In advance of the obsolete annual parade through the five beleaguered boroughs, the media have doubled down on glorifying reality-averse flabbermouths

The uglier the sleaze-fest becomes, the harder its showrunners will try to ram it down our throats—even as more and more people grasp that Wokism was a comprehensive scam from the start

The 2023 New York City Marathon is scheduled for Sunday. The NYCM, like all mass marathons, serves no function besides making money for its organizers (the New York Road Runners, as tragicomically degraded as the club’s overrun host city and overmatched mayor) and the local hospitality sector while catering to the egos of thousands of aerobically handicapped people who habitually cough up hundreds of dollars at a pop to straggle, struggle, and shuffle along 26.21875 miles of rat-trodden, pothole-pocked pavement.

This seemingly contradictory phenomenon has existed for decades mainly because distance running is one of the only pastimes I can think of that people can enjoy immensely even when they objectively suck at it compared to the very best. “Distance running” is, after all, merely a contemporary term for activity once required for survival by all members of a human herd; on this view, anyone, fast or slow, is susceptible to becoming hooked on the activity as a lifestyle even in a modern era driven by external cues to mass-action and digitized task imperatives. Exertion on foot feels good because it is correlated, somewhere in that fat-flecked pile of goop atop all our necks, with hunting, mate-finding, and survival.

Try to imagine enjoying playing basketball, even alone in your own driveway, day after day, if you could never achieve a free-throw proficiency above fifteen percent. And someone with 300/300 vision (corrected) probably wouldn’t find consistent joy in a sport like archery. But even people who take six or seven hours to cover 26 miles can derive enormous benefit not only from the sensation of movement and its endorphin-rich aftermath. but also from positive changes to the physical vessel of existence itself and the confidence in these changes being reliably in process. And those who cannot run can, if healthy enough to walk, derive all the same benefits from ambling as they otherwise would from running.

In an age of marathon entry fees well in excess of $100, the ability of an objective slug to fully enjoy the perambulatory arts without paying a cent to waddle along in the fartclouds and sweat-stank of thousands of other laggards should seem like a veritable life hack: One can indulge in limitless running without paying for anything besides proper shoes and clothing (and for most, some kind of timepiece). Name one other universally accessible pleasurable habit that continues to fulfill these basic, humble criteria, excluding any pleasures banned in holy texts.

Yet because of the wonky vicissitudes of human social psychology, people have been tricked into thinking that getting a medal for covering 26 miles of road someone else has chosen, and that they may never see again, means something special if it costs enough to enter compared to doing the same thing alone or with a small group of friends for free.

The advent of social media, eventually including sites like Strava, created a nation of benign, mostly upper-middle-class idiots insistent on displaying medals for achievements that may mean the world to someone with little talent for running but were simply never worth bragging about at scale. Nevertheless, people even slower than these bozos soon started feeling left out, and there has been continual pressure on race organizers to loosen mass-marathon qualifying standards and keep the roads of major cities open for six, seven, even ten hours. This was a natural inevitability in a vain society with lots of collective free time and skillful marketing by road-race promoters and their corporate allies, but sites like Instagram served as accelerants.

When Wokism and its spectacularly grim array of ersatz “social-justice” movements exploded onto the scene in 2020, it was game over. With no one’s explicit permission, cheating and fabulism—including self-anointment with incorrect or nonexistent gender-based labels—became not only selectively permissible, but grounds for book deals and sponsorships from companies like HOKA.

And sufficiently slow people—if they were the right “color,” anyway—didn’t even have to finish marathons to count as marathoners; they could just make numbers up, and media outlets would publish these numbers and keep the resulting incorrect articles live and unamended even when hounded by citizen fact-checkers armed with the dispositive goods.

Worse and more cartoonish yet, these liars, cheaters, comment-section gaslighters, and cowards who block and flee from the few people with the gumption to serve as determined critics—demanded to be called athletes.

And somehow, it has all worked. And in context, this isn’t surprising: While every subculture, institution, and organization in America soon wound up in clown-world after the advent of sham social-justice activism, running and its shitlib-dominated punditry was one of its earliest and noisiest arrivals.

