iRunFar's attempt to flatter Zoe Rom is instead a detailed explanation of why she sucks at her job and should quit being an editor

There's failing while at least demonstrating effort, consistency, and a willingness to respond to criticism. Then there's the bubble of solipsistic babble forming Rom's entire persona

IRunFar.com published a profile on Tuesday of someone the piece describes as an “ultrarunner, podcast host, author, editor, comedian, and coach.” This person’s name is Zoe Rom, and she’s apparently the same figure with that name I often criticize here.

The author does on excellent job of explaining—or, for those aware of Rom’s work and overall vibe, confirming—exactly why the one and only Zoe Rom is so relentlessly terrible at being an editor, as well as why Rom can put her own hypocrisy on superblast while experiencing remarkably little cognitive dissonance.

The author is a woman named Morgan Tilton. In my experience, there are no female-Americans named Morgan who are anything besides very white and at least upper-middle-class, so this is as fitting as an essay about the multifaceted excellence of Megan Roche by, say, David Roche or their eleven-month-old-son Leo.

The first line—“As a fan of trail running, you likely know of the work of ‘Trail Runner Magazine’ Editor-in-Chief Zoë Rom and her capable team”—left me laughing almost until I reached the part a half-dozen or so paragraphs later where Rom is also identified as the managing editor of Women’s Running.

On the same day this profile was published, Women’s Running sent out a newsletter linking to an article about Jenny Simpson pegging Simpson’s age at 32, presumably in Earth years.

The link in the e-mail led to this four-and-a-half-year-old article:

I gave examples the other day of how the remaining corporate running outlets all republish old articles and give them fresh dates without indicating these articles’ original dates of publication. If these outlets are going to insist on this already sketchy practice, then their editors should at least take non-evergreen stories out of whatever “pls repurpose this at some point thx!!!” database these dingbats maintain (and in assuming they even use databases, I’m probably giving them far too much credit).

Between revelations about Rom’s various alleged jobs, Tilton describes Rom’s upbringing, calling Rom’s hometown of Fayetteville, Arkansas “the track capital of the world.” Rom claims she was cut from her junior-high school’s cross-country team, which I don’t believe. She also says she spent two of her four years of high school in Italy, which is impossible to not believe.

Rom managed to work as a backpacking guide in New Mexico during college despite attending college in Arkansas. This part about her college years was remarkable, too:

She also picked up a job at a local run store, giving her access to gear and race entries that she couldn’t otherwise afford.

From two years of “studying” in Europe to having to work just to afford the rudiments of a running life? Did mom and dad cut her off in between? Because that spigot seems to be flowing presently.

But the line directly afterward is even better:

On Saturdays, employees were even allowed to arrive late, allowing them to race.

While this is standard at a lot of running stores—it was at the one I worked at, and that was 32 or so years ago—it’s also emblematic of the ingrained expectations of Rom and her ilk concerning trading labor for monetary compensation.

Rom came to Boulder in 2016 to pursue a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Colorado, a credential the esteemed institution duly awarded her two years later. Her assessment of this stage of her ever-challenging life is virtue-signaling run through a rusty Cuisinart:

“At the time, Donald Trump was running for President, and I was concerned about how the national conversation was drifting into uncomfortable territories and felt called to get involved in climate action and use my skills for a cause.”

Trump has been out of office for over two and a half years. In the interim, the new president has ramped up drilling in Alaska and aided and abetted environment-demolishing warfare, while Rom has ignored these developments in favor of taking frequent trips by plane, often to Europe, and explaining why her climate-inaction is actually a form of silent protest against the inaction of even richer people.

She also tries to convey the raw, venerated magic of Boulder and its running surfaces:

In Arkansas, a group run would mean we’re running on a gravel towpath, an order of magnitude below what I experienced in Boulder.

Funny, I’ve lived in Boulder for around ten years and run on a lot of gravel paths. I even see trailers (residential, not construction) on a few of these routes. These seem to be universal. Maybe Rom came to Boulder, and stayed in the area, for reasons unrelated to the unique topography and soil?

Rom had these things to say about her job as an editor (oomphases mine):

In Boulder, I felt like I was in the echo chamber, but trail running isn’t an echo chamber — there are a lot of ideas and opinions and people push back, which means I’m reaching people who haven’t been reached before. There’s room for growth in trail running. Having a traditional narrative de-centered scares people and leads some to react by asserting their dominance.

