Complaints about Oregon's body-fat monitoring reflect personal body shame, not concern for others
Complaints about Oregon's body-fat monitoring reflect personal body shame, not concern for others
The latest verse in a ceaseless chorus of self-interested, hypocritical whining is a pointless attempt to obliterate mention of women's weight, period
It’s been four weeks since the publication of Ken Goe’s story about complaints by former University of Oregon runners against the school’s head cross-country and track and field coach, Robert Johnson, and members of his official and unofficial support staff. That article triggered approximately one useful follow-up story and a wave of irate reactions about “body shaming” from joggers, retired runners, and others who used the situation to express shame about their own bodies before moving on to the next item on the grousing agenda.
Bear in mind two things about this uproar. One is that the departed athletes’ most urgent stated health problem, per Goe’s article, was “feeling at risk for an eating disorder.” I didn’t stress this last time, but if you take that literally, it seems like everyone emerged miraculously unscathed from a health perspective, notwithstanding the disappointment inherent in leaving a college running program on unhappy terms. The other is that Alison Wade, whose not-quite-stated mission is to eliminate men from positions of power in running if not eradicate them from the world outright, dedicated her entire November 1 newsletter to the systematic “body shaming” of these and other University of Oregon runners, but did not even mention this alleged evildoing in her November 8 and November 15 [← corrected from “November 22” in original version] newsletters.
Nowhere has evidence surfaced of a letter-writing campaign to the university or the NCAA, coordinated or otherwise, or even of one of those symbolic online petitions slacktivist warriors love so much. Despite the horrified reactions on display for a minute there, it turns out no one really gives a rip about the fallen set of Oregon athletes.
Taken together, these facts imply that none of the principal complainers really thinks there was any kind of actionable problem in play here. Instead, the suite of “revelations” about Oregon’s weight-control procedures offered individual media actors an excuse to express, in tailored ways ranging from the comically imperious to the openly juvenile, that what the Oregon coaches were doing was hurting their feelings.
On October 29, Runner’s World published a story by Sarah Lorge Butler following up on Goe’s piece. Below is the image Google associates with the story. The words at the bottom represent the title of the HTML document containing the text of the piece.
In the title of the story itself seen by visitors to the RW site, however, “Body Shaming Accusations” is replaced by “Accusations of Body Composition Focus in Track Program.”
This is a crucial difference, and to be honest, “body-composition focus” is better than anything I could have produced in three words or less to summarize my concept of the situation. (I tried, before I saw Lorge Butler’s choice. That one wins.) And since most people don’t read past a story’s headline before drawing conclusions about its contents, in this case the same story is—albeit unintentionally—sending two different messages.
While the inaccurate, anger-stoking message is predictably the one that prevailed overall, this was not true of Lorge Butler’s article, which is excellent. It focuses chiefly on the experience of Katie Rainsberger, who had a phenomenal career at Air Academy in Colorado Springs, and how assistant coach Maurica Powell tried various strategies to counteract the progressive drop in Rainsberger’s body fat during her freshman year. Rainsberger was by all accounts doing everything the rest of the staff wanted. A nutritionist, meanwhile, told her she was doing great despite apparently being aware that Rainsberger had stopped menstruating.
Rainsberger’s reward was injuries and a progressive deterioration in performance. She slipped from 4th at the NCAA National Championships as a freshman to 16th as a sophomore, and after outdoor freshman marks of 4:11 and 16:13 in the 1,500m and 5,000m, she managed no better than 4:21 and 16:43 as a sophomore. She transferred to the University of Washington in the summer of 2018, and after working her way back into health and through the messes created by COVID-19, she ran 15:46 last spring.
I have three basic perspectives on this.
ONE: The inappropriate use of the term "body-shaming" to describe what’s happening here is not a mere overreaction on the part of the media and others with large public platforms. It is an intentional semantic misstep aimed at producing precisely that reaction on a wide scale. Its message is, "These are bad people who are intentionally causing emotional pain," and portrays running itself as a hostile environment, when a more honest appraisal is...well, see Lorge Butler's headline, which translates to "People are making coaching decisions that are resulting in emotional and other distress"—a vitally different proposition.
