Organized running has always been "funny," but it's now a humorless joke
Organized running has always been "funny," but it's now a humorless joke
Competitive cardio will never attract journalistic and promotional talent the way legitimate sports do, but running deserves better than the drones now flapping its banner
I was relieved earlier this week when Major League Baseball’s lockout ended after 99 days, ensuring that the 2022 season will start on time next month. I’m pleased with this development mostly because I enjoy tracking and discussing sports statistics, not because the game of baseball itself moves me; I’m nominally a Red Sox fan, but MLB and other pro rosters turn over too quickly nowadays for any aficionado of team sports to have a realistic shot at finding any longitudinally cohesive unit of personnel to pull for. I also like following baseball and other ball, puck, and shuttlecock sports1 because most reporting on these sports continues to bear a suspicious resemblance to genuine, factual reporting, and to date remains only minimally diluted and hijacked by intentionally disruptive Wokish machinations.
Wokesters, and attention-hungry social-media dweebs more generally, gravitate toward allyship with individual sports whose professional element blends semi-seamlessly into its citizen element in a series of amorphous steps. And it’s easy to see why: In running, for example, the narcissistically inclined can convince themselves that having coaxed their animated meat-heaps across 26 (often imaginary) miles of asphalt at ~3 MPH qualifies them as athletes.
That’s a pitifully low bar to set even for a “Let’s be lazy for real” trust-fund media class bred in a nation already reeling about in a terminal beer-and-cheeseburger stupor. We’re millions of years removed from the arboreal lives of our ancestors; an adult biped who can move semi-continuously on level ground for eight hours is simply a reasonably successful product of primate evolution—no more an “athlete” than someone who can figure out that moving away from things like wildfires and anacondas carries more survival value than dashing pell-mell into the maw of such dangers.
But try telling any of that to the “journalists” who find interacting with pro runners on Twitter way cooler than actually doing any running, especially if you at least wear sweatpants while tweeting out staccato packets of manufactured outrage.
The upshot is that any bozo off the street can pick up—or merely claim to have picked up—running, cycling, swimming, or cow-fisting as a solo hobby, whereas even the most flamboyantly successful race-, gender-, or sexuality-grifter can’t yet get away with, say, “My ass is starting in right field for the Astros on Saturday—link to donation button in bio.” Not only is running easier to infect and potentially even destroy with petulant nonsense than, say, the NFL, but it’s also easier to impersonate an athlete in a “sport” that reduces to little more than competitive cardio on different surfaces. Even a random idiot who bandits most of her events can feign superficial allegiance to Shalane Flanagan after stomping her way to a series of marathon finishes at 18 minutes a mile, especially if they both have blond hair, thousands of Instagram followers, and a willingness to seamlessly shift moral and other positions on demand.
Baseball writers, television analysts, and YouTubers aren’t afraid to question managerial or front-office moves, mock multi-time doping losers, or confront whatever forms of cheating are most popular (in recent years, “doctored” baseballs have enjoyed a resurgence in strategic popularity, though the league has cracked down impressively on pitchers whose tosses display unlikely spin rates). ESPN has even long employed one man, Stephen A. Smith, for the dedicated purpose of mercilessly heckling whatever professional athletes have recently perpetrated the most grandiose flops, be these in competition or in their never-private dope-smoking, wife-beating, dick-swinging lives.
While some of this raucous banter is solely to generate clicks and yuks, it also helps preserve the sense that loyal fans of any sport want to see real reporting on that sport—even if it sullies their regard for the sport’s icons or shatters their illusions of competitive purity—and that those fans appreciate non-theatrical efforts by the rule-makers and regulation-enforcers to keep the playing field level. While doping apologists occasionally crop up in the ESPN studio and elsewhere, this is mostly to position them as addled punching bags; the idea of all but ignoring the use of banned substances, and pretending athletes who get caught using them are blameless (especially if they’re American), is nearly impossible to even process for any bona fide sports fan, even if it’s now the norm in stateside track-and-field reportage.
