NewHampshireCrossCountry.com keeps pulling away from the subscriber-supported competition

Meanwhile, we* can hope for the market to punish the unrepentant sleaze-merchants apace

---

The cross-country postseason is approaching at every American scholastic level. In fact, Alaska, already barreling into extended darkness, held its high-school championships over a week ago (the results are reportedly in the pipeline). On Friday, the NCAA Division 1 Pre-National Meet took place in Tallahassee, Florida, where the local kids took first and second (in the notable absence of a few key squads). And on Saturday, the nearest thing New Hampshire has to a pair of Meet of Champions preview races unfolded at the Black Bear Invitational in Northwood, hosted by annual juggernaut Coe-Brown Academy. Since you can see across the state and almost everyone there is related, New Hampshire doesn’t really “need” such a meet, but it nevertheless invigorates the autumn competition schedule.

This post, though, is not about the action at this or any one cross-country or track meet. It’s another necessary burst of praise for the media outlet that for years has been promoting and covering New Hampshire’s cross-country and track meets gratis, and at a time when traditional media and upstart nitwits alike are charging or at least requesting money for thoroughly incompetent and dishonest coverage of every aspect of running.

What do these Granite Staters do? A lot:

• In the days before the meet, NewHampshireCrossCountry.com posted a preview on a dedicated Black Bear Invitational “meet hub,” linking to its own past coverage of the event—results, recaps, photos, videos, and interviews.

• Within twenty-four hours of the meet, which featured varsity and junior-varsity boys’ and girls’ races and real-time results from Granite State Timing, the site’s YouTube channel boasted videos of the varsity races as well as interviews with each individual and team champion.

• None of this coverage costs any money to access, and its creators make no money doing it—they all have other jobs or are students. It really is a product of methodically channeled passion for youth running.

• The people behind the site put on a production of similar or greater scale, week after week, fall after fall, starting in early September and continuing until mid-November (2020 was different thanks to COVID-19). They will cover the three divisional state meets in Manchester in less than two weeks, the statewide Meet of Champions in Nashua on November 6, and the New England Championships in Thetford, Vt. on Nov. 13.

Understand that when this crew streams cross-country races, they don’t show, say, one minute each of the mass start, some unspecified waypoint, and the first bunch of finishers, all set to the most annoying dubstep imaginable and filmed from a hundred feet away. Instead, almost entire field can be seen thumping past three or more midrace cameras, all with useful commentary from whoever was beamed to that spot from the mother ship. They’re not quite at a point where they are offering literally continuous coverage of the entire field using a squadron of drones, but they’re getting there.

The commentators include current and former New Hampshire athletes and coaches, among them a core group of warhorses and a more fluid coterie of kids and recent ex-kids marching toward diplomas and degrees and pausing along the way to devote their time to the NewHampshireCrossCountry.com effort.

If you have a child who participates in cross-country in the New Hampshire public school system (or at Phillips Exeter Academy, which shows up at a nontrivial number of “regular” cross-country meets), then you can watch most of his or her races for the first time if you were unable to be there in person, or re-watch them for fun. You can refer college coaches to this material. And if your kid isn’t superstar, he or she will still be rewarded and respected for being out there.

Additionally, high-school kids tend to have people like doting grandparents in their lives, and grandparents love watching their kids play sports, even ludicrous sports. Not all grandparents can get to competitions in person, and some folks remain hesitant to attend gatherings of any kind owing to fears of getting sick. Moreover, some weirdos like to follow all the New Hampshire action from nation-states such as Colorado, where they incorporate what they see into providing coaching tips for kids in New Hampshire. Or at least have that option.

The people behind NewHampshireCrossCountry.com and NewHampshireTrackAndField.com are mostly career educators, and were teaching long before “the Internet” was even a concept outside the U.S. Military. They understand acutely the potential pitfalls of the medium, and have kept them in mind in continuing to expand and curate the site’s content. It’s the kind of work that is only going to look and become more valuable as the years pass, but it something the folks who do it need to be repeatedly and emphatically congratulated for in the present.