Now, when I say that slow people have no business entering official marathons, I am stating this from the standpoint of an attempted shitlib. This is because the media outlets glorifying the recently hatched gaggle of citizen-running cheaters and swindlers are entirely owned and operated by promulgators of shitlib politics.

Shitlibs are to genuine liberals are what the Wokish are to activists who earnestly want to help the systematically downtrodden rather than elevate a small slurry of bombastic tokens and purposefully inelegant, racist, and dishonest “disruptors.”

As someone who has always supported free speech (including for America’s vast swath of newly emergent Christian zealots), meaningful education at the public’s expense, protection of open spaces, sound science, equal access to opportunity regardless of “identity,” same-sex marriage rights, abortion rights, and the quaint notion of affordable quality health care while opposing wars, mistrusting three-letter agencies, and hating the whoredom between government and industry, I should be able to identify strongly with Democrats. (I’ve also always been pro-nuclear power, but you probably won’t find many physics majors from my era who aren’t.) I also think everyone should have a loaded firearm trained on another citizen at all times unless texting and driving or experiencing clot-shot-induced vertigo.

I’m not saying these stances are all correct or absolute, just establishing my bona fides. But because Democrats have been shanghaied by a near-singular media focus on concocted narratives surrounding Russia and Donald Trump into utterly dispensing of almost all of these stances, I and others like me who haven’t shifted their core principles one millimeter are now portrayed as the principles-shedding haters in the mix.

In any case, shitlibs should be specifically and rabidly against mass marathons, because from their perspective, never mind “climate change” being a concern, we’re already in an outright climate crisis. That bastion of sound science, Runner’s World, emphasized this only months ago, when Heather Meter Irvine asserted that the planet is in the grip of an “urgent climate crisis.”

One of two things is true. Either the claim about a literal crisis itself is false (or at least insincere), or the claim is true (or at least sincere) and not one yapping yutz in the running industry with any real visibility actually cares about anyone but themselves. The notion of gathering 50,000 people at a running event, with almost all of them flying or driving to and from the event, is 100 percent incompatible with the idea that civilization will soon collapse unless everyone stops burning fossil fuels.

So which is it? The answer may be moot, as both options portray joggers who fly around bemoaning “climate change” (and just say “global warming” if that’s what you mean) in an unflattering light.

And if that’s not enough, shitlibs are also still keenly interested in worrying about dying of covid, even if the 3-percent uptake rate of the new “boosters” suggests the same crowd is far less interested in dying from experimental injections.

From last week’s New York Times:

These claims are false, other than the “You’ll hear it again” part and the name of the bent doctor who supplied the falsehoods about the new jabs.

But let’s pretend we* should be worried about spreading new coronavirus variants. How exactly does a mass marathon serve this end? Especially one with a multi-day indoor expo?

Again: I don’t care one bit who flies where or can’t fight off whatever germs they encounter when they arrive there—germs that all root and multiply with special avidity in fat people. But libtards say they do. In between not following any of their own edicts, they issue these edicts with aplomb and aplenty.

And on the matter of fat people, major media outlets have doubled down lately on the same nonsense from the same bloated and purulent sources, one chronic meandering ass-boil in particular, even though the know cogent readers don’t buy any of it. Just as with everything else these outlets cover, the intent is to gaslight the public into submission by normalizing decrepit ideas by dint of banal repetition.

This was clearly the idea behind an October 23 editorial in The New York Times credited to Caster Semenya, the biologically male person who collected five global titles in the women’s 800 meters. I’ll summarize this obviously coached grievance to spare you the agony of reading it: Semenya admits to being male, expresses anger at being outed as one over a decade ago and finding it harder to cheat as a result, describes winning a bunch of gold medals, and says “Kiss my ass, science, I’m a woman, so there. I’m keepin’ deez nutz.”

Bro, your storied career is over. It’s time to find some chill in your strut. Be grateful you get to keep all that ill-gotten swag you “won” only because you came along at a time when the so-called West was undergoing a period of forced intellectual diminution—an honest-to-Christ de-enlightenment—marked by the hoarse sanctification of formerly pathological behaviors in concert with mundane, correct opinions being treated as the eliminationist chatter of dangerous radicals.

