Paul Ryan and the mystery of the easily disprovable lie

Suffice it to say if you're a candidate for Vice President of the United States, you don't want this associated with your political brand. 

I won't debate whether Paul Ryan knew the difference between a 2:5X marathon and a 4:01 marathon. He did.

I won't debate whether Paul Ryan misled the reporter into believing he had run a pretty darned fast marathon when he was really a mid-packer. He did that, too.

I won't debate whether Republicans lie more or less often than Democrats. I don't care. I don't get all excited watching either party's convention. I don't have cable, and I don't consider myself a Democrat or a Republican.

The only thing that's interesting is why someone under such intense scrutiny would mislead a reporter so easily disprovable. 

Paul Ryan had so little to gain from lying and so much to lose. Democrats criticize Paul Ryan for being disingenuous, stupid, his ill-fitting suits, and the douchey hair. If there is one area of his life, however, where Ryan has been immune from criticism, it's his fitness level.  The guy's in good shape. No one's disputing that.

Yet he got caught in a galactically stupid lie about his fitness.   

It makes no sense, from a rational political perspective. But humans are rarely rational. And how we self-identify even less so. My only guess -- and this is pure speculation -- is that Paul Ryan made up this story a long time ago, as a way to reinforce his reputation as an impressive physical specimen (which he is). Mr. Ryan told it many times to many people, and he had actually come to believe it was true as part of the narrative of who he was. The race was a long time ago, but this narrative had been a part of his life for a while.

The first time you lie about something, it's a conscious act. If this were the first time he had made up this whopper, he would have caught himself, because he's a VP candidate now. But after a while, when you tell a story, you're just representing a narrative version of yourself that you've come to recite many times before. Neither the true nor the gently (or greatly) exaggerated versions of that narrative form part of the conscious mind. And that's why he got into trouble. He just told a story he had told many times before.  

Only problem: he had forgotten it wasn't true.