A contrast in sport-shaping: Letsrun and Fast Women
An informational, analysis-heavy website and a sniping newsletter demonstrate running's divergence into those who see it as a legitimate sport and insatiable complainers
If I had written a blog post with this title fifteen years ago, regulars would be anticipating commentary on the relative strengths and weaknesses of Fast-Women.com (now Fast-Women.org) and Letsrun.com. Both were dedicated running sites updated multiple times a day and heavy in breaking news—not the norm in social-media-starved 2006 —but only Letsrun was remotely controversial, and only Fast Women was remotely legible. Today, not only are these enterprises no longer in the same neighborhood or even zip code in terms of their commitment to quality, they are arguably no longer in the same business.
In March 2006, Fast Women, then under the ownership of the New York Road Runners, boasted a clean interface with easy access to event coverage, up-to-date results, athlete interviews, and news about pro women around the world updated daily. It had a slick if basic presentation, and resembled what it was: A pure news site.
Meanwhile, Letsrun still looked like something created by an eighth-grade Web-design student as close to the submission deadline as possible using a GeoCities hack gone severely sideways. Navigating to certain pages was at least as hard as finishing most of the text-adventure games I played in the early 1980s on an IBM PC Jr., and the number of typos led to scores of visitors leaving comments on the calamitous message board intended to send Robert and Weldon Johnson—then the only two regular maintainers of the site, I believe—home devastated, night after night.
But Letsrun was then already very information-rich, and from its inception, serious running fans understood it as a place to find out what you wanted to find out, even if the discovery process sometimes required a high tolerance for forum-dwelling trolls. And the Johnsons’ high-school coach and ongoing adviser, John Kellogg, provided an excellent chapter to Run Strong, automatically upgrading anything he and his friends are associated with.
In 2006, both sites were between five and six years old. The minds behind each treated the sport as exactly that, a sport, with the apparent hope of not merely keeping junkies happy but also drawing more hobbyjoggers and even general sports fans into the agreeably weird realm of running zealotry.
Since then, and especially in recent months, Letsrun, now with a front page that belies its long history of HTML crimes, has sequentially added the kinds of features true fans enjoy—longer-form articles by Jonathan Gault, a podcast, prediction contest to draw visitors in more closely, and unflinching attention to real controversies, such as doping-related hijinks and age cheats. (Actually, those contests may have been around since about day four.) In fact, when I started focusing on members of the running media last year, I didn’t even really think of Letsrun because of the sheer obviousness factor; it’s a running site everyone knows about, with no hidden facets or agendas, and as far as the relevant aspects of competitive running are concerned, all of the standard magazine-like and newspaper-ish entities regularly mentioned here bob and zag in unsteady orbits around Letsrun and its far more forceful information- and influence-fields.
Fast Women, in contrast, has been rebooted and encouraged to mature into feminist gutter-wine. Run by Alison Wade since—I believe—its NYRR beginnings, it is now operationally a site that dispatches a Monday-morning e-mail newsletter and features topical articles on the main page. I admit to always having found Wade’s writing engaging, even when the words and sentiments are unsafe for consumption by about half of the U.S. population and merely unpalatable for a hefty portion of the remainder. Sadly, as of 2021, many of those words meet these criteria.
Rather than psychoanalyze anyone, or link back to whatever else I’ve already expressed here about Wade’s recent work, I’ll give two fresh examples of why the Fast Women newsletter is untrustworthy, one a maybe careless goof-up and the other a reflection of a staunch refusal to propose goals that align with basic reality.
The first is a mistake made by Wade two weeks ago—well, I see it as a mistake, even if Wade perhaps doesn’t—and reflects her willingness to use her platform to send inaccuracies whizzing into cyberspace as long as those inaccuracies suit a greater rallying purpose. The day after Lindsay Crouse’s lie-riddled comeback column appeared in The New York Times, Wade noted the fictional burst of inspiration in her newsletter:
There is undoubtedly a good chance Wade believed the column was accurate despite Crouse’s own history of florid dishonesty. If so, however, there is a far greater chance that if Wade has gotten wise in the interim or catches on in the future, she won’t utter a peep about Crouse having conned her and who knows how many thousands of NYT subscribers and paywall-evaders.
