Jennifer Acker responds, albeit only by establishing anew that Runner's World is staffed by lazy pinheads
Every morning, this poor, abused "running magazine" wakes up wondering why no compassionate soul suffocated it in its fitful sleep
I may never know for sure, but I suspect that my recent and unabashedly withering criticism of Runner’s World editor Jennifer Acker was causally connected to the even more recent removal of around forty of my published articles from the Runner’s World website, along with the author index page with my name at the top that someone at RW created years ago.
This was a mutually beneficial decision, one I openly courted in the course of flinging barbs at the various degraded figures associated with the inexplicable ongoing publication of an entity that still bears the name of a magazine Bob Anderson started as a teenager in the late 1960s with an entirely different target audience—and for that matter, planet Earth—in mind. Not one of those articles, after all, was originally published in Runner’s World anyway; they were all inherited from Running Times. And flipping the lens, why would anyone at RW —even those somehow immune to the basic shame and embarrassment others feel when they are paid to lie, fuck up, and hide from critics—want the perception of any association with someone who consistently highlights and mocks the catastrophic flaws in everything this diseased and gimpy BlackRock whore of a publication excretes and now stands for?
Acker responded on August 3—not with a personal reply, but with her first bylined RW article since late May. Although ostensibly not related to my peppering of Acker and others on the RW staff, it nevertheless loudly advertises the absence of basic professionalism the publication has cheerfully embraced.
Some excerpts:
"While there’s plenty of beverage options for runners to choose from today, knowing what will optimize your recovery and support your health is important."
"Coconut water may be also help when it comes to drinking enough. If you’re replacing your normal glass of water with coconut water simply because you love it and it makes you drink more liquids, than that’s a win for your hydration, which then supports your overall health, as well as your run performance."
"One catch on the electrolyte content in coconut water: It doesn’t contain much sodium."
"Ansari also suggests alternating with an electrolyte-enhanced beverage that contains more sodium and supports adequate hydration."
"When shopping for coconut water, Jones recommends looking for cold-pressed varieties..."
"very active individuals may need more sugar than the average population"
Acker can’t help being a less-than-sophisticated writer overall. But given the size of Runner’s World’s budget—at least compared to, say, mine—it’s fair to assume that someone is supposed to at least scan every RW piece that gets uploaded to the Internet for editorial clarity, even if the content is undisguised chum and the publication long-ago shed all need for fact-checkers (these are actually a bane to those who knowingly publish misinformation and flat-out lies).
Most of my posts contain multiple typos and sometimes long, banal sentences, and some those sentences are fraught with missing or mystery-clauses. Based on probability alone, this one does, too.
And to be honest, as any sort of misery is osmotically drawn in the direction of more visible company, it’s a relief to me when far more impactful (and simply better) independent writers with far more readers and paid staff members occasionally shit on their own keyboards:
Nevertheless, I dislike churning out a product that’s needlessly degraded by typos and other syntactical miscues. If I simply misfire and write something that proves to be philosophically off-key, I can live with that.
One problem I should have conquered by now is continuing to think of Beck of the Pack as mostly a website, not an e-mailed newsletter—a perception buoyed by the number of people who bookmark the site in lieu of signing up for e-mails. I would be okay with catching a reported 97 percent of my originally published typos minutes after publication if these corrections could be extended to the e-mails that have already reached people’s inboxes, and I suspect only the National Security Agency has that capability. Well, maybe not yet.
Don’t most people who call themselves writers dislike knowingly publishing garbage? Maybe the fact that none of the people “working” today who consistently publish trash are willing to engage in any kind of dialogue with their critics implies that these people don’t actually know how incompetent they are, even if they have to suspect it.
Take paycheck, spend six hours a day on social media, generate dismal and unedited sharticle every few months, repeat. Nice life if you can tolerate the kind of person who embraces it.
Fuck Runner’s World just for the proxy-war scam they’re paying a role in anyway, and for supporting the demonization of everyday Russian citizens (and the glorification of Ukrainian white nationalists).
Maybe the world needs to stand up and pay attention to totally self-aware online wellness-preachers and “Watch out for the bullshit artists who post exactly the kind of tripe-bytes I do” gurus such as Steve Magness:
