Has the Internet been a net plus for running? (Part 2)
Blindly worshiping the sport's professional figures and pretending to be one aren't the only alternatives
(Part 1)
Saw my picture in the paper
Read the news around my face
And now some people
Don't want to treat me the same
When the walls come tumblin' down
When the walls come crumblin' crumblin'
When the walls come tumblin' tumblin' down
— John Mellencamp
Before I explain the origins of the Internet and my understated role in spreading its popularity among members of the late-20th-century wanking class, I want to emphasize one of the most obvious and important differences between the pre-social-media World Wide Web and today’s: How easy it is to reach or at least symbolically attach oneself to elite athletes or, almost as important lately, to icons of ersatz equality—some of them high in the corporate ladder—who have leveraged mass butthurt to successfully market themselves as agents of necessary social change.
Perhaps I appreciate this trend even more easily than other old-timers, because I would not have had the same sort of career in running, and may not have remained involved at all other than as a participant, had I not gotten on board fairly early in the overall scheme of distributing ideas between formerly unconnected Macs, PCs and computer terminals. Even if my efforts weren’t then consciously aimed at structuring my life around distance running, that was often the ultimate result projecting myself and the supposed salient points of my accumulated experience onto the Web for all (or at least several) to see in 1998.
This is worth saying up front, because my view of things today is informed not merely by how things are (or look to me), but how they were “originally,” what factors beyond basic leaps in technology have prompted the changes since, which of these changes are desirable and which are not, and what I believe should be done to better harmonize the culturally inevitable with the best possible experience for the greatest number of people involved. And in running, there is a lot of latitude in that last area, which the harpies leading the media charge of today are not merely ignoring but refusing to acknowledge outright.
With the usual covert unpleasantries out of the way, a little history should help most of us pass the next few minutes in relative comfort. Some older readers, especially those with strange accents, will remember a lot of these events, having observed, participated in, encouraged, facilitated, or purposefully ruined any number of them. Or at least experienced their own versions.
At a number of points in this narrative, I have the option of supplying links to content in the Internet Archive or screen-shots harvested from the same source. But I’ll try to limit those distractions, given that some of them are personally embarrassing.
The 1990s
I had my first email address shortly before Bill Clinton took office. At the time, it was therefore almost useless. Other than my own classmates or people at other educational institutions, I had almost no one to computer-talk to, for a while. I’m sure others recall the pre-spam-era excitement at each and every DING! signaling an incoming message.
In late 1994, I somehow discovered the Dead Runners Society, or DRS. In those days, like everyone at Dartmouth, I was working on a MacIntosh— mine was some kind of second-hand “laptop” that weighed as much as an adult raccoon and was almost as cooperative. I remember searching for topics through something called Hyperstack, which maybe originated at the University of Minnesota because there was a gopher icon involved (like I said, this is an Internet history lesson). I think I happened across the DRS, then a mailing list and not a website, this way.
For those unfamiliar with how listservs worked, those who signed up could send an e-mail message to the listserv address, and once about 20 messages had accumulated in the bowels of the server, it would excrete a log spooling out all of these e-mails to everyone on the list. Some people chose to just read, and were called “lurkers.” Others were more gregarious, and I met a few people through the DRS I’m still friends with today, some of whom are widely recognizable and have had meaningful impacts in different areas of running.
In fact, in the spring 1996, I had my first in-person meeting as a direct result of online shenanigans, when I was recruited to run a leg on a five-person DRS relay team at the Vermont City Marathon. That was a blast. I still haven’t learned to not meet some of the people I connect with via my online pontificating and wisecracking, as deftly humble as all of that windy eloquence probably looks to the undiscerning commoners among you.
Around this time, Cool Running appeared (as dumb as that phrasing looks, it’s preferable to “Some people made a website called Cool Running) and was the first site I remember that aggregated race results. Since the founders were from the Boston area, most of the results were from New England races, which was handy to those of us who lived and usually raced there. Cool Running was eventually bought by Active.com, leading to its immediate conversion into a worthless locus of marketing drivel and ultimately to its erasure from the Web, but the founders made a few nickels from their work.