I would love to end this on a pure sunshine-and-rainbows crescendo. But two and half years have now passed since this dirtbag decided to sit interminably on my story about these same actors after accepting it almost a year earlier, forcing me to finally withdraw it, and without her or her useless editor, Chris Keyes, having the nerve to tell me this was because the content and staff of Outside Magazine were systemically and openly trending racist and sexist. In that time, the Outside and Pocket Outdoor Media platforms have merged to form an empire responsible for a nonstop barrage of absolute Wokish trash, most if it aimed at people within running, and all of it transmitted by social-media fleas and complemented by like-minded theatrics and hackery from similar verbal sewers.

As hard as it may be to believe now, there was a time when I allowed people one mistake, even a serious and intentional one, before going straight to flame-throwing. I chose not to even name the editor who spiked my story when I wrote about it in 2019 even though I knew that what had happened was not even close to a good-faith mistake.

But Molly Mirhashem has since established that her own specific and Outside’s generalized unwillingness to promote even the most selfless and beneficial running figures if they happen to be white is coupled to an even more damaging eagerness to essentially libel white people—for example, by casting a popular event director and philanthropist as racist. (Gary Cantrell’s accuser, Ben Chan—now a severely butthurt former runner and the real racist in the whole manufactured drama— could have saved himself and the running world a lot of trouble had he just ordered about ten T-shirts years ago with some variant of SURVIVING MICROPENIS POORLY on both the front and the back; this would have conveyed his core message while causing far less collateral damage.)

It would be nice to see the whole suite of bullshit-distributors punished. But as evidenced by their collective refusal to own any of the “miscues” I’ve written about, ethics are not a factor in their choices, so none of them has any intention of changing a thing in the absence of a shift in market forces. So they’ll have to be punished at the equivalent of the ballot box: The demand for their output will simply need to dry up, and they’ll have to move on to other lowbrow gigs. It would probably help if I stopped sending them so much traffic. But so long as their code of dirtbag silence continues, I’ll continue to risk becoming a gratingly repetitive critic, and besides, it’s fun to bait half-literate cowards by waving their unglamorous lies and errata in their faces.

If these goons actually cared about “social justice,” and were merely ignoramuses instead of ignorant saboteurs, some of their hijinks would be more forgivable. But it’s been two or three years since prophets of the false Wokish equality movement like Mirhashem started their quest to better the running world through the unpretentious purging of their pale forebears.

Has anything improved? Have any of the progenitors of this grand movement even given an “equality” progress report of sorts? I haven’t seen any of them praising the monthly checks being sent to people with kids, a program that disproportionately helps Americans of color. I suspect that even the ones who have noticed aren’t satisfied, because the whole initiative hasn’t been formally limited to people of color and given a Wokish name.

But as these suckholes of decency continue to demonstrate, none of them give a rat’s anus about anyone besides themselves. The longer “inequality” remains a shitlib buzzword, the longer these already comfortable, mostly white frauds can keep pretending to be annoyed by it. The “Men made it! Burn it down!” squawking of harpy-pundits like Alison Wade—another brazen hypocrite, having piled especially hard on Cantrell in 2020 for his nonexistent racism while regularly singing the praises of a racism-spouting weight-thrower since—and Lindsay Crouse (who should be both fired and institutionalized) is nothing more than jousting between people who already have enough to live on competing for higher status. If you are white and liberal or at least associated with a traditionally left-leaning media entity, there is real value in prostrating, even humiliating yourself these days, because it may be the only thing allowing you to keep your job.

Imagine being Chris Keyes or someone like him, and knowing you’re only in an editorial position because the people around you can’t have every white male around ousted, and that whatever competence and skills you have—or lack, for that matter—are completely secondary in the mushy minds of the people supposedly working under you. Meanwhile, Molly Mirhashem’s attendance a solid or once-solid liberal arts school like Tufts was clearly owed more to personal privilege then to brainpower (if you doubt me at this point, hold your nose and have a few squints at this shrill mess) and she probably feels at least a little guilty about being an impostor who takes up space at a job a smarter, more morally grounded person could perform capably or even well.

Free, expert statewide cross-country coverage will sell itself forever to whoever looks for it. But will people pay enough for fake running news to support that industry? Will the marketplace punish the sinners? I have enough faith in the stupidity of the herd to see the whole Outside colossus staggering on for maybe another year before it has to start cutting and consolidating its brands. On the other hand, maybe that’s just a hopeful guess, and the revenge- and greed-driven antics of running’s and meta-running’s ugliest people will only gain momentum.