"How To Thrive in a Competitive Mountain Town" is Trail Runner's beautifully oblivious paean to modern narcissism

The best way to be happy with yourself is to continually obsess over whether everyone else is happy with yourself

On July 20, Trail Runner published a piece by Hannah Belles dubbed "How To Thrive in a Competitive Mountain Town.” The title alone established this one as a keeper; even more energetically than the usual clickbait in Outside, Inc.’s electronic literary ghetto, this one courts affluent wannabes while excluding normies.

The piece is motivated by a concept alien to such wannabes: Normie-runners couldn’t give two scratchy fucks about their perceived standing in their local jogging pecking order, never mind how to upgrade that standing through systematic ego-inflation exercises. I have never met an elite runner, or anyone with a reasonable shot at getting there, who needs reassurance about “how to thrive” anywhere. But Belles knows that plenty of runners who aren’t especially good and know they never will be are nevertheless chronically concerned about their status within the subgroup group of humans called “name runners,” who tend to collect in a few U.S. locations, almost all of them not only west of the Mississippi but west of Nebraska—think Portland (when it was reputedly more habitable), Eugene, Colorado Springs, Boulder, and Flagstaff.

Many of these runners gravitate toward places with a high density of elites. While this wipes out the potential for “bigger fish in a small pond” competitive scenarios, most well-off wannabes don’t actually care about winning anything. Because they’re affluent and almost all shitlibs, they care primarily about being seen with the sport’s luminaries, and they perceive merely being in the same Instagram photos as elite runners as bolstering their own in-group status through some kind of electronic-osmosis process.

This kind of capering generally looks amusing to Gen Xers, bemusing to Boomers, and incomprehensible to genuine oldsters. But it’s a mostly harmless trait, and because wannabes seem oblivious to how powerfully they telegraph programmed neediness in the context of athletic irrelevance, the topic is impossible for any sarcastic dickwad worth his own slowly sagging nutsack to ignore.

The opening paragraph:

I moved to Salt Lake City, Utah, from central Florida in the summer of 2020. Primarily the result of a job opportunity, the move seemed to also promise a new world of outdoor-related possibilites.

“Primarily the result of a job opportunity,” in this context, means “Primarily the result of wanting to move to an exercise haven and being fairly certain of finding work, if necessary, once reaching that haven.”

Belles goes on to describe how she and her husband were fairly high-ranking presences in a Florida group—but not at the top thanks to the group boasting a Western States Endurance Run finisher—only to discover that the scene in Salt Lake City, Utah was somewhat different. My guess is that Ms. Belles know in advance that this would be the case, as wannabes spend even more time on social media than most runners do. She relates feeling self-conscious after learning that someone had run ten miles just to get to a group run. I’m assuming that about half of the conversation-snippets from these experiences she includes are mostly real while about half are probably made up.

The article includes a link to another Trail Runner how-to piece titled “Avoiding the Comparison Trap,” which is kind of like an article about the best high-ethanol beverages for runners featuring a link to a piece about how recovering alcoholics can avoid cravings for booze. But the best and most unintentionally revealing sentence is this one:

Self-deprecation can creep into our minds quickly when you’re constantly surrounded by the best.

So if I see, say, Jake Riley on a run in my neighborhood—and that happens about once a month or so—that means that Hannah Belles and her peeps will feel worse about themselves? Look, I’m doing what I can to avoid puncturing any egos ‘round the People’s Republic.

The part about Finn Melanson is useful because Belles doesn’t seem to realize he’s not a wannabe. He’s someone who loves to run and was able to move somewhere he felt would maximize his enjoyment of running. He gets a twitch of excitement and reinforcement when he sees really good runners out there, but it doesn’t seem to trigger one molecule of envy, insecurity, or despair. This is a normie you might easily mistake for a wannabe if you’re unaware of his statements and orientation to running.

This sets up an excellent contrast:

Another podcaster, Jonathan Levitt, host of the For the Long Run podcast, found himself in a similar position to Melanson, moving to Boulder, Colorado, from Boston.

“There’s a culture of excellence here,” Levitt said over a recent video call. “If I want to go faster, I can run with Kara [Goucher] and learn something new about my running and myself, or run with Gwen [Jorgensen] and just try to hang on for 75 percent of each rep.” 

