe somebody else’s definition of what a real runner is, and decided that Robert Garside couldn’t possibly be one.
So now, I want to make amends. I want to prove that running this place is possible. And when I do, I hope the remorse that has haunted me for almost a decade will burn away. I wasn’t running alone. My friend Morgan Beeby had joined me. We’d trained for months in Los Angeles, developing a strategy to address the lack of water, the great heat, the vast distances. But our confidence had been shaken from the moment we’d arrived in Australia. In Sydney, we’d heard ominous talk of murdered vagabonds. We were warned, repeatedly, to bring a satellite phone (we didn’t). In Ceduna, at the plain’s eastern edge, we stayed in a reeking-of-cigarettes house trailer, the owner of which, after hearing our plan and collecting $10 rent, instantly pegged me: “You,” he said, without a single hint from us, “must have something to atone for.”
Robert George Garside was born on January 6, 1967, in Stockport, England, a suburb of Manchester, part of an industrial region that sprawls along the banks of the Mersey River. He grew up playing many sports—a self-described “all-rounder”—but especially loved soccer and was captain of his school team. Garside’s parents divorced when he was a teenager, and his mother returned to her native Slovakia. He says he developed a need to travel almost as a way to follow his own mother, who—in exiting a difficult relationship with the runner’s father—had finally found a sense of contentment. “I remember the day she left,” Garside says. “She was so happy, leaving all that stuff behind.” The joy and freedom of that escape, Garside says, is what gave birth to his own inner wanderlust. “[I wanted to see] the world because it’s a way of understanding things,” he says. But accomplishing that goal seemed elusive; instead, Garside says, he was haunted by a “sense of aimlessness.”
As a child, he says, he ran and played in the woods near his house, in “a huge forest stretching for miles. I had some of my best times there when I was a kid.” Beginning to run as a young adult, he says, brought him back to that state. “You have a good experience as a kid,” he says, “and it affects the rest of your life.” Despite this, Garside felt that his future was uncertain. He was at “a crossroads,” he says, and looking for a “way forward.” In 1993, at that point a psychology student at the University of London’s Royal Holloway College (and a volunteer with the City of London police), he found it. Garside was thumbing through a copy of The Guinness Book of Records (during a “rare visit to the library,” he jokes) and came across the story of Dave Kunst, an American who—from 1970 through 1974—walked around the world. Garside wondered if anyone had ever tried it at a runner’s pace. He contacted Guinness, which informed him that no such record existed. “That’s when I knew what I was going to be,” he says. Garside quit school and began training. He planned a route and lined up sponsors, dubbing himself “The Runningman.”
In December 1995, Garside boarded a plane to South Africa. From Cape Town, he started running north, to Namibia. His plan was to curve up the western coast of Africa, fly north to Spain, and turn east at the Mediterranean. But the run sputtered out at around 1,000 miles. Garside says he was unprepared for the difficulties of the actual journey, especially the complications it created with his girlfriend, Joanna, whom he left behind in London. In March 1996, he returned home.
Over the next few months, Garside planned a new route that would take him from London, east through Europe—he could better stay in touch with Joanna, he says—and then into Russia. He’d veer south and work his way across Asia, then traverse Australia and the Americas lengthwise before returning to Europe. Garside departed London on December 7, 1996. This time, there was fanfare, media coverage, and a Greenpeace sponsorship. “It felt good,” he says, “to be a star.”
The runner’s next decisions—more than anything else he’d do—would lead to the staining of his record, which would in turn foment outrage in the media and the running world. That outrage would peak over three years later as Garside, behind schedule and running a greatly modified route, crossed the United States.
