J.D. Greening Responds – “I never ran a second loop”

By
derek
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40
10528
I initially wrote about J.D. Greening on Tuesday. J.D. had submitted his Wenatchee Marathon result to the BAA for entry into the 2019 Boston Marathon. The problem was that he was listed as a Half Marathon participant. In reality, he did not complete either race. He also set up a GoFundMe page to raise money for his travel expenses and was a former candidate for Washington State Legislature.
J.D. Greening sent an email after my follow-up article on Wednesday morning.  He conceded to having not run the full marathon.
….i never ran a second loop. I looked back at the map and website today it’s honestly a little confusing and the race itself was a little chaotic because they don’t close down the route just for runners. But reading the description which i prob should have but didn’t because i was a local and just saw the map and thought. “Run a bit, turn around, go around the bridges and you’re done.” I only looped the bridges once. 
I’m embarrassed. But it was never my aim to deceive people. I genuinely believed I ran the full course and felt great about it. Then when I was cataloged wrong I just thought it was small town race organization sloppiness. I reached out and never heard a response. When it came time to register for Boston I figured hey, BAA certifies all the results. If Wenatchee doesn’t get back to me, they will certainly get back to them, so when i was verified I thought everything was good to go. I wasn’t trying to sneak into Boston or I would have been much quieter if that was my intention. I thought my time was legitimate and by the book so i was vocal and transparent about it via social media. 
I responded to him, thanking him for admitting that he did not run the full marathon, but explained the issues I had with his response:
  • Your finish time was about half the time of what I believe you are capable of running. If you inadvertently missed a loop, you would have realized at the very least when the race was over. Where did you think those other miles went?
  • Secondly, you posted about your pace. No way you were running at that pace.
  • You were wearing GPS I believe, wouldn’t you have noticed it was short? Do you still have the data?
  • I believe the loop was 10 Miles. You would have noticed only running 16.
  • Or am I missing something?

Below is the course map. The course goes around the lake twice. He ran around the lake once.

No automatic alt text available.

I had no idea how long the loop was, I had never ran it. I thought each side was like 10 miles, It felt like forever though so in my mind.
I considered my pace after looking at the final time and calculated it. When I was talking about it via FB about pace, honestly I was talking to a girl and trying to sound smarter than i was. 
I had a Garmin Fenix on that I had purchased from Ebay(attached picture)  but it was defective, kept resetting so I wasnt able to even track the race, I no longer have it. 
Like I said, the course was chaotic, I thought I was in the zone and killing it. but there were bikers on the course, other runners, non marathon runners, and moms with strollers.
I’m admitting I was wrong, and I will reiterate, if I was trying to sneak into Boston I would have not been so vocal about it, specially being apart of running groups. I am glad your article cleared it up, or at least the person commenting about the second loop and made me realize I am the one at fault. 
I think i’ve said everything that I could, I know you do this for a living and you might still have doubts, but honestly my intention was not to deceive or cheat my way into Boston, in this day and age with technology that is pretty hard to do. I thought I had been doing everything by the book. I will be contacting the people that run Wenatchee Marathon and hopefully schedule a meeting to make sure the race map is not confusing for next year. But not only that, make sure if there are discrepancies on the route (like mine) those people are contacted and DQ’d and simply not shifted to another race category leaving room for confusion. 

Team RWB

I spoke with a representative of Team RWB. They wanted to communicate that J.D. is not an active member of Team RWB. He signed up online and purchased a shirt. He has not been to any events and has no official position with Team RWB. If you would like to learn more about Team RWB, please visit their site at https://www.teamrwb.org/.

Conclusion

In my opinion, his explanations are nonsensical. You don’t run 16 miles or less and think that you completed 26 miles. If you unintentionally ran the course short, at worse, you’d notice when you crossed the finish line 10 miles (or more) before you should have. No one has ever run an 11- or 12-minute pace and thought they were running a 6:14 pace.

