MUT motormouths: Your sport is a hobby for vocational slackers, not a career, which is why no one else cares about it
Too many self-entitled, fuzzy-minded equity goons under one roof creates a mess inside the house
I was going to arrange this as an “images only” post, but decided I would be unable to convey all of the necessary details and the proper level of scorn without including a few words. This explains both the abundance of images below and their perhaps confusing level of markup.
On March 19, the very-long-distance focused site iRunFar published an editorial by Meghan Hicks, the site’s editor-in-chief, and the site’s managing editor, Sarah Brady, about “the current status of women in trail running and ultrarunning.” The triumphant opening stanzas read like a We finally did it! press release:
We think we all can agree: Women’s trail running and ultrarunning is B-O-O-M-I-N-G.
Not only do the sports look and feel different than they did only a few years ago, but the data corroborate our thoughts.
According to the running publication Run Repeat, as of 2022, women’s participation in trail races has reached 46%, whereas in 1997 only 13% of trail race participants were women. And if we look at Run Repeat’s 2020 study of ultrarunning, we learn that while women’s participation is much lower overall, at 23%, as of 2020, women’s participation numbers have increased from 14% in 1997.
Wow! No problem, right? Wrong. As signaled by the word "equity" in the title, there is still work (i.e., grifting) to be done. “Equity,” as most earnest observers have finally figured out, is simply shorthand for “unearned handouts, usually to the already privileged, based on demands for illegitimate and unachievable demographic patterns.”
Point one: Concerning the group stats about harassment on the run, is it possible that men as a rule simply don't feel as threatened by basic uninvited heckling and that generally smaller people are more often targets of cowards and ne’er-do-wells than larger ones, independent of the actual amount of bullshit each group deals with? It sucks that women are seen as easier targets, but expecting these kinds of harassment reports to sex-equalize is as laughable as expecting S.W.A.T. teams and tree-trimming businesses to eventually be half-female nationwide.
Now, invoking ludicrous statistics as Hicks and Brady have done is an absolute obligation of such agitators. They don’t actually have any legitimate needs or complaints, just the knowledge that loads of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) dough is available. This knowledge allows them to steer a path toward manufacturing group “needs” and claiming some of that dough for themselves. But it's the same arithmetic chicanery, every time.
Point two: Discussions about a “pay gap” regarding an activity accessible mainly to the well-off as a life-affirming hobby are also a joke. What planet are these people living on? No one but them cares, and MUT impresarios should feel lucky to earn a dime doing something their obsessive natures would compel them to do for free anyway. Adding cash to the mix only further incentivizes doping in a class of people with markedly eroded-to-absent ethics. And no matter how much these races hurt even for committed masochists, it's just a leisure activity and these people’s kids will fall asleep listening to their accounts of their banal exploits in the woods, subsisting for days on bean paste, Instagram photo shoots, and whole bottles of NSAIDs.
Point three: You can either embrace the concept of transgenderism as legitimate despite scientific evidence that humans are either male or female—that is, treat it as an untouchable meta-religious precept, e.g., “Israel is always the victim”—or you can quit fucking around, make the proper distinction, and do away with the entire concept of having more than two sex-based categories.
If well-off white women are going to continue to demand that races provide tampons at aid stations in order to be white-listed by Trail Sisters, and otherwise rally for special treatment, then they can at least stop muddying the picture by bowing to the whims of gender-creatives. Sisters, you do not need these weird men as your mascots, posing as your sisters.
iRunFar itself unwittingly took a step in this direction with a profile yesterday of yet another woman out to finally do some real she-science, Dr. Stacy Sims.
Morgan Tilton, the author of this profile, is also responsible for a profile last September of Trail Runner and Women’s Running editor-in-absentia and Pidgin English specialist Zoe Rom. Both profiles are unconsciously unflattering to their subjects and therefore earn the label of “keepers.”
For example, whenever an author describes someone enacting a “paradigm shift,” as Tilton does with Sims, this is meant as a compliment. Yet you, dear reader, can be confident when seeing this term that the person allegedly enacting the shift is a gibbering huckster—and especially so when her vernacular features the e-word.
As for the highlighted text, start with Sims’ claims about sparse-to-nonexistent research on female athletes. I did a PubMed search for papers mentioning female distance runners, a far narrower category than “female athletes,” and didn’t exactly come up dry.
Here’s one from that list that would surely interest Sims, whose doctorate from the University of Otago in New Zealand, not specified in the article, is in “environmental exercise physiology, sports nutrition”:
The subhead describes Sims as an “iconic author and scientist.” The text notes her age as 50. She’s certainly had proper credentials for a while, earning a master’s degree in metabolism and exercise physiology from Springfield College in 1997.
Sims, also according to PubMed, has gotten her name on a total of 36 published papers, very few as lead author.
The most recent of Sims’ published projects, “International society of sports nutrition position stand: nutritional concerns of the female athlete,” prompted a detailed letter of retort to the journal that published it.
The letter translates to, “While we agree that men and women are distinctly different and that female-specific exercise research is needed, you gotta get the science as right as your intentions.”
But one thing Sims does do well, chronicled exhaustively by Tilton, is make sharp and meaningful distinctions between male and female physiology—in terms of fueling, biomechanics, endocrine impacts, and more. Whether she gets all of the science right is immaterial; what resonates is that ten years ago, an article on a popular running website about the differences between men and women would have been uncontroversial. But given whom and what iRunFar and others in the industry have also been advocating for lately, for this article to state seven times that women are not small men looks like an outright punking of a large segment of iRunFar’s audience: By logical extension, Sims is insisting that women are not men at all.
Tilton’s piece mentions that Sims has worked with Megan Roche, a medical doctor who blindly pushed the untested mRNA injections upon their rollout and a coach who is married to this guy:
iRunFar has published two profiles about the Roches, the first in 2018 (also by Tilton) and the second in 2020. In the more recent one, Justin Mock asserts that “David and Megan Roche are incredibly positive people.” If Mock is so tight with these two, perhaps he can ask David why he deleted the above tweet and the half-dozen-plus below it when I challenged him on its veracity and has ducked and blocked his critics ever since. The Roches are in fact absolute dirtbags, scurrilous to their greedy, insincerely beaming cores, and their popularity among today’s trail runners underscores the intellectual and moral dilapidation of the prevailing facets of the subculture.
But never mind that. I’m just going to try to resolve the logic in play here:
Women are not small men (Sims, 2024). But trans women are women (Roche, Roche, Strout, Wade, Benton, Semenya, Desir et al, 2020-2024). Yet a small man named Dylan Mulvaney is in fact a woman (Budweiser, 2023), or at least I’m pretty sure none of these people would publicly say otherwise. So, this seems like a problem for equity beneficiaries.
It would be one thing if iRunFar and other outlets embracing the gender-scams were conspicuously posting opposing viewpoints about transgenderism, in the style of a legacy media outlet. Instead, it's all just babble slung onto the same site regardless of coherence generated by a scrum of weirdos scrambling for meager acclaim in an increasingly balkanized and unattractive arm of a participation-sport in which 99.9 percent of us are joggers who should be embarrassed whenever a field has been weak enough to allow us to win anything more than a stale bagel.
This equity nonsense hasn’t come close to trickling off, but signs abound that it is creating consumerism failures. Rich douchebags will keep registering for MUT events no matter how pricey entry fees become, and on the surface, this will keep the sport thriving. But when everyone profiled on sites like iRunFar turns out to have serious issues with basic science, operational ethics, or both, there would be little incentive for normies to crash the MUT party of bawdy, fib-swapping weasels even if they waived the lofty cover charge.