Boulder is a magnet for dipshit runners of privilege
If you have rich parents, overrate your own jogging habit, are perpetually in middle-school mode, and have a kelp-stained face, this is the place for you
Sometime in late winter or early spring, I was second in line at the checkout counter at a Walgreens in Boulder, Colorado. The woman six feet in front of me at the register had just ostensibly completed her transaction, but despite knowing—I think—that there were several customers in line behind her, she had her elbows on the counter and was murmuring to the clerk, her own full shopping bag already an afterthought.
I heard her ask the young woman at the register: “Do you have covid testing kits?”
At this I heard a shuffling of impatient feet; I thought at first these noises were all coming from behind me, but then I noticed some were wafting up from directly underfoot. And beside me, Rosie was letting out low happy-whines, a sign she was growing impatient for the snack she’s assured every time we shop at this Walgreens.
I also noticed that the woman customer, who looked about fifty-five, was wearing yoga pants. It’s not surprising how many women around here live in those things despite knowing—again, I think—that these pants were conceived with the idea that only the top ten percent of asses would appear in them. Boulder is the kind of place where half the people (not just women) either believe or need to believe that they occupy this upper aesthetic stratum.
The results can be devastating. This woman’s ass was simply too wide, dumpy, and old to be encased in yoga pants for purposes of positive self-promotion. Maybe she’s living in the late 1990s, possibly an imaginary version of that time. Maybe she owns no mirrors. I would have overlooked all of this had owner of this ass not been so openly rude—at least by the standards of most American towns.
The clerk explained that yes, they had testing kits for (I think) $26.99. The woman thought for a few seconds and said, “I’ll take one.” She still had her elbows on the counter, talking close; a sign some part of her was aware of her own selfishness, but that she was more inclined to sublimate that awareness than terminate the corresponding behavior. And while the clerk had a mask on, as was customary at the time for Walgreens employees, the woman in yoga pants meant for someone else did not.
And then she said it. She said it! This lady said, “We’re going to the beach this weekend.” In case you lack access to an atlas, Colorado is not within driving distance of any beaches. This woman was getting on a plane.
There is no absurdity in the fact that this woman was about to head on a short vacation. But add all the elements together—pretending to give a hoot about covid in the very course of managing to demonstrate automatic disregard for others—and it was emblematic of the collective entitlement of residents of this city. And this kind of stuff is getting worse.
Before I rip the place several new assholes as well as a colostomy portal, some non-token disclaimers: Not everyone here is a jerk. Not everyone with a nice house and nice things is a jerk; many people work for these things, even if some of their value systems are horribly warped by ineluctable ambient factors, and I have known wealthy people who are chronic layabouts who are generous and funny and self-effacing about what life handed them. And if you’ve been here for a while, you start to see a lot of the same names on lists of donors to local running causes or other charities, people who don’t seek attention and often lack social-media accounts altogether but whose names inevitably wind up on plaques where active folks see them. People with names like Buzz and Hans and Carlos.
On Christmas Eve of 2017, someone I had done community service with after a drunk-in-public citation a few years earlier froze to death on University Hill. I had seen Benji around town a few times since, having myself gotten sober while he was flying cardboard signs and trying to save up and clean up and do all the things that aren’t easy when almost no one has your back.
Soon after this happened, a memorial was held for Benji at the bandshell in City Park. It was a brutally cold late morning for Boulder, low single digits, not good for standing around among strangers, most of them homeless. I went, because I wanted to (and did) say a few awkward words, and soon after I got there I saw a small guy in a hoodie looking on with a look I wish I could encapsulate better than surely there is a way to keep people from this kind of pain. But that’s close enough. And I recognized him because we had met a few times and were both on the masthead of Running Times for around a decade.
It is one thing to place a thematic profile picture on a social site, or even to write a generous check to a charity. But walking a couple of miles on a zero-degree day to experience this kind of event on the ground signifies something else. I already liked this guy, but I will always think of him differently now. Maybe it was just the day. (By the way, this guy is Jewish, so he’s apparently immune to whatever Ye has declared afflicts all Members of the Tribe.)
The thing is, people like these tend to be older, and older people don’t last forever. When one of them disappears, his or her replacement stands a reasonably good chance of being a complete dipshit—a recreational-class runner boasting a sub-three marathon who pretends he’s relocating for the training boost, but almost immediately establishes he was here for the craft-beer and Strava vibe all along.
Some brief and. because it’s repetitive, tedious history. After I shared a post on a since-deleted Twitter account criticizing Chris Chavez for making a huge deal out of absolutely nothing, Eric Schranz responded with a thumbs-up. And I will state categorically the “body shaming” episode Chavez had bitched about really was just Chavez being Chavez, i.e., perilously close to differently challenged in all things and a pussy to boot.
