Referring to Courtney Dauwalter's body as "revolting" was not Trail Runner's most dubious editorial choice last week
There's no blasting the stink out of the corporate-media shit-show now
Americans won the men’s and women’s feature 2023 UTMB races. If this were football or boxing, we would speculate, however reluctantly, that both winners were probably users of banned performance-enhancing drugs. This practice, however, is only excusable—and therefore only implemented—when the result is a monster physique like former (for now) NFL tight end Rob Gronkowski’s. Gronkowski in his prime stood 6’ 6-1/2”, weighed around 265 pounds, could run the 40-yard dash in close to two seconds, and recorded in the neighborhood of sixty-seven open-field tackles, nineteen receptions, and three dizzying concussions per game.1 Taking banned substances and looking like Eliud Kipchoge or Galen Rupp anyway, no matter how great a marathon time it produces, is at best a lateral move regardless of the associated career advancement.
Anyway, with no further effort to not merely poison the well but shit down it from a great height and screw the lid on tight, those UTMB winners were Jim Walmsley and Courtney Dauwalter. Although these two could switch first names with relatively few people noticing at a distance of less than at least thirty-five feet, Abby Levene seemed to go too far in focusing on appearance when she included this in her review of the outcome(s) last Saturday for Trail Runner:
In characteristic Dauwalter fashion, she tuned out her revolting body and approached the miles ahead with curiosity.
I have to hand it to Levene here. In theory, it’s not easy to find a worse writer with an official editorial position at a regular publication than David Roche. Yet in practice, Zoe Rom and Levene might both be as bad as, or worse than, Roche. I realize such waffling is, ironically, itself distinctly Roche-like, but this one is a genuine three-way pick ‘em.
(And yes, I understand that “revolting” has multiple connotations, just as everyone primed to make that protest understands that Levene’s phrasing was about the most inopportune way, among many possible alternatives, to express the same idea.)
On Tuesday, Micah Lang attempted to dig Trail Runner out of this hole by serving up another reverse palate-cleanser. The apparent game of one-upmanship among TR and Women’s Running freelancers driving this gag-inducement campaign is rapidly becoming a trademark of the Outside, Inc. brand.
First, just to show that often, my charred ember of a heart is always in the right place, I have some practical advice. I'm from New Hampshire, where 14 to 17 percent of adult males identify as Elmer Fudd. If these athletes are worried about being by run over by woefully wayward motor vehicles or mistaken for deer by drunken hunters, they should wear blaze orange. Hats. gloves, Speedos, you name it and it comes in international orange, or certainly should and might someday. And when roaming the forest after dark, always have an external light source to prevent falling victim to these same hazards (this is also good for avoiding trees, tiger-traps, and homeless camps).
Second, just to show that this story is nothing but an advertisement, a portion of the story itself:
Atim, who lives in London, started Ultra Black Running in 2020, during pandemic lockdowns. It’s an online and in-person safe space for black women and black non-binary people to come together, have community, and trail run. It’s not about speed, or podiums, or doing the biggest, hardest things—it’s about having fun, feeling safe, and outdoor adventure.
Dora Atim started her group in 2020 not just during pandemic lockdowns, but when Black Lives Matter grifting-cash—ultimately totaling around $83 billion—was flying in all directions as companies suddenly forced into “diversifying” their workplaces and ad campaigns beyond sense and recognition scrambled to show that they were on board the “social justice” train and the right side of what rapidly proved to be utterly demented history.
I was a consumer of running media for about fifteen years before I frequently found myself on the production side, where I lingered for around twenty more years, with plenty of entire years off, mostly toward the end. I think running companies have actually been historically great about workplace diversity, including professional running clubs. Although track and field and “running” are arguably two overlapping but distinct commercial-athletic realms, American track and field would be as appealing without its decades-rich history of black athletes winning most of the country’s global athletics medals as popular music would be had decades of black blues musicians not set the table for a crazy dude named Chuck Berry to essentially invent rock and roll.
One of the more fun experiences I had in a racing scenario was being on the then-Reebok (now HOKA) Aggies “centipede” for the 2004 Bay to Breakers 12K in San Francisco, where I was living at the time and employed by a fully accredited university. The original goal of this annual 13-person, bungee-cord-linked rig was to beat the first woman across the line, but the addition of multiple centipedes over the years also made it a contest between ’pedes.
