Brooks exiles a "Run Happy" member for criticizing Strava's support of cheater Latoya Snell, who's not even a Brooks sponsee

This crap is going to stop one way or another

Last week, a runner named Nate Imhoff publicly questioned the GPS vanity platform Strava for affording jogger-gone-heavyweight-grifter Latoya Shauntay Snell the status of “verified athlete.” Snell, a chef who doesn’t train (she’s doubled her mass in the past seven years) and demonstrably lies about everything under the sun, had just failed to finish the New York City Marathon, predictably unable to maintain the glacial 19:00-per-mile pace required to avoid being culled from the official field.

Strava—which would fold tomorrow if joggers admitted en masse that no one besides stalkers cares about their doggedly unspectacular aerobic labors—posted a self-debasing blurb about Snell’s did-not-finish, pretending that she hadn’t eaten and drunk her way directly into a state of being unable to run, running being an activity various companies, among them HOKA, ostensibly pay Snell to do. (Snell walked 26-plus miles in New York City on the day the city hosted an official marathon, but she is not a 2022 New York City Marathon finisher, and she won’t be one in the future when she says she was.)

I suggested that Imhoff, then an ambassador with the Brooks “Run Happy” team, wouldn’t get much real blowback:

I can assure Nate that no lasting harm will come to him because of this. I’ve been chronicling Snell and her clown-show for two years, and no one says fuck-all; they just sulk and stamp their pudgy feet and smolder in the hope that I grow bored with them, which I won’t. Occasionally, some ‘fraidy-cat will wash up in the comments with a long soliloquy about how white people suck overall, but never anyone with a name.

That’s since become something of a toss-up. Imhoff told me that only a handful of individuals have hectored him for his “attack” on Snell, which was as lamb-like as such things get and, importantly, mentioned nothing about her size, sex, or skin color. But after Snell posted a series of startlingly unsophisticated video tirades about being “attacked,” Imhoff saw his Brooks ambassadorship cancelled. And while Imhoff said Brooks itself was “respectful” in its brief notice-of-official-termination call, he’s had some bristly exchanges with remarkably uninformed—or perhaps just flatly immoral—Wokish interlopers.

I have copies of Snell’s now-otherwise-unavailable Instagram videos, about twenty-five minutes’ worth of ranting nonsense, but am saving those for a different post along with Imhoff’s e-mails to various entities. Today, I’m offering two snippets from exchanges Imhoff had with Snell supporters.

I redacted two names from the message snippet below, which is part of an exchange between Imhoff and Kelly Hogan (she/her/they/theirs; “toxikelltoxikell” on Instagram). The words are Hogan’s and fail every test of reality and logic.

Every part of this is wrong. For one thing, Snell’s audience is the Internet. If someone posts something publicly, anyone else can respond in any way they please. It’s unclear to me why some people seem to legitimately not understand this simple premise, even those already quick to drop the speech-suppression hammer.

For another, it’s funny that Hogan suggests Googling, because it’s easy to find material about Snell arising from neither of the redacted sources. Neither of those people has, to my knowledge, written about Snell in several years, and even if both were in fact harassment-prone, suicide-encouraging dirtbags (also not true), this wouldn’t affect the factuality of their observations. (Jeffrey Dahmer had psychotic murderers on his cell block, but they wouldn’t have been wrong to call him a kiddie-diddling cannibal.)

I also find it hard to believe that Hogan is unaware of Beck of the Pack. Snell herself certainly knows about it. The problem facing shitweasels like Hogan and Snell is that no one can suppress my writing. They have no toeholds into which to sink their lying claws, and even if they spotted some, they can probably see that I despise Wokism far too much to shut up about it.

They can’t take anything away from me. And this is soon to become a larger problem for people like Snell and Hogan.

Later in the message comes the obligatory “You’re white, shut up” from a white source, the bawling inanity of which is obscured by an even more ludicrous distraction: The assertion that Snell isn’t a cheater.

Here we go again. Snell continually boasts of finishing over 25 marathons.

Here’s her current list of marathon finishes.

