Amby Burfoot is correct: The U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials are both an alluring sporting spectacle and an increasingly obvious waste of America's (admittedly trivial) distance talent

That the most ignorant, offensive, and comically inept pundits in distance-running history descend on this event with unusual fervor is at least an indirect strike against its continued existence

Late last week, Outside, having already maximized the quality of its three existing running-centric or running-oriented brands (Outside Online, Women’s Running, and Trail Runner), announced by e-mail that it was adding a new brand, or maybe just rebranding Outside Run—perhaps always a part of Outside Online, perhaps not—into Outside’s RUN.

The announcement itself can be taken as indicative of exactly what to expect. “Storytelling”—that is, inventing, altering, or denying the facts of a situation to suit the psycho-emotional needs of the author and “their” equally fraught readers—will continue to replace reporting in this industry; representatives of the company will continue to boast of being nonpareil information-merchants even while tripping over themselves in the slobbering, dignified manner of Adderall-charged middle-schoolers. They will mute out both the electronic snorts of derision and the on-point exhortations from folx like me for these trout-faced imbecilic reprobates to formally quit their long-neglected jobs and seek employment appropriate to their educational level, like collecting shopping carts in the parking lots of Safeway supermarkets.

“RUN is for everyone who decides putting one foot in front of the other is a good way to spend time,” some unknown guru wrote, along with “Don't worry our Women's Running community isn't going away.” And “birth” proved to be a thematically appropriate goof given running’s distaff pundits’ collective descent into obsessing about motherhood, colorhood, and other “other”-hoods at the 2024 Olympic Marathon Team Trials yesterday.

On Friday, Marathon Handbook published an editorial by one of its contributors, Amby Burfoot, the winner of the 1968 Boston Marathon and a former longtime editor-in-chief of Runner’s World. In “It’s Time To Overhaul The U.S. Olympic Trials Format. Here’s How,” Burfoot argues that, while he harbors a deep and unyielding affinity for the Olympic Trials marathons—only since 1984, after a lot of inarguably incredible things had happened in the sport, has there been a women’s version—he recognizes that this attitude is pathological from the standpoint of an advocate for elite American running, even if it makes perfect sense to get excited from the perspective of a suspense-loving fan.

“The Trials are stupid and misguided,” Burfoot opines. And to those who believe otherwise, he advises, “Ask yourself this question: What is the purpose of holding a U.S. Marathon Trials?”

The fact that the single correct answer to this question is obvious hasn’t prevented a legion of contemporary running pundits from generating and defending a slew of incorrect ones. Wokish people—a term I use interchangeably with “shitlib” or, when not caring whether I offend anyone, “libtard”—despise the idea that any environment requiring genuine excellence at a given endeavor should be sensibly limited to people who actually display genuine excellence at that endeavor.

These “running fans” are in fact primarily insecure narcissists who feed off the achievements of motivated and meritorious individuals and therefore seek to derogate the value of any club they can’t whine, bully, or buy their way into. Their exultant gratification over, among other niceties, women’s athletics being peppered with males and prevaricating gluttons of color being flown from major marathon to major marathon like overfed petting-zoo exhibits speaks to their disposability concerning useful sporting-related or other reform-oriented ideas.

I share Burfoot’s attitude about the Trials being very exciting, although for me it’s never really been about seeing who makes the Olympic team. My anticipation surrounding this race—and I didn’t realize this until recently—stems primarily from the fact that the Olympic Marathon Trials represent the only time all of the best American marathoners race each other. Sure, every year, USA Track and Field designates an existing U.S. marathon that year’s national championship, but this doesn’t change anything for the best of the best, who each year distribute themselves across different and competing world-class fields in the spring and the fall.

But while I might find this scenario compelling, it doesn’t really square with producing the best possible three-man and three-woman Summer Olympic Games marathon squads every four years. While five or six months gives Trials competitors ample time to recover for the Olympic marathons themselves, it also forces them to schedule their training and racing around the Olympics starting with whatever fall marathon they run the year before. The Boston Marathon in mid- to late April is a de facto no-go for truly elite Americans in Olympic years because of this conflict, not that anyone should shed a tear for the current, dilapidated version of Boston Athletic Association whenever its only source of meaningful boasting receives a kick to its ever-slackening, uncomprehending moon-face.

Burfoot writes:

[I]n a digital age, it’s easy to design a closed, online system where a modest number of independent selectors could choose our Olympians based on “proven excellence” (over, say, the last 18 months).

Shoe company execs, agents, coaches, and other suspect parties wouldn’t get a vote. USATF would control the process. It would do well to include a number of recent Olympians from the given event.

You think this an outrageous proposal? Then tell me why basically every other country in the world does something similar. 

Ignoring redundancies in this above, such the fact that the management of Nike and the management of USATF have proven at times to be essentially overlapping circles. this pitch makes sense.