This is because baseball, football, the other football, and even badminton2 are respectable sports that draw skilled thinkers and reporters from a far larger pool of observers than track and field, and specifically distance running, ever will. Everything I have just described is the antithesis of the running media and the various slapstick figures now responsible for much of its framing. In this milieu, the prevailing themes include selectively ignoring or excusing documented examples of doping so as to not annoy certain people and corporations; denying consequential differences between males and females, as well as between females, specifically to annoy certain people, mostly men and attractive or otherwise “alpha” women; and—in the always-precarious world of trail running, at least—becoming censorious, vain, self-parodic crybabies after someone has the audacity to exhaustively criticize a bad article in a flagging fitness publication, especially one authored by a terminal butthurt-machine out to hoodwink know-nothings into believing he possesses special wisdom and capabilities even when experienced observers can see this scheme for the carefully constructed and streamlined con-job it is.
I would leave the minor David Roche fracas alone at this stage, but I was even more astonished and bemused at the reactions to my post about his Trail Runner word-dump than I was at the wheezy article and Roche’s whole cult-like vibe itself. I wonder if the people who harass Eric Schranz whenever he shares one of my articles, and who really unloaded on him for the crime of linking to something describing the Roche coaching and theorizing enterprise in an unflattering way, are aware of just what absolute pussies they are, and how none of this behavior was remotely normal before their simpering, supernaturally sheltered asses came bumbling on to the jogging scene. The whole concept of either responding to a link with “I don’t like this article because…” or merely ignoring it has become a thing of the past; maybe the Wokish think that “I hate this, and as a weak-minded twat, I’m obligated to suppress it at all costs” is a discursive standard that has existed forever.
My belief is that these sputtering gasbags are at least somewhat aware of their own morbid pussification, and although they do not like this trait, they are slaves to its influence. They may be devoid of the ability to engage, but they understand that they wouldn’t put a dent in my writing even if they had the stones to address me directly, in no small part because my more caustic observations are invariably on the money. So instead, they employ intimidation tactics downstream on people like Mr. Schranz.
I don’t really care about any functional limitations on the sharing of my articles, but I honestly can’t help but be impressed by the thoroughgoing spinelessness on display here. But I should have known that the collective reaction to criticizing David Roche would be a display of righteous, imbecilic, and mostly private or nameless fury; after all, Roche’s approach selects for the credulous, the hypersensitive, and the emotionally fragile, the kind of people who give nutritional advice while sprinkling Ex-Lax shavings on their ice-cream sundaes.
But at least I did know that Roche and his coterie of weenies were never going to do anything but avoid the issues I raised about him and his article(s). For example, in my critique, I referred to a pious Twitter thread about transwomen that Roche started about a year ago. Here’s the first tweet in that thread.
Roche deleted the thread at some point after I published my article mentioning it. That’s one way to show your intellectual mettle, I guess. I think that given his exhortations for everyone draw at least a little joy from even the gravest challenges (harsh words excluded), Roche should view the video below and then offer some wise and consoling words about fairness to this bigoted Hokie.
(Prediction: Less than six months after he graduates in May, Will Thomas will drop the T-blockers and the “Lia” identity, admit that his participation in women’s athletics was intended from the outset as a stunt meant to show how asinine and unfair the NCAA’s rules are to women, and ink a book deal.)
Below are a few things I could have included in the article that got Mr. Schranz lambasted anew, but declined to add to what was an already over-bloated article. Also, I obviously hadn’t yet seen the crazed, scorched-asshole reaction from Club Snowflake to the idea that David Roche just might not be an expert in everything, and that people who have been around for a minute have been seeing through coaches like him for eons. (Here’s a tip for those folks: Even if someone is an expert in everything, it is okay to criticize him. I’ll keep repeating that until the pussified quietly internalize it.)
