If human-caused global warming is as real and scary as running's chattering class claims it is, then mass marathons simply need to go
Adding 50,000 huffing-and-puffing joggers to a smattering of capable athletes would be a questionable tradition even if every entrant rode a bicycle to the start
“Climate Change Has Ruined Summer,” complains the headline of a September 2, 2021 Outside Online story by Heather Hansman. Suggesting that a recent spate of wildfires were the result of “the disastrous impacts of our inaction,” Hansman observes that “This summer is a snapshot of how our future could continue if we keep burning fossil fuels.” Hansman doesn’t say whether she intends to limit or eliminate her own use of fossil fuels.
In early 2022, Outside Online published another Hansman story, “Everything You Need to Know About the State of the Environment in 2022.” (The piece is dated July 22, 2022, but it had to have been published at the beginning of January because it mentioned “last week’s unprecedented fire outside Boulder, Colorado,” a late-December 2021 event.) As if to warn readers that everything in the piece was originating from a badly frazzled and pliable mind, Hansman boasts in the opening paragraph that she and her friends “were outside and socially distancing again.”
Among the unpalatable truths Hansman lists under the heading “The Bad” in this piece is that “Fossil-Fuel Extraction Is Alive and Well.” Here, Hansman writes that “If we’re going to steer away from catastrophic temperatures, in the next year we need the president to make good on his campaign promise to end fossil-fuel subsidies.” Hansman doesn’t seem able to unlink her own use of fossil fuels from the ease with which the federal government makes fossil fuels available. This is an example of what people mean when they refer to leftists as “nanny staters,” and the electronic pages of Outline Online are filthy with the contributions of similar-minded “I can’t do anything useful until someone passes more laws” pseudo-activists.
That May, the same outlet ran another story by Hansman, this one titled “Climate Change Is Ruining My Birthday.” Here, Hansman cites a study that “shows just how much human-caused climate change is altering the weather.” While concluding with the lament that “No matter where I am next January, I can expect things to be different than they have been in the past,” Hansman doesn’t mention whether there might be anything she can do herself to ameliorate this expected difference, other than fret until next January.
Outside Online ran another story by Hansman on, or at least currently dated, July 29, 2022. This one was titled “How Not to Feel Paralyzed by Climate Disaster.” At last, a call to action—in this case, reading books filled with suggestions about what to do when not reading books. “[W]e desperately need to make change—and fast—to avoid annihilation,” Hansman writes, tracking the thinking of one author whose work she admires. “If enough people like me—a highly mobile American—stop flying as much, that can have broad impacts on the transportation system,” she muses.
Will Hansman stop flying as much? This passage is a hint (oomphasis mine): “We’re using too much carbon, and we need to make different personal choices to decrease it, but that’s really hard to do because of how the world has been developed based on carbon use.” But she may get around to quitting flying someday, as her closing line is “I landed on some real ways to make a difference instead of swirling in angst.”
On August 22, 2022, Outside Online published a story titled “Study: Climate Change Poses an Existential Threat to Outdoor Recreation.” This one seems to treat continued globing warming as inevitable, so that stance if nothing else eliminates even the specter of a need for a “So we might want to…” section here.
On August 15 of this year, Hansman graced Outside Online with yet another sky-is-falling special: “It’s Time to Cancel Campfires.” Hansman states that “Anything we can do now, from curbing emissions to maintaining healthy forests, will make the future less brutal.” She doesn’t say how she herself plans help to de-brutalize the future other than, one supposes, not setting forest fires. That may be a low bar, but it’s the first and only evidence of a pass/fail climate-action metric that Hansman produced in this string of stories about how humans need to act, now.
On August 23, the outlet ran a story by Kristin Hostetter, “5 Reasons I’m Convinced We Can Stop Climate Change.” Hostetter’s title is “head of Sustainability at Outside Interactive, Inc. and the resident sustainability columnist on Outside Online.” The story’s first section title is “To Stop Climate Change, We Need to Embrace Optimism.” Hostetter doesn’t explain whether, or how, personal optimism affects anyone’s fossil-fuel use.
The five reasons Hostetter gives for being optimistic about the climate herself: A teenager won a lawsuit in Montana; the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act; less plastic in New York City food deliveries; coal use is declining; and “Al Gore says we can stop climate change” (in quotes because it’s a direct quotation). Hostetter says Gore is still “still out there fighting the good fight” by giving public talks, which must mean that Gore is now running his mouth at these gatherings gratis.
Given Hostetter’s nanny-state score in this piece of about 9.8/10, it’s not surprising that she doesn’t list a single thing she believes she can do to save the environment other than think positive climate thoughts.
