Quitters, Inc.

Having kept their jobs or standing despite aggressive, systematic incompetence, the soft-bellied slackers of the running media are inviting the rest of us to suck at everything, too

In 1978, “Quitters, Inc.” was published in Night Shift, a collection of short stories by Stephen King. It’s trademark King in short form, using an openly humorous, even slapstick conceit—in this case a ruthless mafia type running a “recovery” business—as fuel for a series of progressively horrifying, easily imagined everyday situations. In “Quitters, Inc.,” this ongoing situation is being unable to quit smoking no matter how progressively painful the penalties for cheating.

When hired, the job of Quitters, Inc. was to literally force people to relinquish a deleterious habit. But the title, stripped of the story’s context, represents a good description of the attitude of the people at the forefront of the running media: They don’t really want to do anything serious or organized, so their collective advice is that you shouldn’t bother, either. The message, with perfect U.S. winter timing: What’s real exercise and fitness when you can just be content with envisioning the necessary movement and internal physiological adaptations?

Last summer, I wrote a two-part series observing the staggering level of self-defeatism among women with easy jobs in the running and other media. It’s as if all of them read it, decided they could do even “better,” and set energetically about even being more listless and blank-minded.

As previously mentioned on Beck of the Pack (read: “Like I complained already”), Erin Strout has left Women’s Running, apparently concluding her main duties there in early November. She announced on Instagram on December 23 that she would become a full-time freelancer on January 3, meaning she has presumably filled out all of the HR paperwork for the position by now.

There is a strong Seinfeld-ian “yada yada yada” in play here, as Strout fails to disclose exactly what prompted this transition. Nevertheless, the comments comprise a cheerleading squad led by a who’s-who of retired opportunists, fellow self-strokers, and proud liars. Folks are eager to have her in the media fold because she helps ensure the continuation of low standards and misplaced rage. (Whatever happened to the “career nirvana” Strout was enjoying as of October?) Some people even wrote “congratulations!”, as if losing a steady job and having a plainly uncertain future is akin to buying a winning lottery ticket.

Strout had another uplifting message for her Instagram followers on New Year’s Day:

If you’re not feeling inspired (and with so much hurt and grief consuming society right now, in so many different ways, who could blame you?), maybe you will be tomorrow. Or next week. Or next year. Sometimes the most we can ask of ourselves is to simply keep on keepin’ on ... No resolutions, intentions, or specific objectives.

Except that sitting around is not "keepin' on keepin' on." Unless you count the bare biological minimum—the automatic processes I sometimes wish I could shut off in myself by thought-force, like heartbeat and breathing—as "persisting," then this post is just a beckoning for others to take a no-expenses-needed-trip to Strout’s Miseryville timeshare.

As I also already noted, this month’s Runner’s World cover features a man who, along with his wife, conspired to receive a $53,000 University of Connecticut benefit he wasn’t eligible for and didn’t apply for. But even pretending that none of that happened, who, exactly, is Runner’s World’s marketing efforts here geared toward attracting? How is this meant to sell subscriptions? Who looks at Martinus Evans and believes that he or she is looking up at least a level in running fitness?

Then of course is the truly problematic Lindsay Crouse, whose 2021 included the one-time 2:53 marathoner — at the advanced age of 35! Sooooo amazing!— posting a fabricated comeback story in one of her New York Times columns, then a-bumbling her zombie-faced way through a 3:39 at the New York City Marathon wearing an elite bib she was proud to have scammed somehow. Maybe, being unbalanced by constitution and having remained unpunished for her slew of professional and Twitter missteps, she thinks half of her lies are real, and believed heading into the marathon that spotty or imaginary training would carry the day in the Five Boroughs. Throughout the year, she also wrote a host of artless, breathless columns capitalizing on others’ recent columns and putting her chirpy, flaky, dipshit stamp on a slightly modified and invariably more myopic take.

It’s also now been nearly two months since I invited the NYT to issue a correction to, or retract, Crouse’s magnus opus of a fabrication.

In October, Crouse boasted of the advantages of giving up:

It’s been a brutal few years. But we’ve gritted through. We’ve spent time languishing. We’ve had one giant national burnout. And now, finally, we’re quitting.

We are quitting our jobs. Our cities. Our marriages. Even our Twitter feeds.

