By Labor Day, a tempo run should feel like a nap in a hammock on a sunny autumn day after multiple bong hits and a few scoops of Xanax-infused Cheez Whiz

There's literally no shame in being shameless

As recently as August of 2019, I still held the corporate media to semi-serious quality standards. My complaints that month about Runner’s World’s coverage of the 2019 Mile High Mile, which I posted on a version of Beck of the Pack then a year away from migrating to Substack, seem quaint today.

The difference between my criticisms then and what I churn out now rests not in the tone of those “old” complaints—which, as I discovered while writing this post much to my dickish delight, was dickish indeed—but in the voice: Though stating outright that I already considered the running media finito as an information resource, I nevertheless wrote as if a part of me believed that this awful article was at least aberration-adjacent.

Despite my unabashedly rude treatment of the article, its author, and the publication that inflicted it on unsuspecting Internet users, I was contacted a year later by a Runner’s World editor intent on featuring an ancient article I wrote about tempo runs, originally for Running Times—and man, were we some fuckin’ par-taaaay-animals in those days—in an upcoming print issue.

This proposition struck me as remarkable, not because of my year-old yammering about the Asian gal’s MHM story but because I had then since vastly expanded the scope and intensity of my sermonizing. By this time, I was derogating not only the entire running media but its spreading fungus-patch of wall-eyed Wokish pundits, its racist “disruptors,” its eater-cheaters, and its other mostly sessile, flaccid, and flab-draped foreign bodies. I was, in other words, bemoaning at unlikely length running’s refitted-and-beshitted corporate-cultural landscape, and praying for Christ the King to clue me in on its origins and expected duration.

This, in-class, was a more egregious gambit on the part of Runner’s World than MSNBC’s recent ephemeral employment of drawling birthing person Ronna McDaniel, which terminated in the network delivering a sharp and howl-inducing sucker-punch to its own scabrous, funk-fuming crotch. But although the Runner’s World piece ran as promised in the print issue, and I even had a new story published in Runner’s World‘s online version as I awaited the print issue featuring the tempo-run mention to be printed, things ultimately soured between myself and Runner’s World, as well as between myself and what really is an impressively long list of cucked-out or otherwise demoralized individuals, nonprofits, media outlets, businesses, trail-wandering packets of soy sauce, and ragtag online white-skank frigidity-grievance communities—at least considering the tiny sliver of people who pay any attention whatsoever to distance running and either its elfin, pharmacologically enhanced superstars or the half-ton trolls of color now chortling and lumbering their booze-bloated way into once-unfathomable sponsorships and dank-media stardom.

Maybe I really am the most inflamed and pinworm-infected of the multitude of chapped assholes in all of this, but this seems unlikely. Runner’s World recently declined to terminate one of its own editors for being a flagrant and unapologetic liar. And this happened despite Kate Carter, a boilerplate anemic- and neurotic-looking England-based harridan, being the last person on the planet capable of playing any kind of race-card.

The most notable thing here isn’t the retention by Runner’s World of a staff member who is inarguably a moral reprobate, as such decisions can and often are made quietly. The “we’re in new territory” part is that that the publishers and editors of Runner’s World are fully aware that the majority of people who consult Runner’s World even occasionally know that Runner’s World has made the choice to retain an ethically unconstrained, and arguably unwell editor. Runner’s World is therefore signaling to the running community that it has no right to expect even minimal ethical or quality standards and that anyone who thinks differently can talk to an electronic, maximally boosted, double-masked, pecker-waving transfeminine wall.

All of which is to say that corporate running outlets continue to jackhammer their way deeper and deeper into epistemic bedrock in their delirious effort to establish new lows in sheer thematic and definitional whimsy.

If every new article being published by Runner’s World or any of Outside’s three even worse jogging-centric e-rags could be divided into GOOD or BAD by a competent and unbiased arbiter, at least eighty percent of them would wind up in the BAD bin, and this is a charitable estimate. Even if I wanted to take a swing at even ten percent of these at the complete expense of eating, sleeping, or exiting my bed to urinate or defecate, I wouldn’t have the time, and at that level of exposure I would be at risk for impulsively dashing off Eric Cartman-style to a dedicking facility to be rebranded as Kevina the Unostracized.

But the fact remains that the august publication Runner’s World has nominally classified me as a worldwide expert on tempo runs, an honor it is forever unable to rescind. Because I’ve marauded David Roche for being unable to perform the basic algebra required to figure out about how hard a given runner should perform a tempo run and then for feigning an informed interest in prescribing exquisitely fine-tuned tempo runs, I couldn’t resist making a few comments on “Track Workouts: Aerobic Threshold Test,” an article by former bad-ass mountain runner J’ne Day-Lucore.

Actually, “I couldn’t resist making a few comments” is dangerous Russian disinformation. In fact, I have no comments about this piece at all, just an annotated image combining elements from the article and an appropriate level of invisible awe.

So now that the title of this post finally makes sense, I’m gonna peace out. But not without making one real, meaningful claim: Running is about getting more out of yourself physically, mentally, spiritually, or otherwise than you thought you could and trying to appreciate the lessons in everything, desirable or adversarial, that your time as an opt-in perambulator earns you. That’s it. This principle allows for plenty of wiggle-room and creativity, but until recently it was assumed that people who took unpopular or formally off-limits steps to attain their own version of “I am a runner and this is now” nirvana lacked access to stable forms of satisfaction. But instead of today’s flurry of scammers and cheaters and falsehood-promoters suffering the negative consequences and concomitant loss of confidence that running’s behavioral deviants once did, these auto-fellating, uncreative, solipsistic wingnuts operate by an “If the right people believe my lies, they’re basically true” ethos.

No one with an intact conscience who consistently lies or cheats at anything is happy with themselves or with their accomplishments, both the real and the invented ones. All this means in a publishing climate bordering on anomie is that the running media will not correct itself, and unless and until it is corrected by marketing forces, it will continue to feature chronically unhappy, anxious, indolent, and scatterbrained writers and editors framing themselves to be brave and attentive facts-first scions, blithely explaining things just the way they ought to be explained and ignoring all pertinent feedback. In this quixotic mission that combines self-elevation with self-delusion, I don’t think these folks are fooling themselves to any greater extent than they’re fooling their most dickish critics, their utility in a mass-propaganda environment notwithstanding.