Landing with a soft thud

Yeah, I've had enough of every aspect of the clown show

The 2023 Boston Marathon produced one modestly surprising result (Eliud Kipchoge losing) and two exciting races. Three men were together with a little over a mile remaining, while five women crossed the 40K mat almost together, with American Emma Bates just beginning to drop off the back. Bates’ fifth-place 2:22:10 might have been close to 2:20:00 on a replacement-level weather day and, with a 2011-caliber tailwind, might have been 2:17 and change. Bates is the woman to beat among Americans and seems likely to retain that status for years.

Kipchoge’s finish, punctuated in reverse with a 1:07:04 second half, was a lonely and forlorn sight, with no one near him as he cross the line in sixth. Top American Scott Fauble was only 21 seconds behind Kipchoge, but was never near him, having wisely opted for the patient strategy he admitted beforehand to Letsrun that he is often enticed away from for romantic-athletic reasons:

“The best I’ve ever done at a World Marathon Major is 7th, so I would like to better that … I think I’m certainly fit enough to run a very good marathon or the best marathon I’ve ever run, but when you tie your happiness, I guess, to the outcome of, Oh I was 7th and not 6th or whatever, you’re setting yourself up for some disappointment that isn’t necessarily fair.”

“Last year, I was alone for the last 11 miles just passing people and getting to the next person,” Fauble says. “Pass someone and get to the next person. That’s a fun way to gain momentum through the race but it certainly feels a little bit more low-stakes…I would much rather have it play out like 2019 when we were out in 1:04-low and I was able to be up front.”

I doubt Fauble was unhappy despite grabbing another seventh place in a come-from-behind effort; this was probably his best marathon yet, accounting for the conditions. Americans Conner Mantz and C.J. Albertson were in the lead pack of eleven men at halfway (passed in 1:02:19) and wound up paying for their extravagance. Mantz managed to run 2:10:25 (4:58.45 per mile) despite a last 10K run at 5:26 pace and a final mile of 6:05.

Not that many Americans have run under 5:00 per mile at the Boston Marathon, which requires a total time of 2:11:05 or faster. Mantz may not be the first one to manage the feat while recording a mile split slower than six minutes, but it seems a safe bet. And despite his late-race agonies, this guy is going to run some great marathons. I don’t think a sub-2:07:00 is out of the question for Mantz even if he and his coach, Ed Eyestone, continue to make the kinds of procedural-ethical decisions I like to think Eyestone is associated with.

Albertson hung on for another good effort, making up 63 seconds on Mantz in the final mile to finish only eight seconds behind him in 12th.

Complete results of yesterday’s races are here.

I didn’t wind up watching one second of the coverage. I really don’t think I feel the same spark for this nonsense I once did, apart from my ever-burgeoning distaste for the worthless idiots allowed to have significant roles in the sport’s marketing and promotion. As former University of Oregon coach Robert Johnson observed—and I’m paraphrasing—running is mostly math, and after a while it all starts to look like the same boring data. I don’t know many people in the industry anymore, and most of the old-timers are weak-minded fools I wish I’d never had any contact with at all.

But the stupidities and their support by people who should know better does offer a strong rationale for just ignoring the whole show and focusing solely on enterprises and events that actually matter. Nonstop evil clown and anti-white racist Alison Desir predictably invented an instance of racism based on the testimony of some YouTuber who wouldn’t move his ass off the course.

I know humans exist who realize that this marathon has strong security measures in place for a palpable reason. Not childish, noisy weenies like Desir, though.

Runner’s World—like every publication, now completely in the control of mentally and morally disabled folx—seized on this pointless rumor-mongering.

This kind of bleating from rathole sources and outlets is expected. But the coup de grace was Kara Goucher, who knows better, blindly amplifying Desir’s crying.

Desir is nothing more than a barking retard. She’s proud of her responses below to “Mr. Moray” and of causing problems for no good reason. She’s got the brains and personality of a toddler, and people take her seriously.

I like to pretend that Alison Desir is concerned about the well-being of black people other than herself, or about actual harm being done to other humans. If she were, she might be concerned about various recent events that deeply affected poor black Americans.

In Chicago, Wal-Mart is closing stores because they can’t keep people from stealing all the merchandise. The Washington Post dutifully calls the closures the result of “urban struggles.”

In Compton, California, near Los Angeles, “street takeovers’ and looting are daily occurrences. And you can conform that this kind of mayhem is happening everywhere, but not by watching mainstream sources.

All of this deeply hurts people of color. But since people of color are also the ones committing all of these violent crimes, it’s not okay to report on it.

I think I should be like other white people and just stop worrying about violence that doesn’t affect me because I don’t live in an urban war zone, I can keep pretending along with the rest of the yutzes that bellowing about whiteness rather than looking at how degraded black American life has become on the ground, constitutes an earnest effort toward social justice. People would evidently approve of me more if I were as mentally and morally decrepit as they insist on being, and if I relaxed my grip on residual concern for suffering people because apparently that was never really the government’s ballgame.

Meanwhile, Alison Desir proclaims whiteness to be the underlying cause of all social ills. If people as destructively stupid as her are not only platformed in running but treated as heroines, then this is a toxic environment with too high a burden of assholes, coward, and ethically scorched haglike creatures for me to want any part of it. Sufficiently imbecilic people and scenarios make me wince. Even heckling these woeful twats is painful because there is nothing to learn from it, unlike some of the nonrunning posts I make about similarly piggish people.

Fuck this sad, flabby mess. Anything I write about professional running in the future is likely to be from the perspective of a pure hater, someone who can’t figure out why anyone would pay attention to a bunch of androgynous anorexics skittering around in circles, in a sport whose figurehead is a doped-up elfin fellow who may be 38 or 41 but doesn’t look a day over 50.