This merrily idiotic essay in the catastrophically cuntstricken New York Times is as brazen as can be in trying to redefine terms to maximally justify butthurt of a purely personal nature. (And because you’re all on the edge of your seats about this, no, Crouse didn’t respond to my e-mail a week and a half ago inquiring about her publishing of fables framed as historical personal accounts.) The headline, “Body Shaming Dressed Up as a Fitness Goal Is Still Body Shaming,” could retain the same structure while greatly increasing its accuracy if rewritten “Personal Body Shame Dressed Up as Advocacy is Still Personal Body Shame.” In an age in which people—well, white males, at least—are supposed to shut up and unconditionally accept cultural perspectives they can never fully understand, I would suggest to Ms. Coaston that she stay in her own lane here; as someone who admits she’s motivated by thoughts about her own appearance, she should grasp that her goals and those of collegiate runners have approximately zero overlap.
If you mock someone for having a fat ass, a small dick, backne, a pernicious unibrow, a Homer Simpson combover, cankles, messed-up teeth, asymmetrically positioned nipples, or a million other physical traits people generally hope to avoid or successfully conceal—especially when they have all of these at once—the focus is the physical trait the world sees and the intent is to induce pain (or, if the shaming is done privately, laughter). This is true whether the thing being mocked is subject to change or not. And it’s almost evil that weight is technically modifiable, certainly more so than height, but in practical terms not nearly as much as people like to believe, a pertinent but different topic.
A coach saying "You need to lower your body fat percentage" is not body-shaming, any more than telling a college football player “You need to increase your bench press” is. It may result in the athlete experiencing shame, sometimes prolonged shame—about being “fat” or “slow” or “weak.” But inducing shame is not the intent behind these ideas, even if some of them suck. Making people better runners is.
But who cares? The misuse of “body-shaming” by the Twitter Gestapo and their slime-dribbling ilk has of course been wildly successful. You know something stinks about a track and field story when for Chrissakes People decides to produce a version of it.
TWO: The stuff Oregon is doing is worth questioning. Johnson says it's all grounded in science, but he can't just defend that claim on the basis of recording some numbers and using them to make coaching decisions.
As I understand amenorrhea in competitive athletes, some women will become amenorrheic at a considerably higher body-fat percentage than others will, and moreover, the same woman may lose her period at a given level of body fat at one point in her career, but not at another. Thus, both interpersonal and intrapersonal variations throw the whole scheme into question.
Also, unless they have data that correlates running performance with body fat at a granular level, and can show that drops in body fat correlated with stronger running are more than a temporary phenomenon followed by a crash, then they are at best making selective use of the data they collect. As I mentioned last time, I obviously have no idea how they crunch their numbers; they have access to Nike supercomputers from the future that probably do just these kinds of electronic gymnastics. What I’m skeptical of is whether these numbers can be useful no matter how diligently the statisticians at the back end behave.
And to really play the devil’s advocate, maybe the Ducks who say they are unbothered by the DEXA scans aren't necessarily being helped by it. They are just escaping the harm that befalls others.
I also said in my other post that more information might become known about whether athletes were also subject to typical scale weighing. Lorge Butler’s story provided just that kind of information: One unnamed athlete not only said she was on the scale a lot, but also said she had been given DEXA scans monthly.
Still, this is not "body shaming." In the worst cases, it's an attempt to make someone a faster runner that failed dismally, usually one that is superficially defensible on the grounds that is has worked for others. It’s a system that is absolutely assured of shredding some nontrivial percentage of recruits in a slow-motion, excoriating way.
Any successful distance program is always trying to achieve a balance between three rumbling, shifting forces: Athlete weight, athlete performance, and the team culture around weight management. None of these problems are new, not even close, and history has shown at consistently successful NCAA programs, coaches dovetail toward the same general strategies. It doesn’t matter if the coach is a woman or a man, and male and female athletes experience the same kind of treatment.
That doesn’t mean that there are no genuine screw-ups coaching at the NCAA level; I can name several, and I hope you can too, different ones. It means that solving a complicated problem isn’t as simple as tossing someone you don’t like out the door and replacing him with someone who seems, you know, nicer.
Rainsberger expresses no anger or resentment in her words to Lorge Butler, and not incidentally, Lorge Butler has a way of infusing people and situations with grace no matter what she’s covering. She writes with integrity and in doing so is fighting a tide of nonsense-feminism to which she could easily submit, even benefit from, in her job as the editor-in-chief of Runner’s World. That shows her commitment to the truth, which I share, just without the grace and the need to oversee the submissions of a bunch of crappy freelancers.
