Half marathon course cutter Ashley Paulson, who served 6 month contamination suspension, wins coveted Badwater 135.

Smart recording is one data point every 6 seconds. She’d have about 14,000+ data points, not just 5,500.

Couple random points.

Scott Jurek keeps getting thrown out as one (of many) top end male ultrarunners that no way could Ashley Paulson have run faster than. I would agree, those end splits caught my eye - I downloaded the last several years of Badwater finish/split results - the average of the top 10 finishers over the last several years ran the final 13 miles 50% slower than she did. Now having said that, its only a single data point - just like its another data point to highlight the fact Camille Heron has a faster 100-mile and 24-hour result than Scott Jurek.

Second, on stride length, someone else analyzed the time her watch was on after the finish line when she was just standing around (before she realized to hit stop), and just about the entire difference in stride length average stems from part of the data.

thank you for this additional info. i'm going to see if i can get a few more Badwater finishers' data just to compare some more. will also open everything in another GPS app just to compare against what Router shows.

I don’t have a garmin, but there appears to be three settings and the smart and ultratrac settings do not record at exactly equal intervals. Maybe someone will contact garmin.

Can you update for the time of day those splits were run at (serious question)? How many of those top 10 finishers ran in the day vs. at night. My understanding (shaky on this point), is that most previous top finishers have finished under the sun whereas by virtue of her start time and performance through that point Paulson ran at night, which would seem to be a HUGE advantage.

Ultratrac data is trash, I tried it once and my data for an ultra was off by 10% -- if that's what she used, the file is useless. But, I highly doubt it, because her battery wouldn't have died.

I think it might be the other way around, but I'd have to look. Meaning the leaders now with a night start finish the last couple hours heading into dark, coming out of the heat of the day. Back with the original 10am starts, the leaders would finish as the sun was coming up, meaning they will have just finished running through the night and coolest temperatures.

As far as the actual temperature at the finish line itself, it looks like it may be pretty equal. Just looking at today at Whitney Portal, for 24 hour finishers at the old and new starting times, the temperature at 10am is 64F on the way up...the temperature at 11pm is 59F on the way down.

I'm not sure how any GPS data can prove Ashley ran legit here, no matter how accurate-seeming. Given the nature of this race and how isolated teams are, particularly at night, Ashley could have easily passed her watch off to her pacer and had her Pacer run for her while she rested in the car.

Not saying this definitively, but kind of thinking out loud ... the faster finishers from the 6 a.m. start would have been doing the climb in the early morning hours and the temps going up the mountain can vary quite a bit. Definitely not as high as it is in the desert, but I've been there in those hours with the temp around 70 and this year in general it was warmer, up over 90 I think. Somebody finishing at 6, 7, 8 a.m. in the old days would likely not have been dealing with significant heat for the final 13. And this year was a bit warmer — Ashley certainly didn't have any kind of temperature benefit this year over what the record-breakers dealt with in 2019.

The first several miles from the checkpoint at Dow Villa can be pretty warm, definitely significantly warmer than at the actual finish. When she went through there, it wasn't cool by any stretch of the imagination. It wasn't Panamint-level heat, but it wasn't cool. Probably at least 85-90.

I'm no expert on GPS watches, but so far it appears there is an explanation for everything with the data that initially seems amiss.

The "edit" could be just from making the data public.

The stride length issue likely is from standing around at the end of the race (the clock is running but she wasn't).

The lack of data points could be from a battery savings mode (I'll let more knowledgable people weigh in on that).

Regardless, we do know these things:

1) She had no obligation to release the data.

2) She knew what would happen if she released the data. She wrote "I realize that people will still scrutinize and question my data Garmin data in an effort to discredit me as well as fantasize that someone else wore my watch ..."

3) She had to know that some people are very good at finding issues with the data and, if she cheated, they might find a smoking gun.

4) She released the data anyway.

I think that analyzing the data is perfectly fair and is the kind of search for proof that I have been calling for throughout this thread. But given that she released it instead of giving this Discussion Board the middle finger, I think it is still weighing in her favor.

I know, and she knew, that the accusation that she and her pacer relayed the watch to the finish would be hard to dispel. To that I continue to ask, wouldn't they both have black hair? If you are going to match outfits you can match hair color as easily as you can dye your hair purple. Using a doppleganger but having "the dark haired one and the purple haired one" would be beyond stupid.

