If bulimia is an urgent mental-health issue, then serious psychotic and personality disorders probably qualify, too
The mass normalization of obvious deviance obscures important conventional lessons, and Molly Seidel is striving like hell to articulate hers
Sarah Lorge Butler is a contributing writer for Runner’s World’s as well as its sole remaining regular contributor of edifying content. As DEI-driven marketing realities over the past five years have resulted in an influx of weirdos and fakers whose jiggly, pink-haired antics have come to dominate the sport’s Internet profile, SLB has maintained her status as a curious, fair, and ethical reporter.
She could have easily taken the Hearst Communications publication down the same route Outside, Inc. and its host of incestuous, unguided, and somehow worsening publications have careened down, and allowed key articles and subjects to become more coal for the Wokish freight train of butthurt and nonsense. (This “movement” pretends to love the environment, but what it really likes is polluting it, hence the antiquated metaphor.) This hasn’t happened, although the semi-obligatory promotion of racist tripe doesn’t add anything good to the publication.
I try to emphasize this regularly because RW, at least its Internet face, has clearly separated itself from the Outside, Inc. rags on this front, and when I started laying into the running media over two years ago—while I was technically still within it, a conflict that quickly resolved itself—I at least passively began classifying all things RW as belonging in the same trash hod as the rest of the whinnying claptrap.
Things aren’t perfect over there. But as I’ve gained a better understanding of the parameters and realities involved in trying to keep an editorial job these days, I’ve come to appreciate more than ever any pundit or editor with a conscience, an obvious love for running as a solid community and cultural enterprise, and stubborn warmth toward human beings. Few such people remain in the industry.
SLB wrote an article published on October 6 about 2021 Olympic Marathon silver medalist Molly Seidel’s ongoing issues with bulimia and what seems like a pernicious inability to be comfortable in her own skin—a wandering form of restlessness or anxiety. This was a contributor to her missing the World Championships Marathon in July, where she could have represented the U.S. on home turf.
I knew this part was coming somewhere in the story, but I winced anyway:
She feels deep embarrassment that it remains an issue for her.
I’ll speak candidly here for several reasons. The first is that I get it. I don’t know exactly how Seidel spends a typical day, but I have strong memories of what it feels like to be in the pit of that particular obsession. The second is that there is nothing to be embarrassed about, although Seidel may be a few years away from being able to joke about her journey—and I don’t mean in a wry, for-the-public, girl-next-door way, but from deep down, where she’s looked for rot in herself and discovered there’s none, just the core of a sensitive human trying to process the stimuli that add up to life. The third is that the world may soon end anyway, so spill your guts while you still can—you’ll find more allies than shamers, unless you’ve actually done something wrong.
The fourth is that Seidel is doing something I believe to be unprecedented: Being candid with the entire world, at the height of her career and despite inexplicable hate thrown her way by Instagram randos, about the things that hurt the most. She’s not pretending to have permanently cleared the highest hurdles she’ll face. I think that readers owe her and her followers the courtesy of similar honesty if it could do any good whatsoever.
Being actively bulimic contributes to being anxious through feeling like an out-of-control failure, whereas a temporary solution to anxiety and restlessness is plugging the emotional hole with a mood-altering substance, such as alcohol, or a mood-altering behavior, such as a gambling or shopping spree. So even if you’ve never been in the middle of this, it’s easy to see the potential for a classic futile-behavioral cycle.
It gets even uglier when people start playing bulimia-intoxication ping-pong, such as going on a food bender as a means of avoiding alcohol, or going the other way and getting hammered in an effort to avoid a food binge. This kind of shame shell-game works about as well as you might imagine.
In Seidel’s case, food, or specifically the binging-and-purging cycle, appears to be the only substance of addictive choice. I’m glad she’s off Adderall, as frankly I have never seen anyone with any sort of compulsive disorder thrive on a prolonged regimen of stimulant medication and especially that one. If “all” she’s dealing with is food, that’s good.