Not that it matters, but I wrote that post not after discovering it and saying “Hmmm,” but because multiple people who have been around the sport for a while, and whose bullshit detectors are among the best in the business, have consistently pestered me about “what I think of” Mr. Roche, which is code for “When are you gonna lay into this guy?” I have to say I better understand their perspectives now. I have seen at least four independent references to the long-retired Stuart Smalley character from Saturday Night Live since publishing that piece and witnessing the aggrieved response from its primary honoree.
I could have been less kind to Roche by not grading him on a curve; because I haven’t known him to flat-out lie like Latoya Snell does, I declined to call him a scammer, but what he apparently does to collect and retain clients seems far more stylish than substantive. I might have observed that he seems to collect as clients runners who have already succeeded and emphasize his speculative role in any further success they enjoy—a thesis that has been corroborated by input I’ve received from readers. I could say that a coach who works with road or track runners who focus mostly on times needs to show an ability to match his training inputs with the performance outputs of his athletes if he wants to maintain credibility, but that this imperative is easily dissolved in the very-long-distance sector, especially when runners can be lulled into complacency by constantly being told that no matter what happens, it’s all okay, even great.
It may also have been appropriate to point out that one of his clients, Zoe Rom, is also the editor of Trail Runner; while this reciprocity of sorts may not be unethical, it largely explains why none of Roche’s articles for this publication appear to have experienced any editing. (My work admittedly suffers from the same malady.)
Leaving aside the elite and the otherwise “serious,” trail runners have always been a notoriously incestuous bunch anyway, prone to unfounded hero worship and a deep resistance to proper skepticism. Dean Karnazes, whose 2006 autobiography was so riddled with obvious falsehoods that it was hard to not laugh out loud in places, just wrote a subscriber-only article for UltraRunning Magazine in which this huckster laments “the gamification of training” and urges runners that it’s “best to keep it real.” Dean Karnazes evidently wants to limit the ability of runners to project illusory versions of their own personas and accomplishments to Dean Karnazes. Too late! Everyone’s a bullshitter now.
I also find this story relevant today, because Boulder appears to remain an unusually lively hotbed of relationship infidelity, at least among runners and not just within the trail set. I concede that in any town serving as a training base for hundreds of elite endurance athletes—many of them here only for short stints—this is practically inevitable. Given that most male elites look like androgynous incarnations of Gumby and most female elites resemble wide-eyed fourth-graders, it’s only natural for rambunctious and often illicit pairings to form. I just wonder why so many locals have decided over the years that I make a proper confidant for any of these abuses of stinkflesh.
Finally, I consider this an example excellent comic timing. If Roche were any good at self-talk, he would not have needed the whole trail running community to fluff his viciously withered manhood back to a twig-like state of semi-respectability last week.
Then there’s Ms. Snell, grown larger than life and far more hideous. After my last post about her hate-filled swindling efforts, someone challenged her on Instagram about her total number of race finishes, and she responded by doing what she always does—filibustering, deflecting, trash-talking, claiming she’s a victim of harassment (apparently, this includes anything unfavorable written about her on sites like this one) and declaring “her truth” to be the only “truth” that matters. In other words, she didn’t deny being guilty of lying.
Snell also returned to her racialist “Caillou-ass folks” theme, and an impressive display of her impenetrable sociopathic arrogance, this gurgling monstrosity who refuses to back down from her raft of blatant lies expressed disdain for society’s “Fucktardasaurus” element, akin to a cat belittling furry animals who sleep too much.
Snell is a turd of a human being, but my interest lies more in the companies supporting her. Will any of them ever react to a few noisy nitpickers pointing out their participation in a blatant fraud? My sole purpose with these posts is to make them sweat—these unseen figures at HOKA and the New York Road Runners responsible for this laughably warped display of “social justice.” I’m imagining a bevy of mostly young, white women with purple or blue bangs, beaver teeth, and a total number of lifetime race finishes and sexual partners in the low single digits. Mix in some slope-shouldered, dickless, listless Ben Chan types, and there’s your whole Wokish promotional team. I mean, who the hell else would foment this kind of purposeful denigration of the sport, or of anything nice? Ugly people who hate themselves, is my educated guess. And if that sounds unkind, well, you’ll have to sod off because until these marketing cockroaches can be coaxed into the light of day instead of continually blocking their critics on social media, it’s only fair to play the percentages.