It’s hard to find info about the 2004 race now, but the adidas TranSports team beat us by around twelve seconds, with the first woman, Russian Albina Ivanova, managing to squeeze herself in between the Trannies and the Aggies. Ivanova was fresh of a 39:22 for the same distance at the Lilac Bloomsday 12K in Spokane, Washington and years later would knock off a 2:23:52 marathon.
Our time was listed at 39:59 in 2004, so if it now says 40:00 on the Aggies website, chalk it up to Putin’s Price Hike.
It was a fun, three-way duel throughout. Our team, led by Kevin Pierpoint, went out in 5:40 for the first flat mile. The course is fraught with uphills until the five-mile mark, which we reached in around 28-flat. The route is famed for the Hayes Street Hill, but the bitchiest climbing comes shortly thereafter, the long rise all the way through The Panhandle and continuing for the first mile inside Golden Gate Park.
Throughout the race, my goal was simple: to not only to avoid, at every literal step, becoming the inevitable rate-limiting step in the 13-reactant equation, but also make sure I could identify someone on the team clearly suffering worse than I was so I could stop worrying about serving as anchor. Yes, I wanted to know there was a buffer between me and any genial post-race blame that might arise for spoiling the group’s effort.
The final two and a half miles (actually 2.45645430685 miles) through Golden Gate Park consist of one black-diamond screamer of a downhill. At least it feels a little like you’re skiing when you’re yoked together. I was coming off a fairly recent 51:32 10-miler and a very recent 14:58 5,000 meters, so I was comfortable until the downhill started. Then it was just madness and hammering feet.
This shot shows me somewhere in those final 4K behind 1:49 800-meter runner Roosevelt Cook, who years later would run a 2:23:36 marathon, and in front of someone whose name may have been Mike. (I could find out.) Roosevelt weighed about 112 pounds and did nothing to block the wind, which as I recall was at our backs. Also on the team was Sergio Reyes, visible behind Pierpoint’s right shoulder in the above photo of then-Ivanova.
Reyes, then a mere 29:34 10,000-meter runner, would go on to run 2:13:34 for the marathon and win the 2010 U.S. Championship at that distance. This year, at 41, he ran a 1:06:27 half-marathon. I could tell at the time that this kid loved, absolutely loved, racing. But man, not that fuckin’ much.
Despite running the final 2.456 miles of the 2004 Bay to Breakers at 4:53 pace, we couldn’t reel in Ivanova, who’d surged away from us on the final uphill, while the TranSports team actually gapped us after we were more or less even at five miles.
I was moved to bring up this otherwise irrelevant burst of self-glorification because as I was writing this, I thought of a conversation I had with a friend in the business in 2020, soon after the corporate scramble to out-diversify everyone else was underway. This person pointed to the existing roster of the Aggies athletes as an example of “What else are we supposed to do that we haven’t organically done already?”
If you look at the archived page showing the Aggies athlete roster as of September 2019, although most of the photos will fail to load, you can tell that this was not a club with any conceivable barriers to entry. And the Aggies were not alone in this. And I never paused to consider how very diverse that 2004 Aggies centipede was; no one did. We were having too much fun for that.
If you don’t believe that BLM was nothing but a grifting circus aimed purposefully at enhancing the upward transfer of wealth during the covid CARES scam that mostly propped up the financial markets while helping a smattering of medium-sized businesses, then someone will have to explain to me all the benefits that have come over the past three years from worsening crime, poverty, academic-performance lagging, and homelessness that, as always, has hit ethnic minorities first and hardest.
Black and Hispanic voters are not only abandoning the badly listing remains of Joe Biden, Junior in numbers that should alarm Democrats, but fleeing into the arms of Donald Trump, alleged mastermind of a white-nationalism crisis (exacerbated by climate change, covid, et cetera, ad libitum, ad nauseam). It appears that economic and other realities begin to prevail over extreme gaslighting and astroturfing at a sufficient level of citizen misery.