(The fact that the Wokish people who have erected and taken sole control of the pillow-fortress the running media now resembles are so incestuously tight assures that any lie one of them emits is quickly received and propagated by the others, putting demonstrable dents in whatever credibility each of these wackos believes they still possess outside their bubble, as well as feeding my ravenous Substack machine.)
Wade is no dunce, in fact very much the opposite, and knows a number of niches of running better than I do and always has. A guest post on Fast-Women.org from 2019 made it clear that she and Sarah Lorge Butler, Wade’s newsletter editor and someone whom I respect a great deal, are aware that Crouse is immune to the basic rules of journalism even when she’s not unspooling narcissistic yarns.
The other reason to be skeptical of Wade’s stances is more organic and damning, and it’s for the simple reason that she consistently makes bad-faith arguments by knowingly laying out impossible-to-meet terms. She is rather like a disgruntled Burger King regular who demands $100,000 for pain and suffering every time they see a giant unflushed log in one of the restroom toilets, no matter how much they enjoyed the fare and comprehend the non-synchronic nature of the setting.
On March 8, Gault published an article on Letsrun outlining Puma’s new North Carolina-based pro group, to be headed by former 7:38/13:03 performer and two-time Irish Olympian Alistair Cragg. The thrust of the story was Puma’s encouraging emergence from world-class running dormancy, and the challenges it faces on a running landscape revamped by jarring upgrades in racing-footwear technology.
Some brief history:
Around the turn of the century, Puma sponsored some of the biggest names in distance running: Noah Ngeny, Wilson Kipketer, Daniel Komen, Moses Kiptanui, Bernard Lagat, and of course, the LetsRun.com singlet.
Then on to the present:
It felt like every day in January, another athlete announced they had signed with Puma. Gesa Krause. Aisha Praught-Leer. Sandi Morris. Renaud Lavillenie. Molly Seidel.
If you pay attention to these things like a good little soldier-boy, you’ll notice that Puma has undergone a shift from an all-male star line-up to a 2021 version that’s overwhelmingly female out of the gate.
So, great! Not only is another company throwing its money into the pro-running game, the sort of capitalism even dolts can cheer on, the company is demonstrating a tangible commitment to progressive values. Right?
As always, the ideal Wokish means of weeding out injustices is to find them everywhere, ignoring any and all progress along the way, however significant. Recast everything as a power-struggle. Know your opponents’ obvious, valid counterpoints in advance and hand-wave them away. Expand the parameters of the argument so that you can malign more people and entities. When an association of college coaches declares progress, deny it flatly and ominously announce your refusal to click a “like” button. Bring race into it for good measure. Then, with a mighty intellectual flourish, introduce the simple solution no one possibly thought of before.
First, it’s obvious to impartial sentient beings how inane it is to slam a company as gender-regressive over one issue when it demonstrates otherwise in other areas. Wade’s desperation to piss on Puma produces such a haphazard “yahbut”-riddled complaint that it would actually look like undiluted praise with the removal of a few sentences that don’t belong in a rational argument.
Second, Puma’s “failure” to select a woman coach could well have been…a choice made by informed executives after careful deliberation. Do we* know who was contacted or considered for the Puma coaching job? Who are among the “plenty” who “are ready”? I haven’t a clue, but the burden is on Wade here to say who was passed over and why this was a poor move on the company’s part, other than her philosophy that the addition of testicles to the running world is invariably verboten except in the case of intersex and non-physically-transitioned transgender females. (Go ahead and poke a hole in that. I think it’s impenetrable by ordinary rhetorical weapons.)
