Negotiating Trail Runner's UTMB coverage is a serpentine up-and-down journey in itself
Zoe Rom, ever eager to demand better compensation for the digital labor done by Wokish women, exemplifies why Wokish women should exit the digital workforce altogether, sobbing and all
The Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc (UTMB), based in Chamonix, France, is perhaps the most competitive trail ultramarathon in the world. This approximately 170-kilometer (106-mile) contest includes over a football field’s worth of vertical gain per overland mile, or over 10,000 meters of climbing in all. The route’s highest points rise well over 8,000 feet above sea level. And the race colloquially called “UTMB” is actually the main attraction of a seven-footrace extravaganza, with none of these qualifying by any reasonable standard as a lower-card fun-run.
All of this is inarguably absurd. Most people who run primarily on roads rarely if ever cover a one-mile stretch of asphalt that picks up 330 or more feet of elevation. Sustained road grades in excess of six percent aren’t even that easy to find in most U.S. states. let alone run up. It is therefore not difficult to see why this march into the maw of masochism is a massive draw to ultramarathon runners. It’s not just the allure of inescapable pain; according to some, no spot on Earth reasonably safe for running offers better summertime views than the Alps.
Trail Runner decided to honor this year’s marquee contest, which starts on September 1, with extremely challenging coverage. In fact, this coverage seems structured in a way to leave the majority readers unable to complete it. Just as a runner needs unusual levels of both fitness and determination to have any hope of even completing the punishing UTMB layout, which explores portions of the Alps in Switzerland and Italy as well as those in France, a reader has to be both laser-focused and adroit just to negotiate these articles without incurring a migraine.
Below is a snapshot of part of the Trail Runner homepage, created at just before 4:20 p.m. U.S. Stoner Daylight Time this afternoon. The site’s two most recently posted articles at that juncture were allegedly a guide to this year’s UTMB and a guide to last year’s UTMB.
Clicking on the link to the purported 2023 UTMB guide leads to a page that looks like the image below. One can, if adventurous, scroll down and see a veritable cornucopia of other titles related to the event.
Clicking on the image-link to Trail Runner editor-in-chief Zoe Rom’s story does in fact produce the loading of a page containing an article titled “Trail Runner’s Guide to UTMB 2023” with a publication date of August 14, 2023. So far, so good.
But a couple of paragraphs in, I was shartled (i.e., somewhere between startled and shocked) to see that Courtney Dauwalter had supposedly turned down the chance to win her third straight UTMB, especially given that I recalled the 2022 female UTMB winner being an American, but not someone surnamed Dauwalter.
Well, for once in my life, I was right and someone at Trail Runner was wrong. Finally!
Obviously, Trail Runner’s “2023” guide is from a year ago. And clicking on the second link on the home page, “Trail Runner’s Ultimate Guide to UTMB 2022,” leads to the same 2022 guide. But while this retains the correct year, it’s still confusing to people hunting for whatever reason for last year’s guide, because the article has yesterday’s date at the top of it.
Meanwhile, clicking on the text that reads “from OUTSIDE ONLINE” in the 2022 guide leads to a different preview by Rom of the 2022 UTMB event. Fittingly, the title includes the phrase “Trail Runner’s guide,” even though this piece is—for those with short memories—purportedly “from OUTSIDE ONLINE.”
For those more interested in straight-up UTMB coverage than in solving editorial mysteries, RUN247 has a comprehensive post about the races, which I’ll have forgotten exist well before they comes to pass in just over two weeks.
As always, I have to marvel at the dynamic established by the most prominent female employees or favorites of today’s running media. Rom, Alison Desir, and Emilia Benton are only a few of the women who have repeatedly executed the following Wokish script since early 2020 or so:
Publicly derogate white males as a category (okay, okay, you caught me; sometimes the target is all white people) without apology, consequence, or pushback from within the industry;
Declare yourself part of a sociological, aerobic, scientific, literary, and vocational revolution;
Ignore, to the fullest extent possible, the white male(s) and others who demonstrate(s) not just glaring insufficiencies but galactic incompetence in all of the areas you claim to be revolutionizing, often packaging their criticism with exaggerated, piss-taking, misogynistic, race-baiting, fat-bashing. ass-gnashing triumph (i.e., while speaking your language);
Repeat—despite an increasingly crippling burden of poorly concealed shame— every one of the steps above, often even doubling down on your “I RULE!!!” stance in your social-media bubbles; after all, the checks from the grifting keep rolling in, and you can generally point to a host of people in the industry more degraded than yourself even if you’re an inarticulate, intellectually lazy-to-enfeebled, craven blob of false bravado.