By late 1997, at age 27, I had gotten my marathon time down to 2:30:52 in my fourth try, and responded to an appeal from the editor of the Central Mass Striders newsletter to take over that job, even though I lived about 90 miles from the club’s home base in Worcester, Mass. I already knew some of the guys on the racing team, who were in fact from all over New England. This was a tedious and sometimes-thankless task that involved occasionally typing in results people submitted by snail mail. But it put me in touch with a lot of people I would have otherwise never met (an observation I will let pass without close scrutiny, since most of those people are top-rate) and let me hone my deeper Word skills.
The CMS website then was fantastic for its time—and it’s too bad most of its original content was summarily discarded sometime in the past ten years, after the guy who maintained the site without complaint for literally centuries finally stepped aside—but the newsletter was difficult to integrate into the website in those days, and besides, everyone with Internet access didn’t really need the newsletter because most of what went in it, be it articles or race results, was posted to different sections of CMSrun.org well in advance of my assembling the newsletter and e-mailing it to someone in Worcester. There, CMS volunteers would gather at the Greendale YMCA six times a year to collate and staple around seven hundred copies of the newsletter, and these were mailed out all over New England. Quaint.
Sometime in 1998, I noticed that Cool Running was posting essays submitted by random people like me, so I started doing the same thing. These submissions were really not very good, and I can only blame so much of trying to be “cutesy” on scaling my efforts to the universally cheerful Internet of the day; I felt unnecessarily compelled in that period to find some cheerful lesson every perfectly mundane experience. I like to think I wasn’t faking, but who knows.
Either way, I was given my own page on Cool Running, which doesn’t look so good anymore.
As I was mucking around with this stuff, I had an office job that had nothing to do with running. But this attempt at writing about running for a greater audience, combined with the fact that I had long read almost every running book and magazine published, emboldened me sufficiently so that I tracked down the e-mail address of Gordon Bakoulis, then the editor of Running Times, which did not yet feature a Web presence. I directed her to my Cool Running essays and asked if she would be interested in a column about this or that thing. She was, and my first column, called “Good Cheer” and describing the behavior of spectators at the New England High-School Cross-Country Championships, was published in the December 1998 issue.
Within about a year and a half, I had been named a Running Times senior writer (still with a day job; that was a masthead title, not a position, something a lot of people misunderstood over the years). And I would learn along the way that the addition of a Running Times website had been stalled in part by a cybersquatting dispute—the domain runningtimes.com had been purchased by none other than the owners of Cool Running, which is why the earliest version of the RT site lived for a spell at runningtimesmagazine.com before the legalities were resolved in the magazine’s favor.
But I am flirting with getting too far into the current century here, and not talking about Internet things, so I should also mention that I built a website sometime that year, which I must have also shown Gordon simply because I had made it by then and was otherwise a 2:30 marathoner and med-school dropout with no writing background. I did this on hosting space provided by MediaOne, which I think eventually became part of the Comcast empire. In the next installment of this series, I will go more into my website and its effects on my life despite me not really using it for much, given the possibilities. For now, I’ll admit that one of the first things I added to my site when I figured out how to do it was a primitive message board. I think this was in 1999, and I got the idea from TrackAndFieldMedia.com, long dead but not quite forgotten as a lot of oldsters recall it as the de facto inspiration for Letsrun.com and the concept of a spot where top runners and coaches gathered to talk publicly and sometimes profanely.
So far, this exploration really has nothing to do with the quote at the top or the false dichotomy maligned in the subhead. But writing about what a typical website or exchange between runners looked like in the days when download times were so glacial that surfing without Valium or methaqualone almost wasn’t worth the attendant frustration throws the contrast with today’s chaotic running Internet into ultra-sharp contrast, making it hard to not remark on that contrast.
For various reasons, I don’t pine for running to return to an environment that was largely the product and plaything of a coterie of high-spirited geeks, Dreamweaver users with lots of spare time, and insomniacs who liked to talk marathon training with faceless strangers whose identities could not possibly be either capably faked or verified in any way. But as you may suspect, I have a few ideas concerning the things that have taken root in running entirely as a result of social media that I would not rush toward with a fire extinguisher if I happened to notice they were burning, and reviewing these unkindly will probably eat up a lot more space in the next installment of this than I should let them. Because face it, dumb Internetting is everywhere and, on Valium or methaqualone—or weed—most of even the dumb stuff is more amusing than annoying, and is better built for rhetorically kicking around than for figuring out how to fix.