We’re not quitting because we’re weak. We’re quitting because we’re smart.

…younger Americans are already teaching us about boundaries. They’ve seen enough hollowed-out millennials to know what the rest of us are learning: Don’t be a martyr to grit.

No, ma’am. You’re quitting because you’ve never had to work consistently for anything and don’t have the faintest fucking clue about how to manage your version of adversity. Sadly, you don’t have the mettle, and you’re not going to develop it in your late thirties.

Crouse wasn’t through stumping for active failure. On December 23, she urged the moping soccer moms and inheritance-enriched bachelorettes who loyally read her dreck to focus on things they have lost and can never get back, always a helpful state of mind to pursue. I’m curious exactly what Lindsay Crouse has on her list of items forever lost to the pandemic. Did her favorite crotch-waxing joint in Manhattan close its doors for good?

That’s right: We’re all two years older than when we first shut ourselves inside for lockdown. If we assumed the Covid pandemic would be brief, we were wrong. So if you feel like a withered old sloth these days wallowing around and yearning for your old life, that’s understandable. But there’s no use. It’s gone.

The stunning number of lives lost to Covid is its own appalling tragedy. But … we really need to grieve the parts of our lives that have disappeared, even as they continue to slip away. As another year ends and Covid surges again, it’s clear nothing will change soon.

Forget resilience. Forget silver linings.

Yes. Fuck it. Fuck all of it! Dwell on the worst things you can summon about the world and proceed accordingly, mostly in sweatpants, and someone will make sure the rent gets paid.

I’m sure the women whose every life and career move has mimicked Crouse’s own—acceptance into a college way over their heads thanks to family connections or money; extreme body neurosis; and an absolute insistence on being as hypocritical as humanly possible—are too self-deluded in the same ways to recognize how anti-happiness the woman is. For example, Crouse writes about power and plainly regards herself as a bad-ass—perhaps one permanently in the on-deck circle of greatness, yes, but who cares?—yet she can neither tell the truth about herself nor respond to calls to explain her lies. She is a gelatinous pile of raw emotional need, enslaved by her insatiable appetite for attention despite being exactly and unavoidably the kind of person who should strive to avoid the spotlight because her every contrived utterance is a supreme embarrassment.

As always, Crouse isn’t inventing anything. Molly Mirhashem, the sparklingly worthless Outside digital deputy editor and the Queen of Middle-School Piffle, was one of ten editors at this fascinating exercise in lowering industry-wide editorial and ethical standards who, on December 29, supplied a bad habit they were aware of manifesting and proudly intending to hang on to. (Seven of the editors are women, and their seven chunks of anti-folk wisdom were the first seven listed. Where’s the number for the Equality Police?)

I’ve never been much of a morning person. When left to my own devices, I’ll almost always save my run for lunchtime or the end of the workday. Sometimes, yes, it’s me procrastinating. But most of the time it’s that my body feels better when I haven’t just rolled out of bed.

I’ve heard all the arguments for starting the day off right by getting your workout done first, and most of them are… correct. But that won’t stop me from stubbornly squeezing my run in between Zoom meetings in 2022.

How many of her readers can operate like this around work and family? Does Mirhashem think everyone interested in improving their fitness, or even merely imagining being fitter, is part of the class that treats a few Zoom meetings as a full day’s work while keeping most of their attention on social-media developments? Maybe the people willing to fork over money to the Outside, Inc. suite of hyperwoke offerings do. Either way, it’s as if Mirhashem has really never known anything besides exquisite comfort buttressed by the fraught, self-assembled illusion of being capable. Sensing a theme here?

Mirhashem’s latest newsletter entry is titled “An ode to hometown winter running,” and fittingly, it doesn’t describe running at all, wintry or otherwise. It is instead an ode to sitting inside smelling and eating food, experiencing maximal warmth and other sources of physical comfort, while imagining being outside—a fantasy of being faster, more dedicated, smarter, more responsible, hotter, and whatever else is required to keep opacity between what she wants to think of her work and what she knows it is actually worth. She knows, actually, that as far as her job as an editor is concerned, it would have been better for the rest of the world had she literally quit her position instead of serially abusing it. And Christ, someone please tell her how people in the adult world convey thoughts and experiences in English words.