As a journalist, you don’t always get direct feedback, it feels ephemeral, there’s data about page time or negative comments posted that are not healthy for any human brain, particularly not my sensitive writer human brain. I got dis-regulated with that relationship and feedback. I self-censored and over-edited myself, and I was having trouble writing things down.

Huh. As soon as Rom’s words and those of Trail Runner’s most prolific low-IQ writer, David Roche, reached me for the first time, I wasn’t scared, nor did I feel inclined to “assert dominance.” I responded by giving their lazy, incorrect, hypocritical content borne of virtue-signaling white-clown grifting exactly the reviews it deserved.

When I was using Twitter for posting as well as for reading, this was the response I got to a question about something in Trail Runner:

Rom, David Roche, and everyone associated with these howling vessels of high-flown insincerities are simply cowards. But even if they weren’t, they would have a hard time holding up their end during any moderated conversations between Trail Runner representatives or fans and myself about the various claims they’ve made, both scientific and sociological.

These people are petrified—not of violence, but of both shared reality and their own feelings. And with good reason: They are wildly insecure about being seen as anything less than perfect, when in fact there’s almost nothing any of them are good at besides scamming, whining, lying, blocking, and remaining maximally ignorant and gelatinous. Every bit of shame they feel is well-deserved, and in fact they should be slimed with far more of it by all of us (I’ll at some point declare how much of this sliming is too much).

Rom is a brazen, shrewish hypocrite about issues other than climate change. Like fellow Outside, Inc.-funded bimbotic shitlord Molly Mirhashem—the frazzled and hollow-headed deputy digital editor of Outside Online who killed an accepted story I wrote for that publication in 2020 owing to its excessive whiteness—she’s taken an unabashedly bigoted stance, on the job no less, against older white males, at least those who refuse to humiliate themselves at the altar of “social justice” lunacies just to stay relevant in the cultural kitty-litter box in which distance running exists.

The profile features a picture of Rom’s “partner.” Nothing against the guy, but as a ginger who looks like he does, he’s pushing an 11 on a whiteness scale of 10. And of course David Roche—who transitioned from being a regular columnist to serving as an official Trail Runner editor himself sometime within the past year—is another alabaster-pale monkey-man who, like his wife, has a magical ability to be seen only in the company of other white joggers.

The redhead-as-archetypal-white-man trope conveniently arose in a September 7 Trail Runner story featuring peripatetic racist moron Alison Desir. This offering celebrates Desir scoring yet another free vacation to a place she knows is devoid of white people—in this instance westernmost Alaska—so that she can complain that there are no BIPOC trail runners there. (If either Desir or the author remembers what the “I” in “BIPOC” stands for and how it might apply to current inhabitants of western Alaska whose ancestors have been here the longest, this understanding is not evident.)

My favorite paragraph:

A few times during the retreat, people in Alaska recognized Désir. While the group was waiting in line in a coffee shop in Anchorage, a white, red-haired woman walked up to Désir and said, “I’m a fan of yours, and I just want you to know that it’s great that you have brought all these people up to Alaska.”

There are three entertaining aspects to this: that Desir is obviously lying, the way she describes her alleged white fan, and the phrase “these people” making its way into the fake fan’s fake compliment. Regarding the last, if Desir ever actually heard a white runner refer to a group of blacks as “you people,” I’m pretty sure she would immediately envision at least six more paid vacations for herself to melanin-starved destinations such as Presque Isle, Maine and Grand Forks, North Dakota in the ensuing furor she would unquestionably create.

But heck, I’m inspired, as I’m supposed to be. The invented episode reminds me of a run I recently did though back-country Mississippi. It was a very warm day, and two black men wearing bib-style overalls and straw hats were resting contentedly under the shade of a willow tree, enjoying a healthful brunch of watermelon, shortening bread, and collard greens. “Saaaay!” one of them piped up. “Aren’t you that ‘anti-woke’ white fella from up in the Rockies?” It turned out that one of these men was a paid subscriber to Beck of the Pack, and now both of them are. I forget the name of the town and the people, but otherwise I will never forget the power in that unexpected moment.

Each of these Trail Runner “BIPOC safaris” into lily-white towns—whether the sneering swine Desir is the protagonist or not—are just excuses for someone to scream “HEY! Give us black people who can afford to go on vacations MORE. FREE. SHIT!” And it works, because it’s easier for companies to play along with the grifting than to get their hands dirty with anything difficult.

