Bre Tiesi-Manziel after a half-marathon.

The Johnny Manziel content this week has already been quite strange, from him being not only released by the Montreal Alouettes but barred from the CFL for unspecified reasons to him calling out a fake ESPN reporter who claimed to talk to him about that release. And now, Manziel’s wife Bre Tiesi-Manziel is in the news over accusations of cheating in a half marathon. Here’s more on that from Andrew Joseph of For The Win:

Manziel’s wife, Bre Tiesi-Manziel, is a fitness and Instagram model. She recently participated in the Run Like A Diva half marathon in Temecula, Calif. And finished the race with a time of 1:58:22 with zero training, according to her. Via the Houston Chronicle, the average time for a woman running a half marathon is around 2:19 and a pace of just over 10 minutes per mile.

Tiesi-Manziel’s average of 9:09 per mile would be impressive but not unheard of — the problem for her came after a look at her mile-by-mile splits.

Tiesi-Manziel hit the six-mile mark at a time of 1:31:29 (a 14-minute mile pace). Her 11-mile update was missing, but she managed to reach the finish line at 1:58:22 along with her running partner. For this to be possible, Tiesi-Manziel would have needed to run the final 6.7 miles at a pace of four minutes per mile.

As Joseph notes, the women’s world record for one mile is 4:12.56, set by Svetlana Masterkova in 1996. And the women’s world-record pace for the 10K (6.21 miles) is 4:42.6 per mile. So there’s absolutely no way that Tiesi-Manziel broke that for six consecutive miles after being much slower in the early part of the race. But she still tried to defend her time in a since-deleted series of Instagram posts, as noted by Deadspin’s Patrick Redford:

Tiesi-Manziel addressed LetsRun’s report on Twitter and Instagram with a lengthy post. She castigated her “sad and pathetic” accusers for questioning her time, and clarified that though she didn’t train specifically for the half marathon, “I am a full time athlete I train all year every year … anyone who knows me knows I hate cardio.”

Over and over again, she brings up the fact that her run supported a charity and that she was more concerned with cheering people on than “trying to get some amazing time.” The only time she addresses the specific inconsistencies with her splits, she claims that nobody was “[ever] waiting at each station to check u in for each marker so this ‘unaccounted’ time is a joke 😂.”

It’s possible that this wasn’t an intentional mistake from Tiesi-Manziel. Redford’s post mentions an apparent late course change, and suggests that Tiesi-Manziel and running partner Khloe Terae may have missed that they were supposed to run a second loop on part of the route. And even if this was intentional cheating, it’s far from the first time that’s happened. But this is still quite something to see Manziel’s wife in the news for alleged cheating at a half-marathon during the week he’s mysteriously released and banned from the CFL.

[For The Win]; photo from Tiesi-Manziel’s Instagram]

About Andrew Bucholtz

Andrew Bucholtz has been covering sports media for Awful Announcing since 2012. He is also a staff writer for The Comeback. His previous work includes time at Yahoo! Sports Canada and Black Press.