Back to Ultra Black Running. When I say that I believe that running companies—despite a history of sensibly marketing to high-free-time high-earners, regardless of color or rainbow status—have always been reasonably diverse, I’m tying this to the idea that most CEOs in running felt the same way at the time the one-woman tsunami of anti-white bullshit named Alison Desir labeled the entire running industry “white supremacist” owing to a murder that had as much to do with organized running as Roseanne Barr does, on or off Ambien. I am quite confident that countless people wanted to tell Desir to shove her opportunistic accusations up her increasingly wide and sessile ass, or words to similar effect, but understood that then was not the time to display any sort of courage on the racial-relations front.
Neither is now, clearly.
People running companies don’t like to be told how to operate by external actors, especially non-stakeholders like autocratic sexual deviants from the World Economic Forum and BlackRock (one word, not two, although both versions have been fetid swamps lately). Between this and the belief among running-company CEOs that their companies were already as diverse as the free market had situated them, these companies have done next to nothing to fulfill their diversity requirements from on high or else be penalized for low ESG/DEI ratings. They’re saying “We’ll jump, but not off the floor.” Can you blame them? (I still sort of do.)
This is why you see Latoya Shauntay Snell everywhere, because in addition to being undeniably “of color” and obese, she also claims to be queer. HOKA, Strava, and other companies that glorify Snell’s bulbous and torpid efforts can check off multiple diversity boxes by attaching themselves to a single chortling goonstress. It’s why Minerva Valerio, who actually is a runner and not a cartoon character, is almost as ubiquitous.
Both women have made it plain—neither is stupid—that they know they are being used as mascots. But what should they do, walk away from the money? (Only one of them even physically could, at this stage.)
CamelBak’s foray into this ESG/DEI-score-bolstering effort, it appears, includes—and may consist entirely of—flying a bunch of black people claiming to be nonbinary to the Alps so they could waddle around Chamonix. That’s not a slam, it’s a quote from Dora Atim:
“Even when it got really dark out there, like when it was really tough, we were just laughing it off. Because we don’t get to do this every single day. We don’t have mountains where we’re from in London. It was also an opportunity to be really grateful for being able to travel to the mountains, and then celebrate afterwards and waddle around Chamonix with pride and our medals.”
Well, good for her. She said thank you and seems to mean it. Do I think she’s full of shit about being “nonbinary,” just like everyone else claiming the label? Obviously. Do I blame her for seizing on an economic opportunity that allows her to travel around? Not one bit. White people like Bill Gates and George Soros (I think Soros counts) who are not the least bit interested in making the lives of minorities rolled out the red carpet, and characters ranging from the benign, such as Atim, to the obscene, such as Desir.
Meanwhile, black lives are mostly shorter and more brutal than ever in all the same long-beshitted and shot-up places police have been told to stand down by the same people funding the BLM movement. As the old saw goes, great chaos if you can fund it.
I was glad to see Ling’s article because it led me to her Trail Runner author page, which led me to this.
I maintain that this is the best one-two single-publication “YES! NO!” punch yet. Two articles by the same author six days apart with brazenly contradictory headlines.
And although Ling may not work all that hard at her craft, if it was her idea to split what could have been one article describing burnout from every angle into two contradictory pieces—hence doubling her freelancer pay—then she's smart about making money. And kudos as well to whatever editor conspired in this grifting.
The primary reason, maybe the only solid reason, that I harbor a focused distaste for well-off trail runners is that they are constantly trumpeting self-satisfied bullshit about supporting rainbows and darker-skinned people while being not only immune to things like rising prices but profoundly oblivious to the ills mentioned above and in previous post.
These assholes are preaching and grifting from what used to be a platform I shared with bona fide liberals. I have always been in favor of the right to have an abortion and be married to a same-sex partner. And although I don’t talk about this much, my experiences earlier in life included extended stints in rehabs and sober-housing settings that often had more “people of color” than white people. This was never a problem; in fact, while it would have been nice to dodge alcoholic drinking altogether, I’m grateful for this aspect of that experience because it reinforced the reality of common struggles despite wildly different backgrounds.
I sometimes wonder if some of these subdivision-raised prep-school clowns somehow handed degrees from Ivy League schools despite phenomenally watery minds have even been around black people outside their own social strata.
One time, the Gronk reportedly punched a hole in the side of a cow just to see what might be coming up the road.