I won’t re-review the host of other reasons Snell is unfit for representing any business or organization with a conscience. But anyone who defends her after doing only a trivial amount of Internet research either cannot process basic information at a basic level or is an immoral and degraded scourge of a human being. There are no excuses for this trash anymore, not that there ever really were.

A message from a different Snell fan observed that most criticism of Snell comes from white people. (Most Americans are white, including most joggers.) Hilariously, this person also implies that Snell wound up in the public eye by accident.

That’s a small piece of a conversation reaching such colossal heights of absurdity that it should probably be archived in the U.S. Library of Congress.

Back to Brooks. Last Thursday, Imhoff noticed he’d been removed from the “Run Happy” Slack group.

“Brooks was communicating with Snell and claiming they were conducting an investigation,” Imhoff told me today. “What’s it called when an ‘investigation’ only speaks with one side and never even bothers to reach out to the accused? Isn't being able to see what you are charged with a fundamental human right?”

On Friday, Brooks representatives “started sending aggressive emails wanting me to jump on a call as soon as possible,” according to Imhoff.

“They claimed I broke their community guidelines; they refused to point out what I said and what community guidelines I broke,” says Imhoff. “They also refused to provide me with what they were presented with. I don't know why they’d do that unless they suspected what they’d been sent might be fake, as that could put them in the middle of a legal battle.”

So, Brooks—with which Latoya Snell has no formal association—responded to Imhoff’s tepid suggestion to Strava to allocate its resources toward deserving athletes by punishing him. And to further glamorize the tribunals, a few happy-ass runners chimed in with racist comments while denying Snell’s obvious cheating.

Imhoff says that Snell has a history of fabricating screenshots, which I believe since her entire persona is a fabrication apart from the puke-inducing power of her photos and jabbering soliloquies. He told me that this was immediately a concern in this dust-up, because the “episode” Snell was roaring on and on about in her Instagram stories—and again, the video footage stretches out to close to half an hour—was a 35-second imprecation from Imhoff that was directed not at her but at Strava. (“Pay attention to your side of the Web!” works both ways, dears.)

“Snell then claimed I was harassing her across platforms, which didn't happen,” Imhoff says. “Then she made the jump to ‘hate speech.’ How did she make this jump unless she created screenshots that didn't happen?”

I’ll have more on this shortly. And perhaps not all of it will be dispiriting: While the privilege of canceling white guys in racist language isn’t going away soon, real signs, are starting to appear that Snell’s career as an “influencer” may be drawing to a close.

But no matter what ensues, raving dingbats like Kelly Hogan need to stop pretending that people of color, size, and lunacy can’t be scammers. This isn’t their sport to turn into a battleground for a race war, or ruin with a purposeful infusion of bullying cheaters whose grotesque antics not only continue to be rewarded but are so sanctified that people who call them out are immediately cancelled—if possible.

Most people agree with this, including most people from minority groups. Most people do not like Wokism and its fake promises to minorities in genuine need.

The bullies and cheaters are dumbasses, but they know their positions are widely unpopular. It’s why they use the brutish tactics they do; nothing but fascist practices can maintain what amounts to minority rule.

My mission here was never to act as a beacon of gossipy trash. I have received pages and pages of official documentation of the criminal histories of some well-known runners, and given what I write about, I understand why this happens. But unless the people involved have been bad actors within the running community and their court histories seem to inform their present behavior, I would never consider playing running’s version of TMZ by wrecking someone’s reputation for fun. Considering the scale of some of their ongoing lies and the momentum of dishonesty in “running” generally, it’s tempting.

That said, “running” is smaller than people believe, and in the past few years I’ve seen a lot of interactions between apparently unrelated unethical actors. If Snell continues to not just get away with cheating but carry the power to land undeserved formal blows on others, this is all going to get extremely dirty very quickly.

My aim is to be left standing when these people are canned and everyone who has supported Snell while knowing what she does—and there are some popular names on that list—is forced to either explain why they stand behind her or be ripped to shreds for declining to do so.

This is not anyone’s sport to wreck.

And one more thing.

Run happy!