Burfoot wasn’t perfect with his predictions—Conner Mantz, Clayton Young, Galen Rupp, Emily Sisson, Keira D’Amato, and Betsy Saina—but he was spot on in predicting how his own predictions would go (oomphasis mine): “There’s a good chance several of the above will actually make the team on February 3. There’s also a chance that several won’t.” As it happens, several (three) of these runners did indeed qualify for the Games, while the other several did not.

Given the near-100-percent probability that I would dislike whomever NBC chose to serve as announcers for the races—or at least dislike the lowest-common-denominator, Wokeblown garbage these mystery people would assuredly be blabbering about—I opted to follow the live online results scoreboard instead (men’s results; women’s results). This caused what amounted to drama for a few moments, because the site initially listed Fiona O’Keeffe as having reached 26 miles in 2:22:10, with her 40-second lead over Sisson at 25 miles having become a 34-second deficit after alleged 6:30 mile. That is, in the lower portion of the graphic below, what proved to be O’Keeffe’s final and winning time was at first listed as her 26-mile split.

As O’Keeffe had covered her 25th mile in 5:09, I could safely rule out exhaustion as a cause—ff the time were even accurate. Assuming it was, this strongly suggested that O’Keeffe must have suffered a pulled hamstring or other traumatic injury but been able to at least keep going toward the finish. This mystery was cleared up minutes later after O’Keeffe and others started trickling across the finish line, but her 26-mile split remained incorrect for at least a couple of hours.

I haven’t scanned the Internet for reactions to O’Keeffe’s win but no one should be surprised that a debutante with a 1:07:42 half-marathon to her credit managed a 2:22:10 marathon even on a warmish morning. D’Amato had recently set a personal half-marathon best of 1:07:55 shortly before running a 2:19:12 marathon in January 2022, then the American record (now 2:18:29 and the property of Sisson). Granted, D’Amato had to be holding back, and last July she dropped her half-marathon best to 1:06:39. But if you ask around the sub-elite male scene, you can surely find a few dudes who have threatened or broken 2:22:00 for the marathon within a couple of years of a 1:07:42 or slower half-marathon, especially when the first result came at age 23.

In my article the other day about ersatz journalist and English-abusing racist stank-machine Emilia Benton’s latest “women of color”-themed yackfest, I set a trap for readers by asserting a blatant falsehood or at least strongly suspect claim, that no one bothered to respond to despite a few readers having to have picked up on the “mistake.” I was actually hoping to get a hater to point out that, in most non-enfeebled and erudite minds, Paula Radcliffe, not Sisson, is history’s fastest-ever colorless female marathon runner.

I was planning to use this input in two ways. First, I was going to point out that no one I know born east of the Mississippi River and raised in anything resembling a city thinks of U.S.-born women from eastern Asian countries like China, Japan, and South Korea as nonwhite, or would place them in the same “of color” category as other colored people. Next, I was going to point out that Benton’s article is blatantly antisemitic in failing to include Jewish people as beleaguered and underrepresented minorities. They’re nowhere to be found in Hollywood, and you can’t find a Jewish delicatessen anywhere thanks to the ravages of anti-Jewish hate, but I know for certain that they are a few of them lurking on the fringes of elite running and that a handful were in the fields in Orlando yesterday.

I say on behalf of members of the tribe that this was a terrible and undoubtedly a purposeful oversight by Benton and the Nazis rumored to be funding and controlling Outside, but in any case I’m sure someone with a legacy degree will start whining about it shortly.

But because this anticipated fraught input never arrived, I can work only with what I was given. This includes some comments I missed when indicating that Benton’s interviewees of color were giving very weakly coded hints that they are tired of being regarded as runners of color first and accomplished, socially competent athletes second.

Saina’s response to Benton suggesting that Saina deserves extra praise for being a statistical anomaly of sorts:

I don’t pay too much attention to what people say. I’m just more excited to see many of the U.S. women [who are also] my friends, like Emily Sisson, Sara Hall, and Keira D’Amato, and to be racing so many amazing U.S. athletes for the first time.

In other words: I know this is your only shtick and that you like to get paid, and it’s nice to have admirers, but can we change the subject already?

Shortly before the races, another journalist impersonator and delusional shitlibtard, Erin Strout, decided to make her Twitter/X account public. This happened soon after I remarked on Beck of the Pack that, like any brave and determined journalist, she had hidden her profile anew. She most likely un-hid her blurts so that she could brag about being on what was evidently dubbed the official press vehicle yesterday.

It’s unclear how Benton—second from left in the bottom row above, looking exactly like someone who would take extraordinary pride in what the rest of the world readily identifies as humiliatingly bad work—and Strout were chosen to ride along in this open-air short-bus, but the fact that they were is further evidence that American running is an unsalvageable joke run by proudly deranged and slop-loving people.

In addition to simply not being strong enough thinkers to adequately cover marathon running—and I realize this takes almost no brainpower at all—they are bigoted, cowardly wharf-rats who refuse to answer for any of their lies, mistakes or defend from any critics a single word they have generated. That these two and figures like them are allowed to even circulate within the sport, never mind attain thousands of followers, is one more reason to stop pretending distance running and its overload of truculent, brain-dead, yet paid observers is worth following other than for the purpose of tossing bricks through the jizz-coated windows of its metaphorical cathedral.