Those on both sides of these transactions are embarrassments to genuine activism, especially given that colored folks have never had it worse in decades or more—and not because of random white people, but because of the white people these mush-brained, privileged trail-idiots of all hues—Desir, Rom, the Roches, and a fair number of blondes named Morgan—reliably vote for.

Two sections in particular powerfully illustrate Rom’s basic lack of fitness for the world most people live in—including most runners—and her consequent lack of suitability for not only the job(s) she now nominally holds but any job requiring her to step outside of her comfort zone by a single micron.

The first:

While in graduate school, she also cut her teeth freelancing for Adventure Projects and “Backpacker” magazine, while deciding if she personally wanted to spend more time backpacking or running. She was also dabbling in biking and climbing.

Some graduate students are rumored to focus on what they’ll be doing for work once they’re no longer graduate students. Rom instead already had her comedienne’s eye on no fewer than four leisure-class hobbies.

And the second:

But back in 2018, she was also struggling with the work-life balance of being a radio host at NPR. Up at 4 a.m. everyday to record for national radio while training for longer trail races was exhausting. Stress caused sleep troubles, too. She needed a more flexible job and saw that “Trail Runner Magazine” was hiring.

This is almost surreal. Someone with no kids and with a work-from-home job—for NPR, an outlet that offers real career advancement to white female imbeciles of privilege exactly like Rom—needed even more flexibility?

I think the second example is more flat-out pathetic, but this isn’t worth polling the members of this virtual room about.

And to close out my review, when I first looked at the story, it mentioned Rom having a sister named Chloe, but this sister’s name has since been changed to Clio. Even that is somehow a letdown.

I admit I would watch Zoe Rom do stand-up as long as she were the opening act for Joe Biden, Junior’s next Netflix comedy special. Biden will be looking for a new job himself shortly, and since Trail Runner is old-white-male averse and probably due for execution in a couple of years, Biden should not apply there and should instead become a full-time comic.

Will he do the bit about the Filipino nurse who stuck a finger up his ass during the Korean War, a thankfully nonexistent nurse given the non-existence of the military stint? Will he deliver the “Bidenomics” howler? He won’t have many gigs to get it all out, so he needs to be efficient.

Finally, thinking in more depth about tempo runs lately has me appreciating just how uncommonly bad the advice David Roche gives is. To review what I wrote the other day in condensed form, with some new seasoning:

Roche says that a three-hour marathoner could do tempo runs at 6:00 pace, tantamount to saying this runner could run close to 60 minutes for 10 miles. Roche is therefore indirectly asserting that 60 minutes for 10 miles and 3:00:00 for the marathon are equivalent times.

Any experienced and knowledgeable coach knows this is wrong, and can show that the conversion factor between these distances is very close to 2.8. A 60:00 10-miler is therefore equivalent to ~2:48:00 for the marathon, and a 3:00:00 marathon is equivalent to ~64:15 for 10 miles. This 10-mile time translates to is 6:25-6:26 pace, so a 3:00:00 marathoner's true threshold pace, per the Daniels definition Roche notes using, would be around 6:23-6:24.

Roche's suggested “threshold-pace” range for a 3:00:00 marathoner of 6:15 to 6:30 per mile includes whatever the correct number is. In fact, that number is near this range’s midpoint. But there are two problems with this pace range. One, it's impossibly broad range. And two, since 6:00 is at a minimum acceptable, what happened to the whole range of possible “threshold” paces between 6:00 and 6:15 per mile?

Regardless the result is that David Roche claiming that threshold pace can range by 30 seconds a mile for a fairly fast recreational road racer. In reality, a 3:00:00 marathoner could hold the lower end of his suggested range for about 4 miles and the upper end of it for close to 20K. One of those distances is roughly three times the other (for any Roche fans reading, the 20K is the longer distance: 12.4/4 = 3.1.

Based on the things some of Roche’s known clients post on social media, it’s obvious why they don’t care about any this. They don’t read Roche’s articles. As sad as it is, there are people willing to shell out well over $100 a month merely to enjoy a formal association with an operation whose owners trumpet insincere social-justice nonsense and hold graduate professional degrees and licenses.

Most readers of this site can see that both Roches are either far too stupid to have achieved their degrees legitimately or are working overtime to convince normal people this is the case. But the Roches’ client list is essentially a roster of liberal-identifying people who are too daft and incurious themselves to see that the Roches are easily the least sincere and least erudite running coaches on offer—self-contradicting, clueless swindlers who insist on running their mouths about how great they are while never listening to the long list of reasons why they actually suck.