The fact that Latoya Snell is still everywhere, and is in fact expanding her sponsored presence along with her physical dimensions, is more evidence of laziness—not just her own, which is the barely concealed attraction in her entire shtick, but that of the people at the companies who sponsor her.

Is Snell the only fat black woman known to wear workout attire in the U.S.? Or is she merely the only one sufficiently cartoonish and poly-offensive to gain the kind of visibility that makes woke-washing a snap for any company owner who only has five minutes of Googling to spend on “equity, inclusion, equality” concerns before deciding “Ah, here’s our token!”?

It’s not hard to figure out what’s going on when the same unabashedly sedentary party-animal who does a few jumping jacks between soliloquies about her latest disease becomes a mascot for a host of fitness companies. And the message is congruent with that of the suite of fitness publications: Slovenliness is good. Cheating is good. Fuck The Man. Fuck Whiteness. Tear it all down. Be ugly in the extreme.

Trying is for losers.

It is amusing and telling that both Mirhashem and Snell have bemoaned suffering from “impostor syndrome.” This is reminiscent of someone who makes a living breaking into people’s homes when they’re away and stealing and selling their valuables complaining of “burglar syndrome,” or someone who just racked up her sixth DUI snickering drily that she’s starting to feel like one of those substance-abusers.

Ladies, this “syndrome” is what little sense of duty and integrity you possess yelling at you that you suck at your chosen profession, and to take responsibility for sucking because you could do at least a little better.

Alison Wade, also known as Fast Women, is industrious, to be sure. But only about encouraging others to be assholes. Her meticulous attention to women’s race results and the generous inclusion of these in her newsletter is essentially an excuse to persist with her misandrist agenda, which, because Wade has no spine of her own, is a task she pawns off to others at the operational level. She’s like running’s version of Gus Fring, the Breaking Bad villain whose award-winning fried-chicken franchise was merely cover for a gigantic meth lab.

Here, Wade, a relentless social-media blocker and the steward of a closed and carefully moderated Facebook group, is pleased as punch that her minions can start effective positive change by hectoring the former Nike Oregon Project on Instagram. Watch that space to see how many comments Wade herself leaves.

Whenever her reliably waspish subscriber base starts stinging someone, the result is much like the “activists” you occasionally see standing alone and sullen on city street corners holding handmade ABOLISH BILLIONAIRES signs. Hey, we’re all sad about something. Blame Nike. Blame dudes. Time for new sweatpants!

But don’t mistrust all of Nike. As always, the Bowerman Track Club is incapable of wrongdoing; any ruckuses or hints of malfeasance emanating from that camp are always bad luck or empty static from the haters. So Wade has been kind enough to keep her readers abreast of Shelby Houlihan’s “exile” fitness level.

Any other people serving doping bans whose time trials we should know about?

I could exclude Chris Chavez from this critical space, because he too is anything but lazy in the classical sense. He is very ambitious about trying to get his mitts on as much of the running-blather pie as he can. But he’s as unwilling to work as it gets when it comes to doing real journalism or even embracing the concept. And with his job at Sports Illustrated having ended on December 23, he’s expanding his Citius Mag operation.

I’ve provided more than enough evidence that Chris Chavez is not interested in doing real journalism, and that he doesn’t have the innate tools for the task even if he someday decides to change ethical course. But the interview he did with Phil Knight in July summarizes why he’s nothing more than a chattering fanboy. Shelby Houlihan’s temporarily hushed four-year doping had recently become huge news, and I’m pretty sure Phil Knight knew about it. We* Know Chavez did, because he buried his face in Houlihan’s bits and projected a falsehood about it to the entire world, one he never apologized for.

But what questions did Chavez ask in the course of sucking up to this rich, words-slurring old despot? Ones like “What’s the worst thing anyone has ever written about you on Letsrun?” followed by “Oh, have you ever been on Letsrun?” Even at a subconscious level, Chavez knows that if every running fan had to pick one site to permanently disable, either Letsrun.com or Citius Mag, he would suddenly be looking for a different sport to cover badly.

In addition, and like everyone else, Chavez is happy to take swings at Alberto Salazar when it’s convenient. Knight also knows Salazar, since he was reportedly the one figure Al Sal reported to throughout his tenure as NOP coach. Salazar had been in the news, and still is, thanks to Mary Cain’s SafeSport pogrom against him. Did Salazar’s name come up during the interview? I must have missed that part.