And make no mistake—Latoya Shauntay Snell didn’t invent race-grifting. She’s probably not even in the equivalent of the Forbes 500 for 2021 when it comes to total income from identity-based scamming.
It’s not just that Snell’s sponsors are backing a slovenly dirtbag who makes no distinction between truth and fiction. It’s what she’s lying about that should matter to her muddle-minded fans. If she is supposed to be inspiring people with natural limitations and hesitations to believe that they can perform fitness feats that she hasn’t even achieved herself, and has no plans to even attempt, then isn’t it time for a new spokesmodel? If I had a 12-step sponsor I knew was getting wasted between meetings, I would find a new sponsor even if the one drinking in secret seemed to possess all the right buzzphrases and bits of folksy wisdom.
If Snell’s sponsors are holding her to no moral standards whatsoever, as if she is a young or special-needs child, then I can only conclude that these sponsors believe either that Snell is mentally challenged or that black people—at least the fat, black, and supposedly “queer” ones—simply can’t follow basic rules, or count, or give remotely reliable personal histories. This infantilization of black people in supposed name of giving them a voice is profoundly destructive, and it should be easy to understand why: The stereotypes being propagated here are virtually the same as those any proud Ku Klux Klan member would expound upon—lazy. Unreliable. Less capable. In need of coddling, of white masters.
Since the NYRR has kept up its Instagram post falsely claiming that Snell has finished 25 marathons, and because none of its members have responded to my e-mail about this—perhaps these New Yorkers are drinking buddies with the editorial team of The New York Times—then I have little choice but to root categorically against the successful operation of their signature event. After all, it is a corrupt organization, not that Snell is its first or worst blemish. Here’s hoping for an early-November “superstorm” like Sandy, which forced the cancellation of the NYC Marathon ten years ago. Or maybe when the members of the Arby’s Cheese Fries Wave start stomping across the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, a few of the cables holding up the main span will snap with a series of shotgun-blast-caliber twangs and the event will have to be stopped out of concerns that the famed main span of the bridge might plunge into the Narrows. Happily for New York, the NYRR has a few months to rectify at least one of their recent miscues and prevent God from disproportionately subjecting the city and the race to Their wrath yet again. (New Yorkers have not once elected an ethical politician.)
I can’t object if people think I’m an asshole for the way I highlight what is unquestionably the misconduct of others, because simply put, if you support rule-breaking in any sport, you deserve no role in that sport—not as a participant, not as an organizer, not as pundit, not as a running-club officer, not as an independent of legacy-outlet reporter, not even as basic self-hating, man-bashing rake.
All of this has made it increasingly difficult to ignore what I’ve known for decades, and what every knowledgeable and honest fan of distance running or any sport knows: At both the professional and amateur levels, the sport is riddled with—or depending on your perspective, wondrously catalyzed by—performance-enhancing drug use. I figured Daniel Komen was dirty back in 1998 and named a dog after him anyway because still. And if you are appropriately cynical, you have to hold on to some kind of “because still”—an athlete’s obvious grit, her willingness to front-run, amazing range, whatever. Otherwise, watching pro track meets is like playing a mental game of darts, wherein your mind flings accusations of varying heft at the figures bounding in circles at unprecedented speeds and then doing seemingly breathless victory laps at five-minute pace.
Now, it’s the shoes, until it’s not. It’s the unusual training focus top athletes enjoyed thanks to COVID-19 (???), until it’s not.
I admit that I could still enjoy the whole show more for what it is if not for all of the fecklessness that has erupted on the citizen fringes. I share Nate Llerandi’s disappointment with Letsrun’s Jon Gault for giving the retiring sprinter Justin Gatlin an unnecessary hero’s send-off. It was bad enough when someone who understands the maths3 of the sport and what a PED progression looks like accepted Shelby Houlihan’s garbage excuse for having nandrolone in her system. But Gatlin’s longest event was the 200 meters, and the only news about him lately is that he’s hanging up his superspikes and the super-everything above them.
