Last week we touched on the notion of ambition: how a little can encourage good work but too much can lead to bad choices. This week, we take a critical look at lying and cheating by examining the forces (systems, pressures, incentives) that would lead a person to cheat in sport at both the professional and hobbyjogger (aka Boston Qualifying/not-paid-to-be-here) level, and wonder if that's much different from a time little Coach Sarah lied to her parents about swim practice.

To be clear, we are not condoning cheating. Like top colleges, the highest levels of sport are full of people who absolutely deserve to be there. In this podcast we postulate that cheating is not going to end unless we look at why a good person would make a seemingly bad choice.

Show Notes

Cheating is defined as: "to act dishonestly or unfairly in order to gain an advantage, especially in a game or examination."

Coach MK and Coach Sarah take a high-level look at pop culture, aka “current history/history in the making” then seeing how our responses to these stories tell us how we view and judge ourselves and how THAT, frequently warped lens, focuses on our goals, our bodies, our expectations...and for most of our runners, all of that is visible in our approach to running.

The duo discuss the relevance and importance of their generational wordview (Sarah is a Millennial, MK iwebster.com/words-at-play/words-were-watching-xennial">s a Xennial or something? she isn't quite sure) and how the world changes but the worldview doesn't. 

They move on to the New Season of Queer Eye Season 4, where Jonathan Van Ness goes back to his high school to give his music teacher Kathi Dooley a makeover. MK hails from a family of teachers, and is THRILLED that this show deftly and cleanly demonstrates how the job most Baby Boomer and Gen X teachers signed up for isn't the job they are expected to perform today. 

This leads to the importance of the arts in general, and how both ladies tie their critical thinking ability to their liberal arts education while realizing that hiring managers may not appreciate what a liberal arts major brings to to a corporate environment anymore. The pressure to major in anything BUT liberal arts is very very real, and the pressure mounts as the cost of education continues to rise, seemingly unabated.

After some very cool tangents about Coach Sarah's Harry Potter-sounding college experience at Middlebury (WHAT IS YOUR LIFE COACH SARAH?!?!?) and how pressure to perform broke Coach MK, the duo acknowledge how pressures to perform have increased and students feel they don't have room to learn from failure AND be admitted to top universities anymore. The population is growing but college classes aren't, which means the competition is stiffer than ever...and the incentives to get an advantage any way possible, are rising. When the stakes are high you can bet that cheating is, too. What's a teacher to do?

In this conversation, the conclusion is the point as they circle back to look at what cheating is and what the word means when discussing a professional athlete, the holes drug-testing-ineffective-aoc-20130301-2faph.html">in the systems ama.org/sites/default/files/resources/files/2013-05-12-Lack-of-effectiveness-of-testing-WG-Report-Final.pdf">that monitor cheating globally, and how the same types of actions are occurring at the hobbyjogger level as the governing bodies struggle to determine how to sniff out and manage doping in super-master categories and why a runner would even consider it or believe that they are not doing anything wrong.

I can only read one link, which one do I pick?

This one: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/health/doping-rumored-among-older-athletes-testing-implemented/

This is a close second: https://www.outsideonline.com/2298566/how-catch-blood-doping-marathoner

This is older, 2009, but even more relevant today: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/19/us/19athletes.html

During that podcast, you said to follow WHO on Twitter?

Ross Tucker. His blog is amazing, but very technical. His Tweets, less so. 

Alex Hutchison, too. I get alerts when these guys tweet, their content is always relevant and on-topic, unlike these podcasts!!!

I also said to read Celebrity Gossip, Academic Style’s Facebook page.  

Why Cheat To Go to Boston When You can Run For Charity?

Corral placement. Prestige, too but you cannot discount corral placement as part of the race experience (ask anyone who has ever Run Disney).

Coach MK likes to say that running more slowly than you want to go in any given moment is THE hardest thing you will ever do as a runner- so a 3:15 marathoner may not consider a charity bib to be a viable option. The race wouldn't lose allure or integrity by allowing charity runners with a recent race time faster than 4 hours (the original qualifying metric) AND/OR within 10 minutes of the runner's qualifying standard to be corralled with with runners at that same level, but doing so could in fact help allay some of the incentive to cheat and back-door-into-the-marathon-connects-runners-with-a-cause.html">reduce the perception that a charity bib is lesser or undeserving. 

BUT LANCE ARMSTRONG!Not letting him off the hook, but casting him out of the sport changed nothing. He will totally make a comeback no matter how any of us feel about it. That’s reality, not endorsement. 

Read this about Floyd, though. 

Links on Burnout/Errand Paralysis

Anne Helen Petersen is the bomb. Just read everything she writes and you’re good. Not surprisingly, it’s a generational thing.