Also chiming in from the Harridan Highway with reliably superfluous output was Alison Wade of Fast Women. Wade is a perfect example of someone who would have slightly less substrate for her supernaturally moronic bitching were the Olympic Marathon Team Trials scrapped outright. Wade is among the many irrevocably noisy and confused women who insist on making the long-disproven claim that being a mother and a fast distance runner is a statistically unusual feat, only to turn around and complain when other observers fail to note how common this alleged rarity actually is.

Also, hte fact that Wade believes that someone running a marathon seven months pregnant is a good idea is another testament to the fact that she’s a mentally disturbed freak first and a running fan a very distant second. And this really is a dumb idea, especially given that Maegan Krifchin had already been to the Olympic Marathon Trials. She wound up dropping out sometime after 18 miles, but what a self-centered dingbat.

If you think that “mentally ill” is going too far in describing the mindset of the middle-aged shitlib, then consider that the freelance serial male-basher who wrote the piece celebrating Krifchin’s reckless idea, Cindy Kuzma, has complained that body-fat monitoring is abusive toward women, that nonwoman Caster Semenya’s path though women’s athletics has been unfairly rocky, and that it’s better to be lonely than not.

If D’Amato would actually train like a marathon runner, she might not fold like a napkin like she did yesterday. She’s as obvious an un-punished PED-user as you’ll find, so she’s gotten away with some unusual shit, but how can anyone paid to run and nearing the end of her career be this outright lazy?

D’Amato’s most prodigious training week in her recent preparation was just over 100 miles, and it doesn’t look like she even managed to average 10 miles a day between early September and the Olympic Marathon Trials five months later.

In agreeing with Burfoot, I am trying, probably not very hard, to not embrace my own biases. For example, it’s easy to be blase’ about the Olympic Marathon Trials because Americans suck so running at badly anyway (nine men, however, did run faster than the women’s world record of 2:11:53 yesterday). And it’s easy to be dismissive of the Olympic Games themselves, between the corruption and hypocrisies of the International Olympic Committee and the fact that the world is getting far too messed up, too fast, for me to be worrying much about other people’s jogging, even when their paces are impressively fast.

RUN sent out a quick summary of the action yesterday.

Apparently, not only were a new era born, but there were two race winners despite there only being one marathon race held.

The top two seeds for the men went 1-2. That traditionally doesn't qualify as a shocking result. I guess you could say it cements the fact that a "new era" is here, but since the Trials occur only every four years, this is a case anyone can plausibly make after any of these Trials races, especially in an era when very few running fans can read or perform computations above an eighth-grade level.

And Desi Davila conspicuously overperformed. She was ranked 19th and finished 11th. Not to usher in an old era of journalism or anything, but marathons are sufficiently long so that you can do pretty well while being "minutes behind" the winner. A woman who chases the WR and finishes in 2:13:53 or slower misses the record by "minutes." Ditto a 2:02:35 male, who. according to math, seems faster than the best-ever Americans. Et cetera. You'd think someone would have noticed this given the worship of older American female marathon superstars, but instead, someone at RUN derogated her. Harrumph.

The main message after this weekend is that if a visitor to your home identifies himself or herself as being a paid staff member of any ad-sponsored running publication, you should immediately hide your valuables and strap duct tape across the anuses of any furry household pets you have, and maintain this defensive posture until either you and your loved ones or the visitor is evacuated to a safe distance (or your cat really has to take a dump) I’ll be writing more soon about cheating-happy Runner’s World U.K.-version editor Kate Martin, and I’ll be reviewing more of Strout’s recent activity. But between this sad clown, the relentless laziness and ineptitude of the Outside editorial gang, and useless cowards, dolts, and morally bereft losers like Jennifer Acker and Jeff Dengate employed as editors by the U.S. version of Runner’s World, it’s become not merely clear but undeniable that anyone now hijacking any of these jobs is not merely inept but despicable on sight. You’d be better off leaving your toddler naked in a room full of Catholic priests than having any dealings with these horrifically ill-bred white homegirls.

While it’s easy to treat Wade, Strout, and Benton as the pure dingbats they are, these are the kinds of people treated as serious-enough members of the running media to be invited to, say, Zoom meetings hosted by Nike representatives for the purpose of lying about cut-and-dried examples of illicit doping by the company’s own athletes. And these fools will continue to receive work, because they consistently meet corporate expectations by consistently being pro-doping, pro-lard, pro-racism, pro-sexism, and pro-anything that reeks of self-hatred-powered cultural pathologies.

Ergo, while running was once a sport worth fondly remembering, what it is today is something different and well worth either avoiding altogether or mocking in delicious detail, with all other followership options reserved for suckers, grifters, and floor-humping fanboys and fangirls.