There are some things in life that I know I will never do.

Run a marathon, for example.

I have great respect for people who voluntarily run 26.2 miles. I also have great respect for people who voluntarily do other things I find incomprehensible, like camping, hiking uphill for recreation, or getting on a bicycle in New York City and trusting that everyone else has developed the same survival instincts you have.

I have a particular problem with bicycles in cities.

They are fast.

They appear silently.

They weave.

And occasionally they seem to believe that pedestrians are merely decorative obstacles placed on the sidewalk for their amusement.

So imagine my delight when I read about the Chinese fitness influencer who was disqualified from the Berlin Marathon after apparently hitching a ride on a bicycle during the final kilometers.

Yuanyuan Sun, 30, who has more than half a million social media followers, publicly apologized after photographs emerged showing her sitting on the back of a bike during the race.

I am sorry, but I cannot help but laugh.

Not because I think cheating is admirable.

But because if I were ever foolish enough to enter a marathon, somewhere around mile 18 I can absolutely imagine looking at a passing bicycle and thinking:

Well. This seems like a perfectly reasonable transportation alternative.

Actually, I probably would have negotiated a ride much earlier.

Mile 3: I have made a terrible mistake.

Mile 7: Perhaps there is a train.

Mile 12: Does anyone know if Uber picks up runners?

Mile 18: BIKE!

The difference, of course, is that I have no fitness influencer career to protect.

And therein lies the problem.

Because this isn’t really about running.

It’s about influencing.

We live in an age in which people are paid to convince us that their lives are effortless, their bodies are naturally perfect, their marriages are idyllic, their children are adorable, their vacations are spontaneous, their homes are always clean, and their morning routines apparently involve waking at 4:37 a.m. to drink something green while meditating beside a window overlooking the Alps.

We know it’s curated.

They know it’s curated.

We all know it’s curated.

And yet there is an unwritten agreement that we will pretend it isn’t.

Which brings me back to something I wrote years ago. It’s okay to be a fake as long as you’re authentic about being fake.

I actually think there is something psychologically interesting about that.

We are all performing to some degree. We have a work self, a family self, a social self, an exhausted-in-the-nightshirt-eating-cookies self. We edit. We filter. We select which version of ourselves gets presented to which audience.

That’s not necessarily deception.

Sometimes it’s just civilization.

The problem begins when the performance becomes so important that we can no longer admit it is a performance.

And that, I suspect, is where our marathon cyclist ran into trouble.

Not literally.

Well, literally too.

But psychologically.

Because there is something almost charming about admitting:

I was exhausted. I made a bad decision. I got on a bicycle.

What becomes considerably less charming is having built an identity around being the person who does the thing you ultimately didn’t do.

And this is where I think we could all take a lesson from Kim Kardashian.

Yes.

I just wrote that.

Stay with me.

Kim Kardashian has never exactly presented herself as some untouched, unmanufactured creature who simply woke up looking like Kim Kardashian and accidentally wandered into a billion-dollar empire.

The artifice is part of the product.

The hair. The makeup. The clothes. The lighting. The posing. The editing. The branding. The carefully constructed reality of reality television.

She doesn’t necessarily ask us to believe there is no machinery behind the curtain.

She lets us see the curtain.

And, frankly, that is much more sophisticated.

There is a certain authenticity in saying, essentially:

Yes, this is manufactured. But I’m very good at manufacturing it.

That’s different from selling authenticity as the product while secretly taking a bicycle for the last few kilometers.

And maybe that’s the real lesson here.

We don’t actually require our influencers to be perfect.

We don’t even require them to be particularly authentic.

We just require the illusion to be internally consistent.

If your brand is I am an unstoppable human machine who runs marathons while simultaneously looking fabulous, perhaps don’t get photographed being chauffeured through the final stretch on a bicycle.

If your brand is I am a deeply relatable woman who occasionally makes questionable decisions while exhausted, well…

Congratulations.

You have content.

In fact, you might have better content.

Because failure, embarrassment, cheating, exhaustion, vanity, bad judgment and the occasional spectacularly stupid decision are all profoundly human.

Pretending they never happen is what makes people suspicious.

And perhaps that’s why I find this whole story so amusing.

Because somewhere in Berlin, a 30-year-old woman presumably reached the point where her body said, Absolutely not.

Her brain said, We’re a fitness influencer.

Her body said, We’re done.

And then a bicycle appeared.

Honestly?

I understand.

I just wish she’d understood the most important rule of social media.

If you’re going to be fake, be authentic about the fake.

And if you absolutely must hitch a ride on a bicycle during a marathon, for God’s sake, don’t let somebody photograph you doing it.

Although, given the way the internet works, perhaps the bicycle ride will ultimately be the most authentic thing she ever posted.

After all, nothing says influencer quite like discovering that your biggest lesson in fitness is actually a lesson in image management.

And nothing says human quite like realizing that after running 20-something miles, you would really, really like someone to give you a lift.

Preferably somewhere with cookies.

And absolutely no bicycles.