Do openly dishonest and hypocritical joggers who feed tripe to fitness mags enjoy healthy personal relationships?
Yes and/or no, according to sources
Ashley Mateo is a slow, poorly informed marathon runner and an inept, inattentive wordsmith despite ample practice. While these attributes alone are generally sufficient to earn a gal regular work in today’s bimbopathic, shitlibs-only corporate fitness media, the real luminaries in this batch of eager hacks don’t just spout nonsense; they seamlessly propound multiple contradictory philosophies at the same time. “We need to protect girls and women and promote women’s athletics” and “We need to saturate girls’ and women’s sports, including their changing rooms, with mentally ill men” may be the most blatant of these in circulation, but the slate of hypocrisies available to shitlib pundits is genuinely impressive is depth and scope.
In January, I reviewed an article Mateo contributed to Women’s Running ostensibly arguing that running increasingly long distances isn’t necessarily a wise move when trying to improve at an activity like long-distance running. In this piece, Mateo produced such memorable passages as “Those numbers—and the results they yield—are staggering. They’re not totally outside the norm” and “A 10-minute mile consists of approximately 1,700 steps, according to research.”
Being a scattershot writer with no practical knowledge of marathon training at one time made gals like Mateo, Emilia Benton, and David Roche inapt candidates for freelancing for running-related publications. But it didn’t necessarily make them liars. Fortunately, the days of excluding both outright waterheads and anti-integrity gasbags of privilege are gone.
Mateo, like everyone who contributes fluff and flotsam to Outside’s e-rags, has shown over the past seven or so years that she’s precisely as concerned about climate change as she needs to be, depending on the publication she’s writing for and the task at hand.
Ashley Mateo and the many, many others who claim that global warming is already present, observable, and consequential either believe that when they fly in an airplane, they contribute to this problem—however minimally—or they do not believe that carbon emissions contribute to global warming. Mateo doesn’t use the term anthropogenic climate change or one like it in her pieces, but because Outside’s e-rags universally promote hydrocarbon combustion as the main driver of global warming, it’s reasonable to assume that’s what Mateo means.
Let’s say carbon dioxide emissions have nothing to do with the Earth’s climate patterns over time. Someone who believes that they do and brags about flying around anyway is just as much of an asshole as she would be in a world in which carbon emissions were driving 100 percent of climate change. The real sleaze here lies in the obvious infidelity to logic and consistency, not in the presumed or known consequences of either “climate deniers” or climate grifters.
Mateo and virtually every other regular contributor material to Outside’s three running-related e-rags (Trail Runner, Women’s Running. and RUN) have been pushing a whole pile of ideas that none of them, to my knowledge, have embraced themselves. It’s supposed to be cool these days to be not just climate-conscious but also some combination of “brown,” transgender, and obese. Yet none of Outside’s alabaster-skinned, uvula-tickling editors and regular authors seem interested in dating or marrying trans, fat, or brown people themselves, and the only reason they’re not all paired off with gorgeous, wealthy partners is that gorgeous, wealthy people have the option of ignoring neurotic, dishonest, avaricious, semi-literate chuckleheads.
These fitness-media freelancers and editors not only push lie after shitlib lie and dumb idea after dumb training idea, but they famously hide from their critics. Roche, Benton, Zoe Rom, Erin Strout, and their allies in pushing dangerous bullshit—much of it openly racist—about “gender-affirming care” and “body positivity” are unwilling to defend their ideas from criticism or engage their critics at all.
I sometimes wonder about the nature of these people’s personal relationships. I have a hard time believing that anyone who was never close to poor, yet is willing to publicly lie for years about various issues in exchange for comparatively tiny payouts from outlets like Women’s Running, is honest at all with their friends, romantic partners, or family members. I just don’t see how a pure propagandist or someone who can airily commingle facts and opinions can just switch that ugliness off when not “working.”
We also need to devise a way to discourage slow runners from entering marathons in their own hometowns, let alone in other continents. Never mind the pathetic Boston Marathon’s pathetic qualifying standards; it’s unclear to me why anyone who cannot finish a marathon in under three hours is even willing to perambulate in broad daylight even when hiding in a sea of other shufflers. This unglamorous nonsense has to stop, and maybe if we showed people videos of what they look like 22 miles into a marathon, they would quit entering them and humiliating themselves.
I feel like enough of an asshole myself for entering the 2001 Boston Marathon knowing I might be beaten by a single woman, mostly likely black, and—because I stopped to disgorge a pile of feces late in the race of toughing it out and prairie-dogging it for the last four miles, that’s exactly what happened. And I kept running races for years after that anyway, even setting personal bests and indiscriminately disclosing these times to others I guess I have my own ego and personality issues.
A reader sent me a story this morning that makes for a good read whether it’s relevant to any of the above or not.