Two days after Semenya’s editorial was published, The Washington Post attempted to raise (or lower) the degradation-stakes with a piece titled “Slow is the new fast: Tips for marathoners at the back of the pack.”

First of all, any publication with editors so extraordinarily lazy and uncreative that they resort to using the phrase “slow is the new fast” in any context, let alone in a headline, would not be worth reading even if its reporting were accurate. It’s one thing to say “50 is the new 40” because 50-year-olds are as active, and vain, as yesteryear’s 40-year-olds. But slow will never be fast—we have watches and other machines to keep track of who is proficient at moving forward from point A to point B without mechanical assistance and who is not.

But such laziness is to be expected in this piece, as it was written by Kelyn Soong, the same microcephalic scribe responsible for the recent deification of brave self-mutilator and rule-skirting doper Cal Calamia.

Soong’s October 25 column begins with a falsehood:

At age 38, Latoya Shauntay Snell of Brooklyn has finished 27 marathons. Her secret? She completes them at a very, very slow pace.

Either Soong failed to fact-check this claim or—more likely, in my view, as this guy is clearly an establishment functionary with no spine, brains, or conscience—he knew Latoya Snell was lying and printed her claim anyway. But as I’ve posted probably a half-dozen times now, Snell has officially completed 13 marathons, none since 2019, precisely when she began accruing accolades and sponsorships and emitting inky jets of unpleasantness toward her detractors. The ones she’s willing to acknowledge, anyway, and I for some reason am not among them.

The logic underlying Snell’s progression, or regression, as an “athlete” is not complicated: She’s gotten fatter as she’s gone from doing little running to none, and now she’s too massive and slow to count in official race results after heaving her chortling and dissembling bulk through city streets in nine-plus hours.

Anyone who does a Web search on Latoya Snell quickly finds my stuff about her quickly, and if he or she somehow doesn’t, he or she can use sites like Athlinks.com and MarathonGuide.com to check Snell’s claim against race-result databases.

And to anyone who thinks it’s simply not a big deal that a slowpoke like Snell lies about this and has help from every media outlet there is: Why is this so? Aren’t black people expected to be able to count as well as others?

There is a very obvious element of patronization afoot in the lionization of deviants of color like Snell, an element of ingrained racism just as grating as any overt white supremacist’s if you cock your head and listen right. The privileged, mostly white waterheads who churn out profiles like these on methodically mendacious assholes of color like Snell let black people paint far outside the moral lines, because these people believe that blacks as a rule can do no better.

The rest of Soong’s piece is almost unreadable. It looks like it was written by a 15-year-old blogger. One piece of advice is “bring your own nutrition,” as if the biggest obstacle for slower runners finishing isn’t being undertrained globules of online yammering but potentially starving to death. And it features Martinus Evans, a scammer with the hugest, ugliest, wildly swaying man-tits anyone has ever beheld and—more pertinently—whose wife stole over fifty grand from the University of Connecticut on Evans’ behalf a few years ago, cash designated for an academic scholarship. But because polite society is obligated to infantilize ethnic minorities in order to better their lives, polite people can’t call criminals or liars “of color” crooks or con-artists anymore.

Regardless of the preferred or implied rationale, anyone who ignores the evidence of Snell’s lying and the criminality of the Evans couple has no business working for the media or in any capacity requiring minimal integrity. Or at least this would have been the case before the mainstream media became a clarion of lies, warmongering, racist filth, toxic-injection and face-masking advocacy, and other forms of cross-eyed authoritarian belching.

Most of this intellectual sewage has flowed from blunt-minded Millennial white women from well-off families with rapidly fading feminist-utopia dreams who became “journalists” to process their own issues, but were asked along the way to spread neocon propaganda and the anti-human effluvia of Bill Gates- and George Soros-fronted organizations. Maybe Soong identifies as a white harridan; if not, he should. Like the earnest journalist he is, he has his Instagram profile set to private so no one can hector him there about his periodic discharges of slapstick-level dreck.

Anytime a mainstream news outlet publishes anything about running these days, it’s always sketchy or outright stupid—defending dopers, pretending “transwomen” are female, framing 300-pound puke-buckets as clarions of wisdom, health, and drive. The idea is to get people to swallow the obviously false as legitimate, and the media are doing this across information realms. That this has proven wildly effective on so many decent people, and that society that has embraced psychopathology while refusing to tolerate input from the sane, is one of the main reasons I have no use for common society anymore and feel unconstrained when remarking on its patent malignancies. If I thought anyone or anything in authority were worth one sliver of my respect, I would probably be inclined to offer it.