An August 25 Outside Online story by Wes Siler, “How to Dress for Extreme Weather Caused by Climate Change,” lists some nifty gear you can purchase to protect yourself from the extremely cold weather known to occasionally accompany continual, crisis-level global warming. Cool advertorial, bro.
Siler returned on November 17 with “Congress Won’t Touch the Climate Disaster. How Is President Biden Intervening?” My guess is that President Biden dedicates very little thought to mitigating “the climate disaster” and never did even in the days when this was a neurologically likely feat. Is Siler somehow unaware of the Biden administration’s intentions concerning fossil fuels? It doesn’t matter, because as a nanny-stater, Siler has the same proposed solution to every aspect of “the climate disaster”: Spend more taxpayer money, and at a time when most Americans—albeit not many Outside Online readers—are struggling.
Outside, Inc.’s suite of publications, which include Women’s Running and Trail Runner as well as Outside Online, are aimed at people who enjoy traveling, far and often, for purely recreational—that is, vain—reasons. Moreover, its target audience is college-educated, perennially complacent shitlibs convinced that they are so superior to common folk that they have all the answers, yet also so powerless that they must leave the work of actually making meaningful personal sacrifices for the betterment of society to others.
Everything the columnists for these awful outlets discuss, they preach about. Whether the topic is transgenderism, race relations, body positivity, or the classic gender wars, there is never any suggestion in these publications of inviting open dialogue or having reached tentative conclusions; it’s always a charming editorial tone of this is how it is so deal with it basted in someone help me! I’m dying over here! This would merely be annoying if these columnists were accurate, but The Unwavering Sermons of the Deceived and Retarded was never among my favorite CDs.
Has Outside Online tackled what The New York Times might call the “thorny issue” or personal fossil-fuel use, in particular air travel? Yes, but far less often than the outlet has cried CLIMATE CRISIS!, and with diminishing enthusiasm—and less of a veneer of sincerity—just in the past couple of years.
In a June 27, 2020 story titled “We Have Much Bigger Problems than Plastic Straws,” Mark Peruzzi writes:
[A]lthough this seems hypocritical from a magazine that extols adventure travel, perhaps the most important consumer change we can all make is to book fewer flights. I take eight to ten domestic flights each year for work and to visit family. Air travel feeds my children and lets them know their relatives. But it’s also destroying the planet I’ll leave them. Today, 12 percent of transportation-related CO2 emissions come from air travel. And the aviation industry is expected to triple its carbon footprint in the coming decades. But what if it didn’t? As consumers we need to choose the right over the easy—and minimize our environmental impacts when we cannot. It’s great that so many of us now feel guilty grabbing a plastic straw for our disposable drink cups, but imagine if we looked at ordering a cheap plane ticket or overnight delivery the same way? That’s real sacrifice.
Peruzzi is making a cogent admission here that he’s part of the problem he sees. Could he possibly get a similar job that didn’t require him to fly so often? Maybe. Should he? That’s really up to him, but at least he’s admitting there’s more he could do.
On February 24, 2022, Greg Melville contributed a piece to Outside Online titled “Do Carbon Offsets Work for Travel?” Melville’s answer to this question—these make “a tiny little difference”—is fairly close to the truth, which is that carbon offsets are a complete greenwashing scam.
On May 12, 2022, the publication either decided to try a “competing voices” approach or happened to run two pieces with conflicting theses on the same day. I’m guessing it was the latter.
The suggestion to avoid air travel is worthwhile read and gives examples of Americans who have found ways to get around the problem of wanting to see large portions of a 3,000-mile wide country while committing to staying out of airplanes. The pro-flying piece, in contrast, is an excellent demonstration of the determined arrogance of people who not only refuse to sacrifice anything themselves, but find honor in this commitment to genial avarice. The author, Cassidy Randall, has convinced herself that she’s a member of the class of oft-airborne intellectuals who are so full of great ideas about improving the environment that the implementation of their wisdom does more than compensate for anything the planes they’re in do to Earth’s atmosphere. (Randall also wrote a piece in May 2022 about her separate dating adventures in Montana, Canada, and New Zealand.)
The main reward of achieving this impressive level of self-delusion is that it’s like buying carbon offsets without spending any money: These people’s own thoughts are, according to their other thoughts, basically carbon offsets. And it’s hard to argue that anything can be more useless than something already established as yet one more mega-scale grift by global elites.
On March 14 of this year, Outside Online published a story by Kate Siber, “Should I Stop Flying? It’s a Difficult Decision to Make.” I’ll spare you the trouble of scanning to the bottom of the piece for the inevitable “Sounds nice, but” off-ramp; the one Siber glides down is “I’d like to say that I’m vowing to quit flying entirely, but that may not be realistic.”