Meanwhile, Kyle Merber’s The Bell Lap is being absorbed into the Citius Mag conglomerate. Merber took the opportunity yesterday to dance on Salazar’s not-quite-solidified grave:

Yeah, don’t you fucking love it when every story about running—or in this case, about a deposed running coach, not quite the same thing—that a significant number of Americans are likely to read looks like a huge black eye on the sport? Whether this is really a lovable development depends, I suppose, on your own aims for this thing you call “running.” If tawdriness and despair is your bailiwick, and you’re interested not in the sport’s overall profile but your own ranking within its pecking order, cool! Otherwise, meh.

Perhaps Chavez will be offering Strout her own space within Citius Mag. I can’t think of what other collab the two of them could be plotting, if such a thing is even in the works. But could just as easily start her own Substack. Either way, you can bet she’ll have a newsletter soon. And she’ll use it in much the same way I was often using my own as of late 2020—to express disgust with things. One big difference: No one is likely to find someone in charge to successfully complain to so that Strout loses professional earning potential.

Strout, eager to clean up after her own leaky asshole, has put a note in her Twitter bio announcing that she is now deleting tweets older than two months. This must be another cardinal sign of a reliable 2022 blue-checkmark communicator. I wonder what she would do if she had access to my Substack controls.

But if you want someone who can manage to get done as a jobless person what thousands of employed people do without thinking every day, Strout is your scribe.

Twenty years ago, I embarked on a January that included 561 miles. Then in February I logged 608. I assure you that I had at least as many responsibilities during that time as any of these teary-eyed clowns. I spent a couple of weeks answering phones as a receptionist that winter, which today would count as back-breaking labor because I wouldn’t have been able to dick around on social media all day even had any existed.

And I’m just some no-name white guy, not a member of this cresting wave of powerful women, dynamic communication mavens showing everyone how the visionaries in charge of supplying you with running advice are practicing what they preach.

Would anyone expect anything more substantive or helpful than “Just fuck off, it works for us” advice from a woeful slurry of lazy, soft-peckered, head-hanging, blame-mongering cowards who so far have incurred no negative consequences from being destructively, relentlessly incorrect and either hostile toward or unresponsive to criticism? These people are too absorbed in Twitter likes and self-dealing to do any job properly, let alone one that involves proving complete and accurate information about a contentious issue. Do they really think that defending one side of such an issue with Wokish trash-science and haughty appeals to emotion constitute journalism—especially when set against a background of intra-sport sniping, pithy recycled mantras, and winks in the general direction of environmental advocacy?

But more to the point, why would anyone take seriously the viewpoints and advice of people in the running and fitness industry who not only boast of their own laziness or paralysis—or at best, consider the fitness version of Brownian movement a solid day’s work—but advertise that they are, as a generation, mentally ill (at least the women, or the dying-of-prosperity women in Lindsay Crouse’s erratic orbit) and deserve a break for that reason, too?

Being unable to get your ass going when it counts doesn’t make you a bad person, at least when the only consequence is a missed workout. It just means you should step aside and let people who know what they are doing and eager to do it take the job you cannot perform. No biggie.

These are people who, in the main, got to where they are owing to privilege rather than merit, and in any case are averse to the basic concept of attaching effort invested to rewards gained, even when the connection is as straightforward and absolute as it is in distance running.

So why are these proud invertebrates in charge of media whose ostensible shared mission is to inspire people to become more active? Their publications have begun to resemble Christian religious tracts advising that the divinity of Jesus, the whole Triune deity thing, is for sticklers who think too hard about the Bible. Just go with whatever theistic flow ya got!

The answer to that is brutally obvious: These are neurotics desperate to avoid confronting the reality of their daily misconduct. Even if they get to keep their jobs or in-group standing thanks to the hijacking of the fitness media by hollow-headed “antiracists” and “equality advocates” whose credo includes selective racism toward whites, sexism, and efforts to ruin lives, they know they suck at everything they claim is important. And the only way they can avoid looking as bad as they feel is if the rest of us accept their invitation to join their shambling parade of vocational and avocational sloth, sniping, and blame-externalizing in the face of the slightest twinge of butthurt.

Choose your icons and idols accordingly this year, friends.