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. The actual record showed that Ryan had run one marathon, the 1990 Grandma's Marathon in Duluth, Minnesota, 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. Fewer than two percent of marathon finishers break three hours. 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. 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. Ryan presumably knew his actual time. The inflation of a pedestrian performance into an impressive one for no strategic reason beyond wanting to seem more athletic struck many commentators as more psychologically interesting than any policy position.

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