It is hard to accuse someone of masterminding a great cheating effort and of overlooking an obvious mistake like that at the same time, isn't it?

To add to your summary, RossiCheated, another detail in her favor is that her cheating would have involved 5 people. Which, while not impossible, makes it more problematic.

It sure would be nice to have an eyewitness who noticed something amiss during that 24 hours. Everything so far is after-the-fact speculation based on an "outlier" performance. Which, I guess, is another point in her favor that no witness can be found.

Or you could wear a white hoodie for large parts of the day, which they did.

Image:i.imgur.com/m6K0mDu.jpg

All of these individual things are fishing expeditions - answers looking for questions - because apparently several people there reported suspicious activities. Here we are all this time later and none of those people (as far as I can tell) have come out publicly. Until we know what was reported, we won't be able to know what to look for. I was 100% open to the notion she cheated when I first heard this story. She fits the profile - large social media presence, history of bad behavior in the past (trying to claim a win at an event while knowing she didn't run the correct course etc), amazing course record level splits once the sun went down the last half marathon in. But I'm getting to the point now of concluding that those people reporting suspicious behavior are just butthurt trolls. Its beyond time to put up or shut up. I don't see anything personally in the GPS data that concerns me. Her heart rate and stride data makes sense when I look at it closely. Some people are throwing up at the fact that Ashley beat people like Scott Jurek and that's unfathomable...well I'll point out Camille Heron has a faster 100-mile and 24-hour result than Scott Jurek, and Ashley Heron has a faster marathon time than Camille Heron. So none of this is evidence of anything yet.

But the clock is ticking on those people who reported something...

Hahaha, when everyone was saying "but their hair colors are different!" as if that was proof they didn't use the body double technique, I was thinking the whole time... hmmm... perhaps they could have used some sort of... I dunno... hat? A hoodie works too. An earlier poster talked about double bluffs for throwing off suspicion, and having the body double have a very overt difference like hair color seems like a good double bluff to me.

But to the main point, I agree. If there are really people out there who saw something suspicious, let's hear it, ASAP. It would be worth it for Derek to at least tell us what was allegedly seen, or give us a summary, even if the people don't want their names on the accusations yet. This thread can simply sit in stasis until we get more. The GPS analysis stuff won't get us anywhere, IMO. So either someone gives us the gist of the suspicious behavior, or she won the race legit, as far as I'm concerned.

The accusation that her "twin" ran part of the race for her is a little wild. Yes they have the same outfit, but would it fool anyone who knows her?

Also calling her pacer her "twin" shows malice, and got to stop. People should have the decency of at least saying something like "twin-outfit" pacer instead. Insisting on this insinuation is not giving the skeptics a good name.

Is the word "twin" now a pejorative? I don't see any problem with it.... hell, at the very real risk of unnecessarily fanning to the flames, in that picture just above, the blonde woman appears to be wearing the same shorts, shoes, belt, and hat as Ashley, and has some kind of blue top on, perhaps, under the white -- Ashley had until now been pictured in a blue top. (See, e.g., the woman usually cited as her "twin," who in that pic is in the background by the van). Could it actually have been triplets????

No, I have no idea. I'm just confused by the idea that someone thinks "twin" in a non-literal sense is malicious.

The problem is she’s not her twin and you insisted on calling her her twin to make a wild accusation sounds more plausible.

I'm beginning to find it suspect that an extremely vocal minority of folks are demanding that MI immediately retract its story. If I was the accused and I was innocent I'd invite MI to conduct an exhaustive investigation of my performance. Absolutely no stone unturned. I'd be confident knowing that the evidence would support my result, and that anything short of an exhaustive investigation would leave doubt.

You ask "why release the data" if you cheated. I have not read all of this and so I have no idea if she cheated or not, but a lot of other cheaters have released their "data" thinking it would help them, and it didn't. Also, I think the idea is all you need to do is provide some confusion and doubt.

But, really, as a person coming in at the end I'll say this all I want to say is - it seems significant to me, in and of itself, that her "data" is just unusual as compared to everyone else's data. Why is it always the people who are accused of cheating who, when they provide "data", it's weird. If I downloaded my garmin data it would look like everyone else's garmin data. That fact alone, that hers is different, is suspect.

And yes, every now and again my garmin will do something weird, but not continuously over an entire day and 135km.