I wasn’t on the course, but it seems fairly simple. Run around the lake twice. I could see missing the last little bit by the start/finish, but not the lap around the lake.

I also take exception to him blaming the course and the organizers for the confusion. I am fairly certain they will decline his offer to assist with adjusting the map.

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40 COMMENTS

  2. There is no mistaking the distance he ran and what a marathon is. We are not talking a mile or two! He has to live with it and the shame that ensues with this public attention. I don’t believe him and with his arrogance I’m glad he has been knocked down a peg or two. And to start a GFM page was even sleazier.

  4. As a woman, I am a bit offended. This girl would have called him on his BS. This is the most amusing thing that I have read in awhile. The race management should meet with him concerning his “issues” and laugh him out of the room!

    • Completely agree. His pathetic, utterly unconvincing, scrambling attempt to cover his butt reveals him to be a misogynistic idiot who blames other people for his cheating. I particularly like the part where “moms with strollers” made the race so chaotic that he thought he ran a marathon when he barely shuffled through a half. I bet a ton of those moms ran faster races than he did!

  6. I was working the course and literally stopped him and told him he had another loop to run. He insisted he had run two loops. I told him the lead pack was at least 20-30 minutes behind him. And I told him the leader had a bicycle escort. I asked him where the bicycle since he thought he was winning. He said he passed the (real) leader and the bicycle a few miles back. Sorry JD, it was nice of you to admit you missed 10 miles of the race. But you dumped more lies on top of your previous lies.
    The Wenatchee Marathon is a wonderful race and should not have its reputation tarnished by your accusations towards it.

  8. I’ve run marathons and road races all over the world. You KNOW how far you’ve run and the time it took you to arrive in every race via signage, timing clocks, your own watch, etc. This explanation is ridiculous and clearly doesn’t make sense. Good job on outing this cheater. Want to run Boston? Earn it !!

    • Hopefully the race organizers respond and provide this kind of info, i.e. that there were mile markers. It’s clearly a small event, so I get not having multiple timing mats. . .but every race I have ever done has distance markers.

  9. I was tending to give him some benefit after such a semi-detailed reply, but it just seems more rambling. Political BS obfuscation and babble. Yeah, the map is somewhat confusing (and don’t get me started on the actual certification map, it gave me a headache!), but, as I’ve said before, any serious participant should have checked out the course first. And I agree, Tim, how hard can it be to count to 2?

    On another note, I wonder if he’s not the only one to skip a loop? I tried to match the pics and bib numbers to finishers, and found a lot missing from results.

  10. Fool claims he didn’t know that he ran a full marathon yet admits to running through the half at a 6:xx pace and then grinding down to a 6:15 pace for the last few. TRUST ME. You know if you ran a full marathon, buddy. You also know if you’re capable of running that pace. Dear lord. Narcissist.

  11. If you ran 26.2 miles…if would know it. Also, did he think he just miraculously got twice as fast than his normal times? I don’t buy it. To blame the race for “confusing course” is a huge cop out, I’ve been on courses far most technical than that and didn’t get confused OR if I did, I knew my pace/knew how long I’d been out there enough to know in the ballpark of what mile I was on. What a jerk.

  12. That’s the most ridiculous and unbelievable response I’ve ever heard from the cheaters that Derek catches: course confusion, watch malfunction, no longer even has the watch, thought he’d run 13 more miles than he ever had in his life easily, thought he’d magically cut his usual 14 min pace by more than half because he was in the zone (that’s some runner’s high there!), thought the race organizers would catch it, thought Boston would catch it, and it goes on. Totally, unbelievably ridiculous!! Especially in light of his comment earlier this year that his goal was to run Boston in 2019.

  13. Reading all these articles made me realise that I need to buy a back-up gps watch. Of the small chance of a failure it always seems to happen on the day of a huge PR or BQ event – when the day come when I suddently run way above my abilitites and possibly at a record Breaking pace, I would hate for my GPS watch to fail leaving me without proof.

    • This! You KNOW when you are running a Full. There is no mistaking what distance you are running and what it feels like! Lol!

