Another attack on a college distance program misses the fundamental point

Maybe the University of Colorado staff poses a special problem, but trying to pin eating disorders on particular coaching practices won't make them go away

Cindy Kuzma wrote a story for the demoralized and clickbait-driven media outlet Runner’s World about an investigation into the weight-management practices of the University of Colorado distance programs. Though important, it’s another volley from someone who believes that certain coaches can create eating disorders in otherwise healthy specimens through certain approaches and that it’s completely inappropriate to make weight an issue at all in competitive running.

C.U. has carried a reputation for being inimical to runners prone to eating disorders ever since Mark Wetmore took charge of the program decades ago. I can’t fully tease out how well-earned this reputation is, because I’ve been in Boulder for long enough to have my perspective skewed by incidental and purposeful contact with locals, and also because there is no way to formally assess such a thing. But I can point to multiple athletes who went on to successful professional careers after washing out of—or inelegantly surviving—the C.U. program, among them Tera Moody, Allie McLaughlin, and Laura Thweatt, and there seem to be certain realities about the Colorado program that set it apart from other high-risk environments.

One is Wetmore’s steadfast refusal to recruit foreigners; to my knowledge, the Buffs have never had a non-American on its varsity men’s or women’s rosters. That, if true, is an objective fact. Another is an almost palpable ethos of not so much as “Do what it takes to be as lean as possible” as “You’re around people who will do what it takes to be as lean as possible; remember that.” This is an important difference, and while it’s a second-hand sense only—and perhaps a partial effect of the host city’s pro-ana vibe— it’s what I’ve picked up on after interacting with dozens of Colorado runners in the past two decades.

Those who have thrived as runners at C.U. seem to carry an understanding that the environment isn’t for everyone—which, as with any sports milieu, doesn’t necessarily make it pathological. I’m not sure how obvious this would be to the rest of the world without the existence of Running with the Buffaloes, but it would be clear to me anyway.

The runner who came forward and had to rattle the university administration to bring things to this point was a walk-on with no exposure to other environments and thus no sense of what things would have been like elsewhere. But if she was willing to deal with the very worst kind of uncooperative bureaucrats to the extent she apparently had to so that the world could get its first somewhat unvarnished look under the C.U. hood, then good for her. Good for her.

The persistent wish-making that goes on with these expose’-style stories, however, exemplified by this passage, is problematic.

Consider this instead:

The idea that stronger is more effective has permeated football for decades. But in recent years, researchers have increasingly documented the risks of anabolic steroid abuse and the number of catastrophic injuries resulting from high-speed contact between drug-bloated players. As a result of these findings and player complaints, many teams have faced criticism for an undue emphasis on weight training, strength conditioning, and regulating bench-press and squatting capabilities.

You can see that even if every part of this bears truth, the middle is a non sequitur. The idea that larger and stronger (within reason) is better for a lineman is true. The idea that lighter is faster for a distance runner (within reason) is true. If weight and running performance were significantly uncoupled, then competitive running wouldn’t include a higher-than-normal number of people who go to sometimes harmful lengths to control their weight.

Ditto wrestlers, jockeys, and ballet dancers. Eating disorders suck, but they don’t arise in a vacuum or (rare cases excepted) from motivations anyone would describe as irrational.

Kuzma focuses heavily on the use of skinfold calipers to monitor athletes’ body composition, i.e., how fat they are. The increasing use of this ancient technology by collegiate coaches has resulted in ironic but predictable consequences: In an effort to both diminish the importance of the scale and lend credence to physiometric monitoring in by collecting hard data rather than occasionally telling an athlete to go easier on the crullers or lose the love handles, these programs have merely shifted the misery. It’s a shell game, but one borne, I believe, of good intentions.

I say this is a predictable consequence, because every college program will always include over one thousand pounds of raw human substrate from which various eating pathologies are certain to spring. A caring coaching staff that prioritizes ideal physical and mental health in 17-to-22-year-olds over an ideal competitive record—and sometimes, both can’t be assured at the same time—can lessen the collective blow. But at the same time, if Mark Wetmore and Heather Burroughs were total monsters, it’s likely—though by no means assured—that neither would have lasted this long. The Buffs have been outstanding at cross-country, but no university truly values its cross-country and track programs enough to protect staff from uniquely serious and repetitive allegations for over twenty years.

I’m surprised I don’t think more of my own collegiate experiences when these stories arise, because my coach was far more incompetent and inhumane in every respect than anyone named in this story and in similar stories about the University of Oregon’s program. He didn’t turn me into a bulimic or a drunk, but when I went to talk to him about finding these developments bothersome, he basically laughed at me, shaking his head over yet another crybaby about to quit the University of Vermont team.

Ed Kusiak was a master at turning the few sub-16:00 5K kids he got into 27:00 8K runners and turning those kids into ex-runners within two years. The one time we got an assistant who knew what he was doing, “Kus” saw to it that the guy was out on his ass. And that dumb, lumbering motherfucker—a former javelin thrower with two artificial shoulders who never even gave his athletes off-season or in-season training plans—is now in the UVM Athletic Hall of Fame, all for treating his job as sinecure for 30 or more years. But I suppose I owe my middling later accomplishments to having not gotten anything close to what I wanted out of my college years. Holy fuck was my coach an idiot.

Lize Brittin, who experienced both the good (at Brigham Young University) and the so-so (at pre-Wetmore Colorado) of collegiate running from the perspective of someone fighting an eating disorder since she was a young teenager, has a great post about this. She highlights the problems caused by allegations based not only on hearsay but resulting from differing notions of what student-athletes consider overbearing methods.

I’m trying not to go extra-hard on Runner’s World thanks to further consideration of its decision, which I only recently noticed, to replace an article I wrote in 2020 critical of nasal-only breathing at the same URL with one praising the practice.

I was never informed of this change or the reason for it, and if I still had a website linking to my published work, that site would now include a link to a ridiculous article by someone named Jennifer Acker.

I was already paid for the piece I wrote and will not suffer one bit for its removal from active circulation. In fact, if I could have picked one article to be deleted from this set on the simple basis of “Why did I even bother?” then it would have been that one. But consider the chain of events and the essentials: RW gave me the green light to write an article properly questioning a silly but extant practice, paid me for it, then quietly replaced it with an article promoting laughable nonsense.

At least I don’t have to worry about being accused of a lack of professionalism here no matter what I write; in publishing, that entire concept is purely historical.