On April 24, Martin Fritz Huber, whose entire function at Outside Online is the generation of chin-stroking, quasi-controversial pith about whatever people are arguing about on Twitter/X, took things further and gave readers permission to do away with the whole “Should I fly somewhere just to finish 193rd in a race no one not involved with the event knows about?” question in favor of “How Guilty Should You Feel About Flying to that Destination Race?”
Huber asked runner and philosophy professor Sabrina Little whether flying to destination races was more of a climate affront to the planet than “hopping on a jet to fly across the country to ski Utah powder.” Little’s answer is telling: “Some people live for destination skiing or World Marathon Majors and see them as once-in-a-lifetime trips. Should we all do them? Probably not.” Okay, but who decides who’s in the group that “probably shouldn’t”? Huber obviously believes that his forgettable work in the industry justifies his flying all over the planet, but what preening, elitist, industry-superfluous “gear guy” doesn’t?
All of these stories are from Outside Online. The rest of Outside, Inc.’s running-relayed pubs are no better. In August, I wrote about perhaps the most flagrant example of a running-industry climate-poseur, Trail Runner editor-of-sorts Zoe Rom.
Whether a climate disaster exists or not, and to what extent, is irrelevant for present purposes. What matters is whether this slate of allegedly climate-nervous authors actually believes that human-caused global warming is in fact a serious problem. If they do believe this, yet leave the reduction of air travel to others, then they’re assholes. If they don’t believe this, and are just supplying articles filled with contrived concerns just for the easy check, then they’re liars, and this obviously wouldn’t be the only issue multiple publications under the Outside, Inc. umbrella have published lies about.
In January 2022, Molly Hanson wrote a piece about eleven U.S. road races readers should try because these events are characterized by “high energy, rich cultural history, and guaranteed fun.” At least one of these classic races ends in a nonexistent football stadium even larger than the Rose Bowl.
Just yesterday, Outside Online published “Why Your Next Vacation Should Be a Marathon” by Jamie Aranoff. The author advocates for traveling to run or merely watch the six World Marathon Majors races, which are held in Tokyo, Boston, London, Berlin, Chicago, and New York City. Aranoff writes, “I’ve also got my eye on marathons in Honolulu, California’s Napa Valley, Australia’s Gold Coast (where I studied abroad), and Ireland’s Dingle County.”
Aranoff has run two marathons, including the Chicago Marathon in October. Her time in Chicago was 5:06:33. I don’t know if Aranoff is among those who believes that someone needs to start making sacrifices, pronto, or we won’t even have an outdoors to jog around in anymore. But anyone who does hold that belief should immediately recognize that slow marathoners simply don’t need to be convening in huge masses in large cities just to jog around when they could do the same thing on streets near their homes and thus without adding to the climate disaster, possibly by causing it to become unbearably cold somewhere in Montana next week. And slow U.S.-based runners who insist on official marathon finishes now all live within an hour or two of at least one small or mid-sized annual marathon anyway, so it’s not like they would be excluded from the official racing scene altogether. A medal is a medal, and minutes and seconds pass at roughly the same rate no matter the timing equipment used.
What counts as a slow runner? I’d say anyone incapable of breaking three hours. “But that’s a good time—only a small percentage of marathon entrants ever achieve that!” some of you might respond. You’d be correct about the second part, but incorrect about the first. Anyone who is 50 percent slower than the best in the world at completing a given task is simply not objectively speedy at completing that task. Try driving down an interstate highway at 40 or 45 miles an hour in good weather and observe whether most cars are edging away from you or blowing by you. That’s your 3:03 marathon against the fastest Africans on the planet.
And it shows. too. Watch the people on 2:59 or even 2:50 pace 22 miles into any marathon, especially when you’ve watched a cadre of 2:04 guys glide soundlessly past the same spot 40 or so minutes earlier. They may not look dead, but compared to the dudes running 4:40 to 4:50 pace, they look like folks who wound up on the losing end of a spirited and drawn-out domestic dispute and are now drunkenly fleeing he house: heads akimbo, nipples bleeding, knees knocking together, eyes unfocused, mouths agape in great wet blowjobby "O" shapes as if fellating the fart-filled air around them.
I mean no disrespect by any of this, of course. And this is just the opening chapter of a long, earnest discussion about the health of the planet and its regularly airborne jogging columnists, not the final say. But we desperately need a way to recognize who should get to fly or drive to these big-city, high-exposure marathons and who needs to sit home and concentrate on being more optimistic.
And remember, none of the above applies to you anyway if you either don’t believe that a climate disaster is in progress or don’t actually care about this any more than the roster of privileged, government-dependent climate-action columnists for Outside, Inc. do.