Running is no longer among the sports generating statistics I care about. And this is not primarily owed to the loveless ass-reaming of the sports all-time performance lists pursuant to quantum leaps in road- and track-shoe technology; in the end, fans root for gadgetry permitting such gains as long as everyone has equal and unfettered access to it.
It’s the fact that the sport—once marginal in a charming way, now a powerful draw for the most charmless attention-sluts in society’s moral and intellectual underclass—is now a humorless joke covered almost exclusively by yes-folk, self-loathing Twitter gadabouts, and carny-barking pitch-people for nonexistent shortcuts, fake accomplishments, and incipient physiology breakthrough spun from the luminous intrarectal aether.
In my pettiest moments, I sometimes wish I had never discovered competitive running. Not only is that not the case, but had my mom not urged me into it thirty-eight years ago, my hyperactive, obsessive self would have eventually bumbled into the activity somehow. But I do solidly wish that I had never chosen in 1998 to submit a few writing samples and ideas to the then-editor-in-chief of Running Times Magazine with a “Whaddya think?” Not because I wish I had applied my marginal creative talents elsewhere, for more gain; any truly gifted writer is also a tenacious writer, and had I wanted to make an impact as a word-generator, I would have naturally gravitated elsewhere, and probably avoided sports completely. Twenty-four years ago, I was just throwing concepts out there and having fun trying to present them in novel, entertaining ways. I never intended to feign the kind of expertise that can only be legitimately developed through years of hands-on coaching with individuals.
Whatever the case, I would be a grump today no matter what I had sent to whom in a fit of possibly misguided motivation two decades ago, and no matter what I was doing with my professional life [sic]. It’s what I do; even in times of personal prosperity, I seek out and brood over examples of inapt human social behavior, and constantly ask myself why people-athletes, journalists and pundits, and the drooling Retardasauri of Instagram cut corners they don’t even “need” to. But had I never taken part in the production of running-media information, I doubt I would be inclined now to lament this industry’s catastrophic insufficiencies, and I doubt my own running would have suffered any for keeping my guff to myself, and toiling anonymously as someone who manual screws the caps onto tubes of toothpaste while daydreaming, for eight otherwise exciting hours at a time, of a sub-2:22:00.
Multiple times a week, I have the experience of returning home from a run to find a text or e-mail pointing me toward a fresh example of something a distance runner, distance-running pundit, or running-adjacent publicity-whore has said or done that is some combination of the following: Whiny, dumb, unintentionally funny, insincere, demonstrably false, hypocritical, and rooted primarily in personal shame or avarice masquerading as activism. I can’t complain about this bombardment, having expressly invited it and become increasingly reliant on it for article ideas. But it is persistently strange to go out and do something I have been doing consistently since I was 14 years old, and have roughly the same range of physical and sensory experiences, only to come back indoors and be reminded again of what a bawdy display of misdirected bullshit citizen running has become, and why this was inevitable well before the Internet made it frighteningly easy for everyone with a grudge to glorify the least appealing aspects of their own personalities.
If that edited image up there failed to entertain you, that’s fine. But if seeing it pisses you off for some reason, ask yourself exactly why that is. Ask yourself why it is you get upset at the things that you do while refusing to earnestly confront them. Consider for a moment whether you prefer to ride the wave of a demented, mostly online mob and ignore dissenting, unimpeachably sourced input, or whether you’d rather shake that persistent shitty feeling you experience in your darkened bedroom at night, when your mind creeps as close to a realistic evaluation of the forces guiding your convictions as it is likely to get.
Sweet dreams.
This is bullshit, of course; no one, nobody at all, follows badminton. At 52 and a lifelong sports fan, I still can’t even spell it without help.
Bullshit. See above footnote.
No bullshit—they write “maths” in the U.K. and perhaps elsewhere.