Outside's lazy, fragile editors embrace ignorance and irresponsibility while blaming the world for their self-imposed anxieties and mental disarray
The WEF-caliber people ultimately directing this messaging want us to think we're the crazy ones for seeing through their massive, swirling fogbanks of lies
In the past year, the term “mental health” has appeared in Outside Online articles around 196 times. Trail Runner pieces have included around 63 mentions of this phrase over the same period, while Women’s Running accounts for around 29 mentions. This means that the three publications Outside dedicates in whole or in part to long-distance running have featured the term “mental health” around six times per week over the past 365 days, with this frequency gradually increasing over this period.
On the surface, most of these pieces are no different from the “While running is no cure-all, it reliably improves your state of mind and being” stories about the relationship between exercise and mental health that peppered fitness magazines for decades. But there are important differences between this old, often helpful content and this new, invariably dilapidated content.
One difference is that today’s Outside publications are both staffed and managed by and aimed at the most neurotic objectively understressed people in the world—folks from affluent families who unironically couple a voracious appetite for approval to inviting uproarious, scathing derision with every new zany, counter-logical, and deleterious public gambit. These characters don’t merely blame any unwanted feelings they experience on others; in most cases, they attribute these feelings, which invariably manifest as transparent self-loathing, to purposefully malign others.
Another difference is that corporate publications—in particular those aimed at left-leaning readers—have as a rule been churning out more articles than ever in recent years about how nutty and scatterbrained the American citizenry has become. The main idea here is to convince people wed to consuming corporate media, especially “liberals,” that any psychological distress these people experience is someone else’s fault and that someone intends to cause them this (opt-in) pain. This is a means of the state getting the citizenry to trust authority even in the face of creeping authoritarianism: We know you feel “off.” The problem is Them; come along with Us, and We’ll fix everything for You.
The utility and the quality of the sourcing of the more recent class of mental-health-first articles is neatly captured by a quote from Grayson Murphy in an October 31 Outside Online piece by Sarah Strong titled “The Easiest Way to Improve Your Running? Focus on Mental Health.” Outside Online’s own editors selected this as one of the e-rag’s best articles of 2023.
It would be fun, if not remotely edifying, to hear Murphy attempt to break down the assertion, “80 percent of your training and success is mental,” perhaps while sporting the finish-line weapon most of us sadly forgot at age seven: “airplane arms.” She sounds like someone trying to imitate late Major League Baseball catcher and notorious wag Yogi Berra (“90 percent of this game is half-mental”) without including the critical elements of self-aware irony and internal cohesion.
Murphy is coached by David Roche, making her one more mindless, unethical attention-hound associated with Roche’s S.W.A.P. coaching mill. Despite being unable to assemble comprehensible sentences himself, Roche is a Trail Runner editor, a status owed to the fact that another of his clients, Zoe Rom, is—at least on paper—both Trail Runner’s editor-in-chief and Women’s Running‘s managing editor. As I’ve mentioned a few times, Rom and Roche have turned Trail Runner into an internal S.W.A.P. circus, with practically everyone quoted as an expert source in these “articles” associated in some way with this group of ridiculous, no-account, tragicomically misguided, dick-twistingly obnoxious, and grossly self-overrating know-nothings.
Rom, who is so insecuhre and despehrate for bespoke attention that she occasionally altehrs the spelling of hehr suhrname, wrote a mental-health-oriented piece for Trail Runner on November 16, 2020, “Prioritize Your Mental Health Amid Coronavirus Madness,” obliviously yet perfectly capturing her and her S.W.A.P.-o-pathic mates’ astonishing lack of fitness for dealing with the basic expectations of modern life, especially the intrusive bane of remote employment.
Among the claims and admissions (H)Rom unconsciously makes here:
Normal people develop eating disorders and severe anxiety owing to disruptions to their social and exercise routines.
You should maintain social distancing while running outdoors if you insist on running outdoors at all. (“The pandemic” was over nine months old in the U.S. at this point.)
Running may help you feel better, but there are better ways for you, an audience of distance runners, to go about this tragic work.
Rigidly obeying government directives is a form of exerting personal agency.
Becoming more informed only screws with your head.
I oomphasized the fourth bullet point because I find it astonishing that anyone could equate categorical trust in government with being in control, even though far-left or merely limousine-libtard politics (think Boulder, Colorado) have been virtually synonymous with a fondness for the nanny-state for many years.
This was far from the only piece the Outside verbal-slag-heap empire released in 2020 urging people to stay indoors and isolate. It was asinine advice to propagate to a readership of ostensible exercisers then, and it looks even dumber now.