I was upset to see that someone had prescribed Seidel naltrexone, the active ingredient in Vivitrol. I still have at least one more post to write in my series about that useless drug (1, 2), but my own experience being on opiate receptor blockers was not good. I assume Seidel is on the oral form, whereas I got the intramuscular form (a shot) three times. For now, I’ll limit my description of its perceived effects to just this: It’s a bad idea to mess with neurotransmitters that promote a sense of calm and well-being after not just taking a drug but after experiencing ordinary pleasures like eating, sex, and running. The entire reason the market is flooded with various naltrexone products is that these have been falsely but successfully sold as a solution to the flood of opioids from Purdue Pharma and others that will never trickle off. A dangerous scam based on a lethal one.
Those are not recommendations, but I won’t upgrade that to the usual “my opinion only,” because I know a number of people who reported the same effects from the Vivitrol shot that I had without me even disclosing to them that I’d also been stabbed. Even though it’s perpetually in vogue to airily bash “Big Pharma,” I don’t think many people have even a glimmer of how many drug execs should be locked up, then repeatedly addicted to and withdrawn from fentanyl old-turkey with only a single crap-and-puke bucket for support until they choose to simply tear their own throats out.
Anyway, back to the matter of shame and embarrassment. SLB uses the word “mental health” eight times in this story. Maybe a few instances were for the Google-bots to pick up, but it’s a real theme: We all have something wrong with us and it starts in our heads.
Bulimia is inconvenient, furtive, all-consuming, and even prohibitively expensive for some (a former elite Japanese runner was caught shoplifting some years ago and blamed the episode on supporting her bulimia). It can ruin teeth, and it invariably shortens and ruins careers if unchecked. It certainly counts as an illness if anything does. It’s stressful. It tends to produce Curb Your Enthusiasm-type moments, like not knowing if the person in the stall next to you in the public bathroom can hear you puking despite your discreet maneuvering.
But—but—it's at least easy to see how people get there. Eating disorders in this context arise in predisposed individuals from a basic, if misplaced and ultimately ruthless and self-driving, desire to improve by being lighter. In no way can it be construed as a moral wrong, although I suppose if you have roommates and consistently lay waste to their half-gallons of ice cream, they may grow less forgiving over time.
Seidel basically says that she has been actively bulimic throughout periods of training and racing. While it’s true that eating disorders eventually lead to the progressive deterioration of running and health, it’s not an overnight thing. Often, someone—usually a young woman—will develop an eating disorder when soon after starting college, or experience a worsening or a recurrence of an existing one. Because she is likely to be training harder than ever, for a while, she is likely to improve and somewhere in her mind write off her issue as basically harmless, something to deal with “later.”
If crashing and burning were virtually instantaneous and irreversible, then people would quickly wash out of programs or fall by the waysides of their clubs, and the term “eating disorder culture” wouldn’t exist; anorexia and bulimia would be properly perceived as problems that invariably start from a seed within, not from a germ planted from the outside. But coaches are often accused of fostering an “eating disorder culture” within teams when in fact those men and women are at a loss and trying to do their best to manage the team and care for the athletes, knowing the rest of the world is watching and making facile judgments. Bad coaches obviously handle these situations poorly, but in all seriousness, what would the dexterous and compassionate management of the blooming eating disorders of several athletes you just met—and who just met each other—look like to you?
One thing Seidel has probably faced for a long time is an erosion of confidence. Even if someone is in sort of a “chipping” bulimia mode, maybe throwing up a few nights a week but otherwise gaining adequate nutrition, he or she will carry that knowledge and the accompanying burden to the starting lines or races. It’s possible to show up at a race recently bulimic but fueled and ready to go on the day, and then start falling apart when the race starts getting tough for mundane reasons because thoughts like “I’ve been misbehaving, I’m not right…I’m mentally ill” start to gain traction, and the inevitable result of that inner monologue-diatribe is crumpling on the course, sometimes almost imperceptibly but sometimes completely and always enough to matter.
But if bulimia counts as a mental-health issue widespread among runners and therefore worth addressing, so do a variety of trendy things that mark a frank departure from reality, i.e., a psychosis.