Dedicated running outlets, of course, are even worse.

On Monday, Runner’s World, which has become so shambolic in recent years its ignorant freelancers and illiterate, chickenshit editors defy conventional insults, managed to outdo Soong’s advocacy for attention-craving snails with a piece by Abby Carney titled “Don’t Forget: The Back of the Pack Deserves Your Support, Too.”

It’s hard to know where to start with this one, as it appears written to intentionally annoy anyone who runs seriously and has no inclination to whine, lie, or demand recognition for middling or imaginary accomplishments.

For one thing, no one in these races “deserves” my support, from the bug-eyed ectodopers leading the bloated pack to the dingbats struggling to hold 15:00 pace or whatever walking clip has been established as a pace cut-off. There is nothing “heroic” about someone who knows he or she will have a hard time getting through a marathon and then pays money to try anyway. No one is drafted against his or her will into a marathon field and given insufficient time and resources to prepare.

Again, whatever such a person is trying to prove doesn’t—or shouldn’t—require a race bib and the presence of photographers.

Carney also pushes the trite, self-defeating myth that slower, browner, or wider runners still feel unwelcome at road races. I say “self-defeating” because when someone notes that the 1990 Chicago Marathon had just over 6,000 finishers and this year’s rendition over 48,000, with the average finishing time rising all the while, and then suggests that slower runners somehow feel unwelcome in the sport, she looks either badly blinkered or like the laziest liar on call. This is in addition to Carney and Soong obviously shilling for the large corporations that sponsor these events that have, by popular demand, become showcases of whiny, narcissistic can’t-do’s and won’t-even-trys.

But the most glaring part is this:

In advance of the 2023 New York City Marathon, select runners including Snell and Kerr were invited to participate in a similar pilot program. On race day, Kerr will be lining up with Wave 1, which could potentially be a game changer, she says. The now three-time marathoner is glad that the earlier start time means she’ll have an official finisher time this year, but she’ll still be on the course for a long while.

That’s right; LieToya, fresh off waltzing last month’s Chicago Marathon at 21 minutes per mile, was apparently offered or nearly offered a spot the first corral on Sunday morning, with one such bib verifiably assigned to a similarly slow person. It would be a terrible shame if Snell also indeed wound up in the first corral and one of the tens of thousands of genuine runners—well, a few hundred; maybe a thousand—behind her trampled her after she bent over to scoop up a Twinkie or a bottle of rum somewhere on the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge.

The more these degraded characters brag about getting away with cheating, or merely about being proud, sessile gluttons who pollute road races with their illegitimate presences, the more acclaim and handouts they receive, and the more they are regarded as dispensers of legitimate wisdom. There are hundreds if not thousands of fat people out there who can honestly relate what it’s like to struggle in the ways Snell pretends to, but the media isn’t interested in anyone who doesn’t conspicuously cut corners.

There is another driver to the thematic suggestion that being fat doesn’t lead to any meaningful deterioration in physical capacity. All of these outlets are heavily funded by pharmaceutical companies, and overweight people are by far the greatest consumers of prescription drugs, many of them very expensive metabolic modulators.

Whatever the various etiologies of this nonsense, the moment I started questioning any of when it popped up in running, and saying things that would have made universal sense five years earlier, like “Males can’t actually be females, even when they think they are,” I was a persona non grata. As my past work has been gradually offloaded from the Web by actors representing the entities that published or inherited it, not one of the wharf-rats involved has shown the nerve to respond to any of my e-mails and other communications about these systematic deletions. The moment Wokism arrived, levels of dismissal and gutlessness I never before experienced immediately became normalized, because when people consciously publish lies or otherwise behave in underhanded ways, what response do they really have for a critic persistent enough to shrug off barbs from a smattering of Afro-racists and purple-haired shemales?