Third, why is Cragg, a full-fledged H. sapiens sapiens despite bearing the mark of the phallic beast, not a good choice? Shouldn’t this matter in the context of wanting him replaced? If he appeared incompetent in any way, then sure, question the choice. But to pretend every hiring of a male to a vacant position of consequence—even the move represents an outlier in a trend toward actively hiring women—is inherently wrong is a good way to avoid making friends.
But the same metastatic attitude is what fuels openly discriminatory policies like the one Outside and Molly Mirhashem used as reason to tank a story of mine with no explanation: Instead of looking at people as individuals with skills to bring to the table, look at ratios, and grouse when any hiring decision doesn't go in favor of “correcting” any imbalances (since all imbalances automatically imply injustice, those favoring women excepted and even if no unequal access to opportunity can be demonstrated). And when you’re not lying outright hide, hide, hide, all under the aegis of embodying what it means to be “strong women.”
No one I know is fond of absolutists like Wade besides her fellow absolutists. She’s got plenty of company in the running media, but because such people are frail, unreasonable and calamitous characters to begin with, even allies birthed in the same critical litter often wind up clawing and biting at each other before long. They idea that any horde of gaslighting fools, regardless of what collectively animates them, maintains some kind of “honor among harpies” code is farcical; they’re all in this for their own glory.
Lorge Butler, by the way, wrote a piece about the Puma hiring I can agree with. She can highlight that iniquities persist in the sport without accusing anyone of being a bad person or slamming properly credentialed men with the nerve to move up in the world, and her thrust her seems to be “Less cronyism across the board, more transparency in open coaching positions, and women, do your best to make yourselves visible despite the obstacles you’ve run into before.” In other words, by politely inviting Puma and the On Athletics Club to be accountable for their hiring decisions, it provides the abutments and piers for a bridge between parties rather than burning what’s there and announcing that everyone is taking the Wokish ferry from now on. (One thing I’m surprised wasn’t cited as a reason for On hiring Dathan Ritzenhein is Ritz’s established ties to Boulder—a status, it must be said, plenty of capable women also hold.)
It’s TL,TL for TL;DR, but were it not, I’d summarize the foregoing as follows: “Not naming a woman to an open position is clear evidence of sexism being perpetuated, mitigating factors notwithstanding" is both obstinate, which isn’t always bad, and a guaranteed way to alienate the people you most hope to reach, which is.
Wade's absolute insistence on bashing everyone and everything that doesn’t conform her absurd standards in every moment, though both insane and a prescription for personal misery offset to some extent by personal Patreon income, is not unique. It is reminiscent of this bullshit from "no-bullshit" Lindsay Gibbs, glowering thoughtfully for dollars on a blog that is really just one interminable emission of sour vaginal flatulence.
While praising Annika Sorenstam for, you know being an amazing athlete, noting "how fearlessly she competed against the men" (in a full-contact sport like golf, at that) and for helping girls ("her ANNIKA foundation has made a big impact globally for girls and women in golf"), Gibbs still issued a That bitch! verdict, whining that Sorenstam didn't basically tell Trump to take his medal and shove it up his ass on the spot:
Sorenstam could have used this moment to speak out against Trump ... Instead, she chose cowardice and complicity.
Last week, she competed in the Diamond Resorts Tournament of Champions, where she faced the press, but cravenly dismissed any criticism about receiving the medal from Trump ... Unfortunately for Sorenstam, there is no way to truly move forward without actually addressing racism, xenophobia, and bigotry of all kinds.
Sound familiar? It should—Wade loves her some Lindsay Gibbs.
Wade conspicuously refuses to own some of her opinions. When she knows she’s including a link to pure garbage, but can’t resist the urge to send it to thousands of readers anyway, she’ll usually stick it near the bottom and add as little flavor as possible (e.g., “Ben Chan was great on this podcast.” Like I pointed out, she’s sharp, and she knows that her activist capering, especially in the area of nontraditional girls and women athletes, is apt to earn her scowls from the elites she interacts with if she’s too open about it.