Garside posted his proposed trajectory online, and was making entries in a web diary as often as he could (it was the early days of the Internet, and access was spotty). He arrived in Slovakia, where he was reunited with his mother, in January. But there Garside stalled, again preoccupied with his crumbling relationship back in London. He says he’d planned for the break to be brief—Guinness allowed pauses of up to 30 days for injury or moving from one land mass to another—but as the weeks wore on, the runner began to falsify his diaries. In early September 1997, Garside’s online diaries offered a harrowing but fictional account of an attack in Pakistan: “I was robbed,” he wrote, “my tent slashed with a knife.” Garside says his biggest fear—driven by near-constant media coverage of his adventures—was that somebody else would set out and beat him by taking a more direct route. (The Kunst record of 14,452 miles bypassed Africa and South America.) Garside wanted to traverse every continent. “I wanted to see the world,” he says, by going “the long way, not the short way. But I didn’t want other people to beat me. If they knew I was having trouble, everything could go down the drain.”
To himself, though, Garside had to admit that this run, like the first, had failed: he’d already stopped longer than Guinness would permit. But by the fall of 1997, Garside was ready to start a third attempt. The relationship with Joanna had ended, and it was a relief to Garside. “She wanted me to get on with my life,” he says. By then, however, the run was Garside’s life. His third version of the quest would be done with less fanfare and limited sponsorship; his plan was to start in New Delhi, India, and find local support wherever he could, keeping the effort low-key. This strategy meant less pressure on him. But there was one ticking bomb: the online diaries of his second attempt, which Garside had not taken down. The runner’s made-up tales of danger and deprivation in the Hindu Kush would be repeated in most media accounts of his journey; each repetition would cement the accounts as central to the run’s narrative.
There would be genuine danger and adventure ahead. But on October 20, 1997, as he left New Delhi, running toward China, Robert Garside had no idea that the biggest threat to his run would be borne of his own past actions.
What does it mean to run around the world? Give the idea a moment’s thought, and you’ll soon conclude that it is unimaginable, perhaps impossible. The task shares little with ultramarathoning, or even a record attempt across a great—but defined—distance or time span. One term proposed for open-ended efforts like Garside’s is “journey run,” and that’s a good start. In such an effort, speed is unimportant; instead, there’s a sort of strategic arcana. How does one define “around the world”? The criteria are a subject of debate among organizations that certify circumnavigations. Do you need to cross each continent? Is there a minimum mileage that should be required? Garside’s conditions, supplied by Guinness, mandated that he travel a total distance that exceeded the length of the Tropic of Capricorn—almost 23,000 miles—cross the equator at least once, and start and finish at the same place. The record-keeping organization also set, in advance, the standards of evidence Garside would have to meet. Logbooks with official witness statements were to be the primary means of documentation, along with photographs and video—and, in a nod to the senselessness inherent in any such effort (as well as difficulty defining exactly what “running” is), Guinness noted that “the strategy employed in covering the distance is up to the participant . . . there are no minimum running distances each day.”
The structural challenges involved in completing—and proving—a journey run were what initially attracted the person who would become Garside’s primary nemesis, a Canadian distance-running enthusiast named David Blaikie. During the
time of Garside’s efforts, Blaikie wielded huge influence via his now-defunct website, Ultramarathonworld.com. At first, Blaikie viewed Garside with a sort of removed skepticism. But over time, Blaikie came to believe the runner was a fraud. He became a primary source for journalists (including me) writing about Garside. Blaikie’s reporting was obsessive and meticulous; page after page dissected every element of Garside’s effort, including the runner’s route; his media claims; his qualifications; his physical and emotional state; even his social life. Between 1998 and 2000, Blaikie’s doubts shifted toward certainty: Garside was a fake. Ultramarathonworld.com’s coverage of the runner often resembled a prosecution, and one of Blaikie’s key exhibits was the Nullarbor. Garside had arrived in Perth, Australia, on August 13, 1998—he’d traveled from India through China to Japan over the previous eight months—and set out from the Nullarbor’s westernmost roadhouse, at Balladonia, on September 14. Less than four weeks later, Garside claimed, he arrived at Ceduna.
Blaikie believed none of this. In an article titled “Analysis of Run Across Australia—Very Long and Carefully Documented,” Blaikie implied that nobody could accomplish a solo foot-crossing of the desert expanse: “Where did he get the 12 litres of water a day he says he required in hot conditions? Roadhouses along the Nullarbor are up to 190 km apart, and there are no rivers, lakes, streams, or puddles to drink from.”
