Being healthy has become a fast growing fad, which will hopefully turn into the every day norm for the majority of the population. One growing aspect can be seen in the number of individuals who sign up for race competitions such as triathlons and marathons.
Great news yes, but if you are already putting in the time and effort to get fit and compete, why lie about your results?
According to The New York Times Health, more and more people are fibbing about their race results. Sometimes the little white lies such as, “I run an eight minute mile” are unconscious ones and the person, who might not be a die hard runner believes this to be true.
Michael Sachs, an exercise psychologist stated that most people (especially die hard runners) don’t lie about their performance. One reason for this is that lying about competition times can easily be discovered as results are usually posted somewhere for all to see.
However, there are always exceptions as Dr. Michael Joyner, a Mayo Clinic researcher, who competes in triathlons, points out, “Everybody like me who has been doing sports at a high level since they were teenagers can give you four or five or six examples [of extravagant liars].”
This might be surpring for some but not so surprising for others. It seems that if you count “white lies” into the batch of lies a typical person tells in a day the total would be fairly high.
However, given the following description of a lie, a study published in 2010 in Human Communication Research (Kim B. Serota, Timothy R. Levine, Franklin J. Boster) that surveyed a 1,000 Americans, found that typically men & women lie only about 2 times a day.
“We are interested in truth and lies in people’s everyday communication. Most people think a lie occurs any time you intentionally try to mislead someone. Some lies are big while others are small; some are completely false statements and others are truths with a few essential details made up or left out. Some lies are obvious, and some are very subtle. Some lies are told for a good reason. Some lies are selfish; other lies protect others. We are interested in all these different types of lies. To help us understand lying, we are asking many people to tell us how often they lie.”
On the same topic of athletic fibbers, Slate.com reported in a recent podcast. To listen to the entire postcast click here.
Absolutely not, I agree! I think the bottom line should be that you are improving yourself, and lying to make yourself looks better brings your insecurities into question. Great article!
Tom – We appreciate your feed back !! Thanks for sharing