THREE: The people making the biggest fuss over this are not remotely credible. They have repeatedly demonstrated this in the past, and they have hammered home the point with extreme prejudice over the Oregon situation.
The day Ken Goe’s story in The Oregonian was published, Kara Goucher made a plaintive, scattershot, and altogether childish post on Instagram (motto: “A Billion Emotionally Charged Imbeciles Can’t Be Wrong”). She didn’t mention the coach or the school. My summary of her caption—and feel free to challenge it—is “I was a world-class runner despite having extra fat on my body. Quit pretending there is only one path to success.”
This is wrong on two levels. The first is obvious. Goucher writes:
If you look closely you will see I have skin hanging over the side of my shorts, there is cellulite on my butt and there are no rock hard abs on my stomach.
All of that is wrong. I see nothing but skin. You’re not supposed to run with your abs tensed. And cellulite? Had I been shown this photo with no context, I would have focused only on Goucher’s expression, a combination of joy, effort, and disbelief. A rare combination that appears toward the end of successful marathon races, and Goucher the racer always put her feelings where you could see them. Clearly, she still does.
Moreover, this violates an inviolable rule we* were given last year: Never mention anything about women’s bodies. This happened after Chris Chavez, a veritable clown-car of unforced journalistic errors, decided to gin up attention by complaining about a track announcer’s genuinely innocuous comment about the comparative muscularity of the pace-setters in a 1,500-meter race. (Equally controversial: “Basketball centers tend to be taller than guards.”) It was a farce, like the shameless Chavez himself.
The rationale, of course, is that it’s wrong to get girls and women thinking about and judging their own bodies, as if they (and boys, and men) don’t already do enough of this on their own. But Goucher was doing exactly this with her post—after rallying vociferously a year ago behind Chavez’ nonsense, probably without even having watched the “disgusting” video clip.
This interaction exemplifies two people willing to say whatever is required—even knowingly false and hurtful things—to grow their respective profiles and brand, to succeed. Goucher is in a precarious position to be criticizing a running program for flirting with ruthlessness in an effort to win, to succeed.
The impression Goucher was offering to her 187,000 or so Instagram followers, most of them presumably women, is that she was fatter than a typical 2:25 marathoner. How many thousands of neurotic teenage and adult runners—of both sexes—looked at the images and caption and thought, “If what she’s carrying there is flab, then I sure better lose my actual flab if I want to become as fast as her.” That’s not what Goucher was trying to say, but by now she of all people ought to know her audience and how triggering that kind of content is. I’m not being speculative about this.
Yet any “Uh, WTF. Kara?” replies from the Instagram rabble were quickly pushed into comment-obscurity, squelched by the immediate torrent of blind love from other big running names—a showing that, whether anyone meant this or not, shouted, as always, “Do not disagree with this. It’s gold.”
No, it was crap, just what it looked and smelled like.
There’s another angle that bears mentioning, since Goucher insisted on bragging about her glory days. When Goucher ran that 2:25:53 in 2008, it put her just inside the top 100 women all-time. She retired with a PR of 2:24:52, which she ran in the strong 2011 tailwind at Boston and places her just inside the top 300 on the all-time list. Goucher was a great marathoner by U.S. standards, but she was also ten minutes behind the best in the world. Perhaps that’s unfair because Paula Radcliffe was such an outlier, but the fact remains that the very best women in the world—the 2:14 to 2:18 “crowd,” say—do in fact look more or less the same. They don’t have any less fat on them than Goucher does, but they are tinier people. They have smaller bones and naturally carry less muscle.
Goucher might have been able to burn off some more mass if she’s gobbled all the thyroid hormone Alberto Salazar allegedly wanted her to, but she made a wise choice not to. It’s a strange thing to observe, because Goucher’s build is so tiny compared to 99 percent of the women walking the planet. But look at the absolute fastest runners in the world, male and female. Goucher says herself “Bodies are different, humans are different,” yet seems to pretend this has no performance-related implications. (I’m sorry if I seem to be shattering the dreams of any male readers seeking to run 2:03 or any females looking to crack 2:18. That’s not the idea.)