I cannot think of a club I would rather be excluded from than the craven hypocrites, fools, and semi-literate goon-squads now forming the face of citizen-level distance running. That so many people I first came to know as logical and principled turned out to be gelatinous shills and harpies, people who refused to stand up to a gaggle of mentally ill or otherwise illegitimate aggressors, makes the whole scene look especially morbid from my angle.

I’m actually not, however, trying to discourage slow runners from running, although if I provided vivid descriptions of the bowlegged and splay-footed displays of gasping, bloody-nippled futility I see starting right around the time six-minute-pace marathoners start doddering into the chute, scaring little kids and making any nuns in the crowd even more frigid, this might be the unfortunate result.

I would, however, love to see these same people shun mass marathons and starve them into obscurity or nonexistence. But even if a hundred people with a hundred times my visibility made this a primary goal, it would never happen, because the kind of people who enter these races simply because they’re well known are pure egoists and not easily discouraged. They usually have easy lives and the luxury of bitching—usually to successful effect—whenever, say, Tracksmith makes special shirts for people who themselves are, in cold but undeniable arithmetic terms, fairly dismal runners (the fastest Boston Marathon qualifying standard is around 50 percent slower than the world record), making it impossible to determine who the worst of these dingbats are—the ones who would pay to advertise maxing out with a dismal time or the ones who can’t even sniff at this pitiful level of achievement.

And if you think I’m being overly harsh here, do the math. If you watched a golfer take fifty percent more strokes than a PGA-card-holding pro to complete an 18-hole round—around 100 to 115 pointless smacks of the club—you might not be inclined to holler “Jesus Christ, just frigging quit, man!” but you would also not pretend that what you were watching translated to anything above a child’s concept of proficiency. I should know, because I have in fact shot such a score in golf; that was decades ago, and I’d be pleased with an 18-hole score of 120 today, because I own only one club, a four-wood.

Like Soong, everyone at Runner’s World runs and hides from unwanted, uncomfortable input about the publication’s content or editorial-managerial decisions. I’ve given up on contacting any of the incompetent and industry-poisoning parties involved and instead will periodically trash their work—easy to do when to comes to scions like Jennifer Acker, who writes on her site that “As an editor, I always keep a pulse on what’s trending” (as am outcast Substacker, I’m pretty sure the expression Acker was after here is “keep a finger on the pulse of”).

It’s preferable, anyway, to simply stand back and ejaculate insults and scorn on everything citizen running has become. The NYRR is the perfect apotheosis of shitlibism (a clunky word best replaced by “libtardation”), pro-death piggery, fascism, fearmongering, and the denial of everyday aspirations being crushed by inflation, crime, and the psychotic recklessness of world governments.

The NYCM served a real purpose when it was instituted shortly after I was. Most people didn’t exercise or see it as especially beneficial to health. Frank Shorter winning a marathon gold medal at the 1972 Munich Summer Olympics was the major catalyst for the American “running boom,” but running took on a life wholly its own because people simply liked it. A smallish chunk of people who went for their first runs about fifty years ago stuck with it for years or even for life. Some of these people became my coaches, and quite a few are still with us today, reading rants like these in greatly magnified fonts.

Today, the race is just a for-profit train of bodies, with the marketing focusing at any time on what’s in style.

This is a screen shot of the current NYRR home page.

I’ll probably have more to say about the event before Sunday, both to explore the above themes and to remark on others in the NYCM field, which reportedly includes quite a few runners capable of respectable times.

Also, owing to events starting on October 7 but mostly as a result of subsequent overseas overtures, I sincerely worry about the marathon being the site of a targeted violent attack. Or, if Sunday passes without incident, the city itself. While no one I know truly knows the genuine origins of 9/11, I am not the first person to propose that the Islamic world, currently more restive than usual, sees the New York City skyline as a series of evil, arrogant Jew-spikes in need of immediate flattening: the BlackRock, Pfizer, and New York Times buildings represent only a starter kit. Then there is the New York Stock Exchange itself, and perhaps the Federal Reserve.

I personally wouldn’t go near New York City right now for a host of reasons pertinent to personal safety and security, but for the foreseeable future the specter of a terror attack will be chief among those reasons. (For whatever reason, I think London has more to worry about on this front right now, but I would prefer to not be in a position to speculate about what point on Earth is likely to experience mass unexpected “casualties” next.)