"As an individual, I am not awesome at sustainability," admits "Becoming a Sustainable Runner" author Zoe Rom (in an interview commissioned by Zoe Rom)
Tell a narcissist "No one cares about your mediocre, lying ass," and the response is hapless, artless, jittery and insincere ass-waggling
I often pick on Trail Runner editor-in-chief Zoe Rom because her antics often explicitly invite derision—and not merely the usual sharp but good-natured critical elbows to the solar-plexus, but a series of horrifyingly violent noogies and wedgies designed to cause long-term rhetorical incapacitation and perhaps even permanent expository paralysis.
Because so many insincere women joggers have had books published recently, thus allowing them to Bravely Tell Their Truths, I didn’t register until today that Rom is a member of this shaved and glistening crew. She has authored, or co-authored, not the usual heartwarming anti-white or anti-male pidgin-English diatribe, but a tome titled Becoming a Sustainable Runner.
Rom decided to have someone interview her about this book for Trail Runner, which, yes, is the same publication Rom in theory edits.
This unabashedly blunt-force means of self-promotion is funny enough on its own. But even better is this “admission” to intrepid interviewer Abby Levene:
As an individual, I am not awesome at sustainability. It’s actually really cool to have put something out into the world that kind of owns up to some vulnerabilities I have in that area.
It’s not coming from a place of, ‘I, as someone with perfect work-life balance have it figured out and I’m passing down what I’ve learned to you.’ Tina and I really wanted to pass down the fact that we are moving through this world with the same challenges and flaws that a lot of people are.
Rom has already established that she doesn’t care about sustainability. Her excuse for inaction reduces to “If people wealthier or more famous than me aren’t making changes, why should I?” This logic confirms at least one of two things about Rom: Either she doesn’t believe that carbon emissions make much or any difference in terms of global warming, or she doesn’t actually care whether or not the planet soon becomes a supernova (a very rare event, for non-stars).
As far as the “coming from a place of” part, Rom is admitting that she and Tina Muir just wanted to have a book published even if they had nothing new, remotely sincere, or intelligent to say. I mean, if these two are just “moving through the world with the same challenges and flaws” as “a lot of people,” then what factors have positioned these two flawed folks to write a book? They’re just grifters, and not very bright or appealing ones at that. (Side snark—Muir is as much of a “former elite runner” as I am, being more than ten minutes off the women’s world record in the half-marathon, and should humbly and decisively correct anyone who describes her as such, including Tina Muir.)
Rom expresses herself as the person she is: An especially bozotic bimbo who substitutes buzzwords and plural personal pronouns to unconvincingly conceal her lack of genuine concern for anything besides herself. She’s a stereotypical product of American white privilege—a fraying bag of neuroses who lies so she can craft a brand rather than simply confess to the obvious, i.e., what she says, does, or thinks is just not that important to most people in the universe. Not even to most runners. Hell, she’s not even a big player in trail running.
Rom’s justification for continuing to use airplanes to travel to faraway places while claiming to be protective of the planet is impressively baroque, but fundamentally flaccid:
I feel like so often this question is levied against athletes as a ‘gotcha, but you fly!’ sort of question. And I’m going to say let’s all wade into the tension together as a running community. I don’t think I can in good faith say fly all you want. I also can’t in good faith say never fly again.
I’m encouraged when we see athletes like Kilian [Jornet], Damian Hall, or Xavier Thevenard set these boundaries for travel around what races they’re going to engage in. But I think we need to be honest that that is grounded in a sort of privilege of platform, and a privilege of taking up space in the sport that allows them to make that decision. But it also gives that decision more meaning than it would be if I said, ‘I, Zoë Rom, am going to bravely not race at UTMB this year.’
Strip away all the nonsense from this, and Rom appears to be saying, “No one will even notice or care if I say I’m making a climate-positive change, so why bother?” In other words, she’s not going to inconvenience herself for the sake of the Earth unless she gets proper credit for it. (By the way, I doubt I’ll ever get on a plane again unless I’m both the only passenger and the pilot, but I don’t care one way or the other who uses air travel or how often, unless they call themselves climate activists. We’ll all be dead from other causes long before climate change can make serious inroads on human existence.)
It must be rough going through life this addled and worried about making the right impression while not understanding that no one with a brain expects grand things of unremarkable people. She can rest assured that almost no one in the United States has heard of Kilian Jornet, let alone Zoe Rom. I’m guessing maybe 1 in 100,000 could identify him—that’s around 3,350 people total. And if the number is an order of magnitude greater, it’s still minuscule. No offense to anyone, but if a typical U.S. sports fan—who is male and watches sports dominated by gigantic, powerful, high-flying Africans—were shown a photo of Jornet, this fan might gruffly say, or belch, “That’s another goddamn Eurofag soccer player!” before returning to his Budweiser and Celtics-Lakers coverage. Also, Jornet is a Spaniard, so everyone who does have a clue about trail running recognizes that he’s surely juiced to the max anyway.
Rom is coached by David Roche, another Trail Runner editor with the brainpower of a slowly moldering dug turd, and associates with other cowards in and around the joggersphere who really don’t like to respond when called out for obvious lying by people who aren’t buying into the “We can shut up or brainwash the white guys pretty easily” goonery from Kretin Korner. The contingent of visionaries who have chosen to block me rather than address any my questions or statements is actually a few dozen strong. I didn’t get an answer from these assholes, either, and although I knew this would be he case, this is annoying me more than I expected it would. Ideally, the City of Boulder will be burned or washed away in its entirety by a flash wildfire or flood in the days or weeks to come, perhaps sparing the unincorporated portions of the county and its own coterie of swaying and drooling MSNBC addicts, perhaps not.
The episode I have described here is entertaining. It doesn’t affect me in any way if Zoe Rom wants to advertise to the world that she is a hapless attention-hound and a hypocrite. But in general, the real-world effects of the machinations of these censorious, scam-happy, and gutless gadabouts are not so benign.
I am not done with my patient and generally kind efforts to engage them just yet. I can’t help this any more than people like Rom can spend 13.75 hours a day worrying about how they’re perceived by other high-soaring hypocrites. I will remain compelled to try to extract confessions and justifications from ignorant and malignant people who refuse to own up to their mistakes, especially when mistakes and ignorance account for 95 percent of a given offender’s effective mass.