Has the Internet been a net plus for running? (Part 1)
As in every realm of life, it's a complicated question. But yes. And no.
I wanted a title for this like “A biased history of online running communities,” or “How running crawled online, and how the Internet sped away with it,” or something both terse and clever meant to capture a single idea:
That I have been a distance runner since the mid-1980s; started my first version of a personal website in 1998, the same year I started writing for running publications and took over editing my running club’s newsletter; enjoyed my best years as a runner between 2001 and 2004, starting my first blog at the end of that period; was commissioned by a two-time U.S. Olympian to build him a coaching website—then a fairly new concept—in late 2002 in exchange for online coaching aimed at getting me to the Olympic Trials myself; saw Facebook usurp the function of blogs (and a lot of other things) as soon as it became universally accessible toward the end of the oughts; watched as the publications I’d written for succumbed to the inevitabilities of trying to sell words and ideas on the Internet when millions of people were now slinging these for free; seen Twitter become a breeding ground and super-spreader of impoverished ideas promoted in cult-like fashion; and observed efforts by individual entrepreneurs—some of them barely qualifying as runners compared to even the most ostentatious pretenders of the turn of the millennium—to compete with these “legacy” outlets for money and Internet primacy, salvos that have produced results spanning the spectrum from the sublime (and perennially underrated) to the obscene (and defiantly celebrated).
That task proved difficult, so I wound up putting a sweeping, moot question in the title. That way, no matter what kind of personal digressions I wander into, the title still works as long as I mention the Internet, which it’s virtually impossible to not do anymore even while avoiding being self-referential. And because I’ll be referring to myself constantly here, I’ve filed this under “Personal essays.”
The question of whether the Internet has been an overall plus for running is no different at root from asking if the age of electricity has, on balance, been good for the game of chess. The Internet is not a set of principles but a part of the world’s communication infrastructure. If it disappeared, running would not merely be free of millions of nearly identical photographs, countless over-weighted and useless opinions from people blaring ignorance through the cyber-equivalent of Pink Floyd-caliber sound systems, and the otherwise impossible stardom of a bevy of frolicking pretenders; this would also temporarily destroy the logistical framework of all major events and permanently end a variety of successful and worthwhile businesses. I point out the obvious here only because when people think of “the running Internet,” they probably think of a specific set of sites, and whether these are product-based, content-based or personality-based depends entirely on the habits of whoever considers the question.
My own constitution compels me to immediately think of what sucks the most and could be fixed—needless or destructive material that wouldn’t be ingrained or even a factor in running if not for certain portions of the Internet, and how gratifying it would be to see such chum eliminated forever. No more passing off lies as the truth, would be my number-one rule. What’s amazing is the number of self-described runners today whose own gut response to such a draconian proposal is “What a motherfucker.” Well, fuck you grifters and garbage-merchants right back; you’re lucky you get to read this wisdom for free, and I wouldn’t lie here even if bribed to do it, either literally or by the sway of a corrupt yet intoxicating social-religious movement. And be warned, because it happens. I probably won’t bite, but the rent has to get paid.
As fantastical (and, well, authoritarian) as the prospect of cleaving every first-magnitude personal annoyance from every sector of the cultural landscape may be, it’s a fun thought exercise to imagine Instagram and Twitter both sunsetting from civilization without any substantive duplicates taking their place. I say this mainly because these platforms are where the worst assholes in every subculture dig in their heels and manipulate conversations to their diabolical advantage, with the aim among members of this crowd being making money (Instagram) and flash-popularizing dubious or plainly laughable ideas (Twitter). I would comment on Facebook, but other than sharing my writing there, I don’t use that platform anymore.
So, that really settles the question: Get rid of the most highly trafficked commercial websites ever built—all of them owned by young, douchebag billionaires who will control almost everything you see and hear for the rest of your life, and not just online—and a lot of nice things will fall neatly into place.