So, when Mr. Levitt—an unwilling or at least unwitting friend of the blog and not identified in this piece as a sales guy for Inside Tracker—"found himself" moving to Boulder and wanted a fast training partner after getting there, he homed in on two former female married Olympians, one of them a gold-medal-winning triathlete and the other a runner whose personal bests closely track my own (sub-15:00 5K, 1:08+ half. 2:24+ marathon). Goucher is retired but keeping fit, while Jorgensen, 37, is returning to triathlon after failing to reach the Olympics in the marathon (personal best: 2:36+). But Levitt wants us* to know he’s on a first-name basis with both gals.

Levitt raced a heat of the Mile High Mile a couple of weeks ago, entering a heat for people aiming to go under five minutes. He missed the mark by only an agonizing 7.6 percent, which is like setting out to qualify for the U.S. Olympic Trials in the marathon by running under 2:18:00 and running 2:28 and change instead.

Levitt reported running the first lap at under 4:40 pace, which means that he averaged 84+ seconds for his final three circuits of Fairview High School’s track after completing the first one in 69-osh.

I will admit that I’m almost jealous. Levitt doesn’t seem the slightest bit fazed by either missing five minutes by around one full straightaway or running like a meth-head with a small television set under his arm (and eventually, balanced on his shoulders) instead of a trained athlete. He seemed genuinely buoyed by his own effort and somehow infused it with just as much meaning and ripeness as he would have had he actually run 4:59. This is a skill I could never develop, though I’m not sure how or where it would ultimately help me improve my life.

Belles’ next two paragraphs—again unintentionally—reduce to “Although Levitt says he didn’t move to Boulder to tongue elite bungholes, of course he did":

Although Levitt frequently trains with elite runners, his initial draw to the area—and reason for staying— involved much more than proximity to excellence. In Boulder, it’s less about the elite athletes but more about the high-level of dedication to training and adventure among the general population.

“Everyone is here because they love the outdoors and truly want to be here. I’ve really come into my own since I moved here.” He finds that within the Boulder endurance community, individuals are able to immerse themselves in the natural terrain and find their own challenges to conquer, which makes for an inspiring environment to live in.

Everything Levitt is pretending is unique to Boulder is not. I moved here over a dozen years ago for reasons connected to but not driven by my running habit, and the same few but inescapable reasons keep me here now. It’s beautiful, but if cost-of-living is included, most runners even with a strong yen for trails and mountains would never dream of moving specifically to a City of Boulder ZIP Code. People who want to live on the cheap are living in leaky cabins and trailers up in Rollinsville or Nederland.

Also, what Levitt is doing looks utterly normal to the kind of locals I select for extra doses derogation, such as David Roche and his crew of preening shitlibs and attention-whores. There is no failure in someone coming up wildly short race after race as long as their photo streams continually feature elite or name runners, especially when these can draw comments from those runners. Who cares about training or racing sensibly when you can be a 5:22 miler who thinks he needs to train with women who have run that pace for ten miles?

Better yet, did any other 50-and-older runners out there ever think you’d live to see a 5:22 miler who is genuinely convinced he needs to train with women who have run that pace for ten miles, while all of his goofy pals co-sign the charade? This is, in its own farted-up-but-also-memory-choked couch way, priceless. (Okay, okay, Levitt’s time converts to 5:16+ at sea level. But this doesn’t move the hilarity much.)

Belles writes: “When speaking to both Melanson and Levitt, I was surprised at how healthy their perspective seemed.” Their perspectives aren’t remotely similar. But Belles should keep in mind that people who choose unreachable goals and learn nothing from not coming close to attaining them are supernaturally adept at maintaining healthy perspectives because they’re deluded. Even the ones who would admit under pressure that they love kissing rapid-moving ass still seem to believe that some of the osmotic e-fairydust I mentioned above is real.

The coda:

These mountain communities are not great solely because of the physical talent they attract, but through the relationships and support their individuals have for one another. For those of us living in these areas, hopefully we can learn to be motivated by the excellence that surrounds us, and be inspired to share our own talents as well.

Well, obviously she inspired me, so there’s only so much I can criticize this piece as ineffective.

While I call this wannbeism “harmless,” the reason I focus on people who strongly manifest the trait is that narcissists require nonstop external approval, meaning that Wokish narcissists like Levitt and Roche trumpet all sorts of wrong and dangerous ideas about vaccines, transgender biology, race and ethnicity and never answer for them because they don’t care what rational thinkers outside the shitlibbian cult believe. Even when they know I’m right, they know they can safely ignore me just like these twats have.

I won’t say I always enjoy the show, but chronicling its various acts and scenes almost always elicits a real grin or two along the way. And the unconscious admissions in Belles’ piece of what drives so many mountain-chasing under-forty runners to places like Boulder these days help shed light on why these people so often dispatch so many opinions and “facts” that make little to no sense to normies.