Schranz’s assessment drew a sharp rebuke from an aggressively stupid, self-entitled, and terminally self-absorbed distance runner from Connecticut.
First, note that Ellie wants you to know she (?) admires morons, liars, and outright twats like Lindsay Crouse, Alison Wade, and Chavez. These are low-quality humans and contributors of toxic ideas and ideologies. Second, she immediately places me in an out-group solely for the purposes of delegitimizing my input. That this is her only goal is established by the material after this part being both a non sequitur (would only an “Old Boys Club” member say that?) and senseless on its own. And unless you’re an idiot yourself, you can read this tweet and reasonably conclude that Ellie here has no brain in her head, just a bag of neuroses and a series of fraying virtue-signaling triggers and switches.
As I’ve stressed before, calling me what I technically am doesn’t bother me, perhaps because I could still outrun as well as pummel the piss out of most of my younger detractors. But if you get to dismiss my input on the basis of my sex or age, then I get to do the same to you. And when you look like transgender Olive Oyl and publicly call yourself hot while reminding me that I am in fact male, well, that’s just a big-ass gold mine for any honest polemicist.
Again for emphasis, because I am talking about—and therefore, to a large extent, to—a really stupid crowd: If you post something on the Internet in a public place, you don’t get to control how people respond. And if you’re expressly fishing for compliments, have the constitution to be ready for less gratifying input, too. Especially after making bigoted tweets.
One LAST time: You don’t get to control what people say about you, or about anything, and that includes trying to punish others for approving of ideas you dislike. We clear now, you gobsmacked pricks?
It’s become evident why so many c. 2022 joggers and jogging-adjacent whiners and lard-asses think highly of Chris Chavez, as do many slugs who have been around a while: Most runners, at least the “online and opinionated” kind, are just dolts. Maybe this was always true and it took the advent of social media and (especially) podcasting to expose as much, but most of the people in charge of public running conversations are simply unintelligent and constituted to remain as such. This is a problem, and the stopgap solution, for me, is to vacillate between ignoring and castigating all involved.
There are two major problems with dumbasses with a lot of money and a jogging habit. The first is that their privilege has expanded the gap between what they think they know and what they actually know to a magnitude rarely seen outside Hollywood or Washington, D.C. And the second is that these gomers flock to Boulder, Colorado in preening, kale-munching, stinkbird droves.
It can be irritating to “watch” a stupid runner tweet something out anyone should be able to identify as dumb and watch other people circulate that thing approvingly. Anyone retweeting the flamboyantly obnoxious tripe David “trans women are women” Roche writes for Trail Runner represents the apotheosis of this phenomenon. (If you are among those who circulates his stuff or even publicly pretends that it’s good, ask yourself why you feel the need to stand up and proudly align yourself with a bona fide rambling idiot who happens to be another pussy. Hint: I know why you do this, and everyone else can see it, but can you? You think about you a lot, so I expect you to work on this one.)
Roche and his wife—a medical doctor who could probably teach her husband the anatomical and functional differences between men and women while she remains pregnant with someone’s child, but probably not beyond that period—live in Boulder and operate what they call a coaching business. They have a lot of clients in and around Boulder; I know this because the Roches post the names of their clients on their website. Since they presumably do this with their clients’ permission, this is a list of people publicly willing to be associated with the Roches’ version of wisdom.
As such, it as a roster of dipshits. People who pay the Roches for “coaching” are not expecting or at least not demanding competitive results; they are joining a feel-good cult for upper-income-level types on self-actualization quests, in need of plugging personal holes that money or their careers or their marriages can’t.
There is a formal term for these people: Millennials.
It is not the fault of Millennials that most of their upbringings coincided with the advent of an Internet that not only permitted but, within the upper social crusts, virtually demanded self-promotion—a need to stand out and impress people beyond their personal circles, to gain not just the attention but the approval of an army of unseen cyberjudges they will never meet and who spend no time thinking the accounts they follow when not staring at images on a smartphone and hunting for the right button to click. In the same spirit, it is totally not my fault as a member of Gen X that I dress like a semi-retired skateboarder for formal occasions and drive a car with a well-maintained interior that looks like it was driven upside-down across most of Utah.
Ellie is of course a fountain of idiotic virtue-signaling, ever on the hunt to score points with the libtard-laptop class.
Ellie wasn’t alone in chiding Schranz for the temerity to link to a non-approved viewpoint.
Levitt is a sales rep for InsideTracker, a bloodwork scam cooked up by some Boston wonks aimed at the same demographic the Roches cater to: Well-off people for whom it is completely worth it to spend money on the illusion of exaggerated competence, because the preservation of such an illusion is all that matters to these lords of ego-gratification.
There is a shorter name for these people, too: Recreational triathletes.
I’m told this is pushing the length limit, so it looks like there will be a part two to this. I’ll get around to that before long. Whoops! That was quick.