By taking her grievance-brag to this platform, Goucher also failed to heed the warnings about the dangers of Instagram published by, who else, Goucher’s project collaborator and spiritual sister Crouse in another one of Crouse’s “Rather than produce an idea, I’ll steal one!” columns. (If you associate yourself with Lindsay Crouse, you invariably and deservedly bear the stink of end-stage dishonesty yourself. This is now axiomatic. If you think that’s overstating the case, you have a mental problem or six yourself.)
Still, again, Goucher was obviously reliving something painful as she typed all that drivel. But did she have to post the drivel? Her own past words prove she knows better. Her screed is the epitome of an unchecked id having a demented public thrill ride.
Instagram has a way of making everyone look maximally and confidently asinine. Instagram combines the anonymity available on Twitter with Facebook’s option to unfurl long-winded posts in the form of captions. It is therefore the most diabolical social-media platform of them all, allowing high-profile people to unleash great gushing floods of objectively embarrassing nonsense, yet receive a disproportionate level of reinforcement because there is no “dislike” button to offset the thousands of likes, giving posters a greatly inflated sense of the validity of their messages. Under Wokism, it allows morally depraved talking landfills like this to flourish, and achieve approval from the likes of Kara Goucher.
And Goucher’s post is not messaging. Her dispensation of the “no body talk” rule and the support she got from fellow supposed hard-liners is just one more example of self-interested parties scrambling for validation and a share of whatever attention people are paying to loud, retired distance runners. This blatant hypocrisy again reveals the hilarious fungibility of a moral framework to which a slew of progressive-minded runners have pledged blind electronic allegiance.
Wade headlined her Nov. 1 newsletter “University of Oregon track and field athletes speak out about body shaming,” then went on to describe a host of things that don’t qualify as body-shaming, using the word “shaming” only once and in the first paragraph. At one point, she writes, “It’s also notable who in the running world has commented on this issue and shared the news, and who has stayed silent.” Uh, what’s stopping you from elaborating, mate?
Wade links to Goucher’s post, knowing full well it could trigger people but not caring because Kara Goucher’s output, however misguided and inarticulate, reaches a lot of eyes. The main idea is to make known the bellowing of women and punish men for inciting it.
Again: These are exactly the wrong people anyone should be listening to when it comes to ethics. They lie, contradict themselves constantly, they refuse to even face (much less heed) criticism, and they do exactly the kinds of things to people they pretend offends and enrages them the most. Since his tweet about the announcer, Chavez has since proven himself an inept putz with crisp regularity and dependability. And you don’t have to believe me when I say not to trust Goucher; she tells you this herself. At the 35:45 mark of this podcast, she starts stammering about Shelby Houlihan case and basically admits that personal bias is the reason she won’t admit Houlihan doped.
The pure, thrumming self-interest motivating each of these parties should be obvious to anyone, as should the negative consequences to other people of the perps’ lies and general stumbling.
I don't want to become so jaded that I dismiss reports that turn out to be real, and really bad. Right now, I am privy to one situation at a prestigious-enough high school that is almost unbelievable in both its roots and the way it has been allowed via fear and stupidity to propagate into a lot of kids’ and families’ lives. But whereas I used to take bad-news articles mostly at face value, my null hypothesis is now "This has to be buncombe," and I work forward from there to see if anything in it might be true. This is exactly the scrutiny, even reflexive disbelief, these bozos have come to deserve.
It all kind of makes you wonder why a bunch of people who don’t operate ethically in their own jobs and quests for personal glorification are so concerned that a successful running program might include some unethical actors. Seriously? These clowns are upset someone is cutting corners or hurting real people in trying to gain a performance edge? They want their feelings respected even when those feelings are external to stories and situations, despite showing a morbid disregard for the feelings and even livelihoods of those they disagree with on any level?
At least Oregon has some genuine winning to show for whatever they’re doing, though I wouldn’t use this weekend as a barometer. Winning in the court of social-media opinion or even in the prestige media is like lip-syncing at a gigantic benefit concert for the mentally challenged and being proud to have fooled 50,000 screaming people. If nothing else, folks should at least be aware that this long-recurrent “body shaming” theme is really all about intra-gender competition, not any sort of ingrained animus toward men or coaching styles. And that element is never going to disappear, no matter how desperate some people are to chalk its existence up to externalities like the Oregon coaching scheme.