Does anyone even pretend that not-happy-unless-unhappy types like Wade and Gibbs want any outcome that includes comity or compromise? Do they appear to be seeking anything besides a twisting of the world’s collective dangling dick? The name of Gibbs' podcast is "Burn it Down,” which is a clue. She's an undisguised man-hater, which is her right and about the only part of her writing that’s not bullshit. But attitudes like hers need not determine public policy any more than regressive attitudes toward women and minorities did for decades before a spate of laws, which I agree have not fixed everything, began to be passed—and not as a result of anything like the “We’ll ruin your life from the safety of our iPhones” tactics of the present. (The full-throated “History? What’s to learn from that?” arrogance of Wokish agitators must be unprecedented.)
What these loudmouths want is a war, with every given Wokish leader expecting someone else to actually do something besides point fingers. They want some undefined “victory” over the ceaseless grind of oppression that has curiously spared most of their predominantly white, prosperous selves. That being the case, I’m tempted to trash them at every opportunity; just dump on them based solely on intelligence I can glean from gender, age and ethnicity, like they routinely do to people, and expand on how their main motivation is (transparently in most cases) insecurity related to physical traits and a desire for greater status, not anxieties about broader social problems.
But the funny part—and there is always a funny part, usually gallows humor—is that the women most urgently pushing the “Give women power over everything and watch the magic happen” line—Crouse, Wade, Mirhashem, Erin Strout, Emilia Benton, and others you’ll “meet” this week—are all either proven sources of falsehoods, ranging from ignorance to damning omissions to purposeful, malicious lies, or eager amplifiers of those falsehoods. (I’ll leave all things Oiselle aside for now, but trust me when I assert that the company’s public profile is becoming enthusiastically worse.)
Women like these now control the cultural narrative in the running media; allow your mind to wander how grisly the result would be if they actually tried to design, implement or manage anything. Given a choice in this macabre scenario, anyone concerned about the future of women’s and girls’ sports would find a way to intervene. And caring about women’s sports means caring about the future of sports, period; do even the scrotum-scratching cads among you think being a sports fan would be the same if women’s sports disappeared, either literally or from television and Sports Illustrated headlines?
Meanwhile, rest assured that in the main, pro women and their distaff associates, who tend to be leakers, find this entire crew to be a joke and disregard without notice most of what its members crank out. And concerning the gripe about it’s worth mentioning that the number of women directors of cross-country and track and field programs in the NCAA is a lot higher than Wade seems to believe, as I learned recently in compiling a list of the approximately one thousand head D-I, D-II and D-III coaches.
Sure, the Wokish believe in their mission. That’s not in dispute. But they don’t believe that the mission or its methods are either honest or aimed at comity, with an “i-t-y.” These are educated adult women who understand the difference between fact and fantasy, and that—to grab one example from an overflowing mental container the size of a Boeing assembly plant—“naturally elevated testosterone” isn’t a thing.
The agenda pushed by Fast Women is obvious, and it has nothing to do with making the sport of running, as a viable theater of fair competition, more accessible to women, women of color, transgender women, or anyone else. It is about changing the sport of running into something that is no longer meaningfully a sport at all, but a self-contradictory quota system. And rather than attracting newcomers to this novel quasi-fitness enterprise, the result, if successful, would be repellent to most Americans on its face.
And also note that, an “always hire a woman” stance defines a quest with no endpoint. It’s not as if Wade or any other Wokish tribal leaders are going to suddenly decide that maximal equality and inclusion have been attained in any realm. They will continue to haunt and hector as many persons and institutions as they can, like other committed religious zealots. And all along, they’ll lie to your face while telling you your own moral compass is broken.
(By the way, I have a theory that every serious training group, even those consisting entirely of male athletes, should have at least one experienced woman coach on hand. But here I am bleeding again into a future post, so I had better wra