Right now, the running environment is awash in a long list of lunacies being framed as normal behaviors. These include:
Looking at someone you know is male and declaring him to be female because he says he is
Declaring males and females to be, on average, athletic equals, with access to opportunity accounting fully for performance differences
Being a world-class female runner who runs strictly against women and demanding people call you a "they"
Believing Shelby (believing Jerry, Shalane, et al. is gullibility, which is not a formal mental disorder but a mental deficiency)
Embracing a public bully and liar who's proudly eating herself to death under the guise of a sponsorship-level athlete
Pretending "whiteness" is not a racist term
Pretending you never saw fat or brown people running without interference or fanfare before 2020
Writing a false comeback story for The New York Times as an employee of the paper and ignoring letters of protest, or circulating such a story while knowing it is false
Pretending female coaches never abuse athletes even when their athletes say they do
Membership in, or any genial association with, the New York Road Runners
If this looks like an indictment of most running's major clubs, organizations, gear companies, public figures, editors, podcasters, influencers, CEOs, and race directors, it is. And we* all know how mentally troubled people handle criticism, hence all my shouting tumbling mostly into a void.
Obviously, some of the items in that list represent signs of not mental illness but basic mental weakness: Cowardice, playing along with pathologies to look good on Twitter (often while laughing at forbidden jokes and using forbidden terms in private), choosing a side because it feels better to externalize anger than admit you’re desperately unhappy with yourself. People can be forgiven for perceiving injustice in the world and wanting to yell at someone or something, or for feeling as if their own lives haven’t turned out as planned. But this collective green-lighting and active cheering on of damaging stupidity is either going to stop or leave the sport a gutted shell, with everyone in charge of messaging utterly deluded and operating from the perspective that the idea of having sports, or any social gathering, is to immediately identify all the bad people and stop them from hurting all the potential victims.
The “bad people” in running are the ones in charge of this grisly messaging. David Roche recently cobbled together this disaster of an advice column, and its appearance on Trial Runner in the same week SLB published her story made for bleakly comic timing. Roche will keep unspooling senseless jibber-jabber for as long as Zoe Rom remains the publication’s editor-in-absentia. But it remains almost inexplicable that he has people telling him he’s doing a great job, every time. Not all of them can be illiterate or ignorant, so I truly wonder what the motivation is.
I won’t go into great detail, because Roche’s most recent piece was absolutely hilarious, an obvious effort at punking me and my sidekick, and I would rather focus exquisitely on his slapstick stuff rather than chum that’s humor-neutral or too hard to read to even be disgusted by in an informed way. But look at how little this wordburst adds. Roche says nothing here of value. He says he had a rough go with the food and diet wars, but the only detail he gives is blaming his nutritional mayhem for the fact that his hair is thinning or gone. Dude, you’re in your thirties and things happen—did your mom’s dad have a full head of hair at 40?
Where is the lesson? What is the central struggle, what are the options, where’s the redemption? “Don’t undereat” is just silly even when someone writes in such a convoluted way that it takes a while to determine that this is, in fact, the article’s entire and sole tangible suggestion.
I hope a lot of people can read between the lines of SLB’s piece and gain something from it for themselves and appreciate how it moves this spiny discursive ball forward a little. Even when people disclose having an eating disorder, resulting conversations traditionally involve unconscious attempts to render things associated with the disorder abstract, mainly to avoid including “triggers.” Sometimes, what’s traditionally viewed as a trigger can actually serve as a reassurance to some people: “Hey, I’ve done that. I can’t be a total monster.”
Being open about having an eating disorder can in fact be a big step toward defanging it. But there is no lasting magic in it, only the promise of more maintenance and a string of good days. Some people simply age out of the compulsions associated with disordered eating without a whole lot of guided therapy, although this seems more common in men. But no one, Molly Seidel or anyone else, should think of themselves as damaged goods for being bulimic, and if they happen to be a public figure, they don’t owe anyone perfection or ongoing status updates. For all the static she may feel about the need to perform, Seidel has to know she has thousands of people pulling for her, and just want to see her smiling and running in ten years whether she collects more medals or not. Some of us really do get it.
(An earlier version of this post, along with an indeterminate number of previous ones, wrongly identified Lorge Butler as the RWOL editor-in-chief.)