Nevertheless, just as with every trivial-to-serious factual error or gravely misguided suggestion that Rom, Roche, and other shitlib contributors to Outside Online, Women’s Running, and Trail Runner have made since cannibalizing these e-rags for their privileged-yet-avaricious and hollow-headed selves, there has been no move by any of these figures to revisit their own past advice—even as these same e-rags have continued to publish pieces underscoring just how terrible they knew this advice was.
I am going to speculate at this point that if I went around insisting, say, that boys who pray hard enough can transform themselves into girls, and then refusing to engage anyone who challenged me on this despite being a paid editor, I would be mentally frazzled. I might not be able to admit to myself under these conditions that this was stemming solely from feeling guilty about my own cowardice and preening foolishness, but I would certainly feel like I wasn’t sane in the membranes no matter the cause. If I added to this one-way discussion the claim that all white people are inherently racist but that no one else even can be racist—as a white person with only white friends, no less—my anxieties would be compounded, even if I might again be unable to properly identify my own public displays of inglorious, cartoon-level inaccuracy as the cause.
If I further asserted that mega-obese pathological liars who are unable to complete a single mile in fifteen minutes have proven to be respectable additions to the running community, I would surely feel even more guilt and psychological unrest. And if I were a data point in perhaps the most jovially in-your-face of the Outside empire’s many hypocrisies, which is using people who fly in private jets to push the idea of an incipient climate disaster, I might just have a distracting level of catecholamines coursing through my bloodstream even at rest.
If I operated like this for years, advertising my recalcitrant-mouth-breather status all over the Web while never once admitting any fault or engaging the people pointing out my mistakes and especially my conscious lies, I imagine I would feel at least some sense of having sinned for having laid down an impressive assortment of galactic and pansified oopsies—even if I could successfully block out all critics and criticism and even if I knew my job would remain safe thanks to Outside CEO Robin Thurston being a proudly cynical vulture-capitalist with no quality standards whatsoever for either himself or his business interests.
As it happens, ample evidence exists—apart, that is, from the anecdotal-but-undeniable evidence in the form of the hysterical and hypocritical dreck that shitlibs unspool onto the Internet all day, every day—that leftist politics are associated with being in some way mentally ill, at least by the standards of a stable-enough society.
Hell, even if everyone alive arrived at the consensus that my criticism of these people like mine is overly laced with superfluous invective, they would have an impossible time defending the targets of these horrifying, bone-shattering insults at a basic factual level. It is frankly undeniable, for example, that the e-rags under Rom’s and Roche’s “management” are routinely awash in significant typographical errors.
Also, the fact that the folks in charge of the graphics work for these e-rags is either overly playful with ascendant forms of AI technology or overly intoxicated introduces a bizarre (and not altogether unwelcome) element to the “Here at Outside, we stay inside whenever we can” mix.
And concerning the image below, it seems like a purposefully racist move to call a fat black woman nourishing herself and a slim white woman exercising “the same you” in consecutive chapters in whatever instructional series is depicted below. But this makes sense since some white person is almost certainly behind this and all of us are confirmed racists.
But perhaps the most startling example of how little this group of people cares about anything resembling a healthy state of mind is what Allie Ostrander’s YouTube channel has looked like since she returned from a doping-related ban five four and a half months ago and enlisted Roche as her coach.
While affirming that she still struggles with bulimia, Ostrander has produced videos about eating and burning 5,000 calories in a day; about eating like a fitness influencer for a day; about eating like bodybuilder Nick Bare for a day; about eating and training like her boyfriend for a day; about eating and training like a triathlete for a day; and about covering the vertical distance of Mount Everest, but near where she lives. She has also produced a video detailing which of her standard videos has earned her the most revenue.
At some point in the past five-plus years, the media and social-media narrative about elite runners with known eating disorders shifted from “How courageous of her to admit to having an eating disorder and to try to reduce the associated behaviors” to “How courageous of her to come out with this and maximally monetize the associated behaviors.”
Ostrander appears less than three weeks from posting about how she's down to throwing up only at night and after inhaling a half-gallon of pistachio ice cream. She'll say this is fine provided she hydrates throughout the day and evening. Soon after this, she'll upload a video of herself with her hands on her knees and projectile-vomiting a bright-green foamy stream of mostly pistachio ice cream ten feet across her bathroom, aiming mostly for the shower stall and joking about a new personal best for distance (indoors, at least). This will gain the spunky lil’ gal more praising comments, followers, and revenue.
Since, as always, I’m trying to be constructive here, if the people who create and subscribe to the content provided by Outside’s e-rags want to escape feeling like the chronically depressed and semi-functional ignoramuses they are, they can try one of the two following strategies: either stop being hypersensitive, craven ninnies paid week after week to create and “edit” material that would be laughable even if copy-edited; or have Ostrander—rebranded, at least temporarily, as Allie Osthrandehr—and high-profile ingestion-eructation-defecation heroine Latoya Snell collaborate on a dining wellness series patterned after any number of effective Monty Python skits.