  15. I ran the Wenatchee Marathon a few years ago and it was a cluster at the start because the marathon runners started with the 10k runners. BUT the course was not confusing and it was well organized. Marathon runners did an out and back, plus TWO full laps around the river. Mile markers every mile. Not hard to figure out. They don’t close the course, but the path is pretty wide so it was a non issue for me and I also felt other people were respectful of the race if they weren’t running and stayed clear of the path.

  18. Lol okay so I’m a slowish runner, my half marathon time is around 2:20 as part of a 70.3. So if during a full Ironman I reach the finish with a marathon time of 2:40 I’ll just assume I miraculously got twice as fast as I’ve ever run before. Take that, Miranda Carfrae! That totally makes sense.
    This guy is either the stupidest person on the face of the earth, or the douchebag liar he appears to be.

  19. Poor guy! He bought the Fenix from a CANADIAN and didn’t remember to switch units from kilometers to miles. He saw 26.2k and figured he was done. Still exaggerated his pace, though. He couldn’t even run a kilometer in under 7 minutes.

  20. Why do so many of these people have faulty watches? I’ve had 3 Garmin’s (15, 235, current Fenix 5s) and only issue has been user error like forgetting to actually start the dang thing at the beginning of a hike. Lol!

  22. As others have said. The difference between a half and a full is light years. Those who do fulls can easily run halfs – and more – every weekend (and usually do to train up). But a full is going to wipe most of the hobby joggers (myself included) out for days or weeks afterwards.

    Wasn’t his MCM like 6 hrs? And we’re to believe he cut it down by 3.5 hrs? Most impressive. /s

    This guy is so full of $hi+. But I don’t expect much from a squid. Beat Navy.

    • I agree. I have only run one marathon (much faster than this guy’s real pace, lol!), but I was painfully aware of every half-mile, every hill, every expected water break or portapotty. I finished strong and was happy with my time, but I trained many, many miles to run that ONE marathon. You know your pace, you know what a mile, 10 miles, 20 miles and 26.2 miles feels like, even without mile markers. ANY person who has ever done this KNOWS he could not make the mistakes he claims. It was deliberate.

  23. LOL – who doesn’t look at the map beforehand and KNOW it’s a loop/double loop?! More like, “I didn’t know I was going to get caught lying, my bad.” I’ve ran the Wenatchee Half, it’s small & not disorganized so much so that you don’t know the routes. There’s clear mile markers along the way, come off it JD.

  25. The idea of him just casually passing the lead runner and cyclist without anyone noticing is just too funny. It’s not like he was in a car, if he had legitimately passed him they would have been within sight of each other for tens of minutes.

  26. its sad now that to get into Boston if your on the cut line u really need to run a down hill..id bet theres around 1000 cheaters every year who get into boston….trust me, the type of people who want to run boston sadly have a good percentage who just want the attention and its verrrry sadly pretty easy to cheat into it….where else can u get so much attention and be very easy to cheat ….no where

  27. I completely agree with your conclusion.

    I am in awe by all of his responses.. Just admit that you were trying to get some social media attention by claiming that you BQed. I can’t believe he was even a former candidate for Washington State Legislature. SMH!

  28. One of the more pathetic attempts at a lie, even for this site. He may be a lot of things but he’s an experienced marathoner and half marathoner, and you know the difference between 16 and 26 a 6 minute versus 12 minute mile. If, and this is a big if(but I guess it’s possible), you actually get confused, make a wrong turn, and mistakenly don’t run the 2nd loop, then you don’t cross the finish line, you don’t take a medal, and you don’t claim you ran and won the full marathon.

  30. It’s impressive how little effort he put into his attempt at cheating.
    “I thought it was the full Marathon, I lost count at 1 lap”
    “Oh I just assumed I ran twice as fast as I ever had before, I can’t tell the difference”
    “I guess I just passed the leader and the bike, it happens”
    Perhaps the dumbest cheater that this site has profiled so far.

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