In all seriousness, any analysis like this one, however comprehensive in its intent, is no more than the distillation of a personal memory-journey. And, though at times I don’t like to admit it despite the illumination a sober and deliberate backward look can offer, my own journey in running has grown fairly long. I’ve been at it for almost 37 years and using computers for longer than that—and not just to play primitive video games like Intellivision and, yes, fucking pong on an Odyssey machine from the early 1970s that heated up like the engine block in a Detroit muscle-car of that era.
My father was a computer programmer, and I wound up in a small after-school class in fifth grade mostly for kids who weren’t playing sports that afternoon and whose dads were computer programmers. There, I learned BASIC and used it to design a working Pac-Man-style game, which may still exist somewhere on a 5.25”-square floppy disk. But probably not, at least not in a decodable form.
I wrote some other programs on the IBM PC Jr. my family had in the mid- to late 1980s, mostly baseball, cross-country and track-and-field simulations. Although I went on to major in physics, I used computers less in college than I had at home, and I suppose it’s too bad that I have wound up parlaying an 800 math SAT score and established programming skills at age 17 to fucking around semi-despondently in the mountains over three decades later. Chronic misanthropy bleeds ambition even when it goes mostly concealed, and will scuttle as many opportunities as a solid binge-drinking habit, albeit without all of the ugliness and scuttling of other lives and livelihoods.
Having learned BASIC made learning HTML (not a programming language at all) and the rudiments of Perl and JavaScript very easy to pick up even after a fifteen-year break from any sort of programming. But although I was tech-integrated enough to throw together the first version of my website 23 years ago—about when “preppers” started to get nervous for real—and although I’ve followed most aspects of distance running closely since I took it up in 1984, my perspective on what “the running Internet” looks like and how it has gotten that way is nevertheless limited. (Sometimes I wish it were more so, like most sane people’s probably is.)
Some runners only use the Web to look for race results, read training-related articles, or purchase gear; these are your practical sorts, often older and social-media-averse and largely unexposed to a lot of the sport’s burgeoning meta-weirdness other than seeing it through the jaundiced lens of these Substack dispatches. Others dissolve themselves into anonymous message-board culture, where they have fermented for decades, growing older and slower and more often injured and becoming increasingly bilious contributors to as many exchanges as they can in the process. Still others gravitate to enclaves on Instagram, where they can select from a range of pictorial poisons accompanied by some of the most vapid and pretentious health advice ever conceived, be it in the service of losing weight, getting over a fear of gaining weight, or being “body-positive,” a proxy for virtually anything that means “I know I’m not in that club, so I’m promoting this one.” Sometimes, elite runners will take advantage of Instagram’s de facto lack of a character-length limit on photo captions and take a stance on an issue of the day, e.g., “I trust Shelby.”
I will get into a (necessarily parochial) timeline of Internet running events in the days to come, starting with the winter of 1994-1995, when I joined the Dead Runners Society listserv. I don’t want to rush through this, because I believe there are a lot of important elemental principles that have gotten laundered out of the basic consciousness of running, at both individual and group levels, thanks to developments that have arisen as an inevitable cost of all of the informative and progressive (in the holistic sense) advances the Web has enabled and nurtured. I am just as susceptible to this skewing of priorities and loosening of one’s grip on the fundamentals as anyone else; observing the roaring bullshit being unleashed from within the unhappy fray, and recognizing it for what it is, unfortunately does not place one above it, a rough version of a quote I mangled so badly I couldn’t find the real one in a cursory search.
Despite how I plainly feel about how a lot of things in running and greater society have decayed—primarily the value of basic, agreed-upon truths—I will always be open to becoming a better runner in some sense, even if I can no longer get faster. If this exploration helps me uncover some of what I’ve lost sight of, that’s another way to go about it. And readers who weren’t alive when the Internet stream became a global gushing river, or weren’t yet old enough to become swept along it its seductive currents and counter-currents, might find some of these perspectives entertaining, if not instructive.
(Suggested reading: “You Really Need to Quit Twitter,” by Caitlin Flanagan.)
Oh yeah. A Happy 47th Birthday to my sister Shelley, on the same day Shalane Flanagan celebrates her 40th.