Paul Ryan Lying About His Marathon Timing

Paul Ryan's false claim about his marathon finishing time — stated during a radio interview in August 2012, shortly after he became Mitt Romney's vice presidential running mate — became a surprisingly revealing episode in the 2012 presidential campaign: a small lie that told a large story.

Ryan told Hugh Hewitt that he had run a marathon "under three hours," adding that his personal best was "two hours and fifty-something." He could not remember the exact time, he said, but was confident it was under three.

Running websites and reporters did their homework. As NPR's fact check reported, the actual record showed that Ryan had run one marathon, the 1990 Grandma's Marathon in Duluth, Minnesota (June 23, 1990), with a finishing time of four hours, one minute, and twenty-five seconds — more than an hour slower than his claim, and emphatically not sub-three hours.

A sub-three-hour marathon is a significant athletic achievement, accomplished by only a small fraction of marathon finishers. A four-hour marathon is a respectable performance but an entirely ordinary one. The gap between the two is not a rounding error.

Ryan's campaign admitted the error and issued a correction. "If I were to do any rounding, it would certainly be to four hours, not three," Ryan said in his statement to Runner's World — noting that his brother Tobin, who had run Boston, was the family's true sub-three runner. But the damage went beyond the specific claim. The episode fed a narrative about Ryan — already under scrutiny for budget proposals that critics argued contained significant arithmetic gaps — as someone willing to embellish for effect.

Political observers noted the revealing nature of the exaggeration: the lie was small enough to be unnecessary but large enough to be meaningful. Every marathoner remembers their personal best down to the second; that Ryan claimed not to remember his was, to runners, its own tell.

It was a minor episode in a losing campaign, but it lingered.