Runner's World, for whatever strange reason, suggests that cheating is wrong

A publication laden with immoral actors should clean its own house before remarking on messes elsewhere

In the eyes of serious runners, Runner’s World has been a joke for decades. The online version, however, has offered far more to competitive athletes and followers of high-level running than the print version since its inception; RWOL has reliably rolled out occasional pieces by Sarah Lorge-Butler and a few others known to commit occasional acts of genuine journalism.

But owing to both Wokism and the immutable realities of online publishing, even RWOL is now completely awash in bullshit—chum aimed at the undiscerning meatheads incapable of distinguishing fearmongering from news, a demographic that now encompasses between 95 and 100 percent of the population. If you’re writing or reading this, it’s almost certain that your brain is badly askew.

Runner’s World decided to publish a story this week about an “influencer” named Matt Choi who was caught running with someone else’s bib at the Houston Marathon. Identifying as an influencer means admitting to being a public liar as well a drama queen (I have yet to encounter a single exception), so naturally, Choi claimed he simply forgot to sign up for his own Houston bib because he was new to running, and “thanked” Marathon Investigation for educating him.

Choi’s main posting venue is apparently TikTok, which hosts the most flagrantly cavorting and unwell Internet sleaze among all social-media platforms (so far). According to the story’s author, Chris Hatler—a sub-4:00 indoor miler in 2017 for the University of Pennsylvania—the reactions of Choi’s followers ranged from “Screw this guy” to “It was an honest mistake.”

Years ago, a story about someone cheating would have generated nothing but scorn for the cheater and his actions. But today, this is no longer true. Even accounting for the fact that TikTok users as a class seem even unmoored and rudderless than Instagram influencers and their acolytes, with many of them one hinky brain-blurt from a permanent diaper, runners in general seem to think cheating and lying are okay as long as it gets perpetrators of these niceties what they want. Or at least that’s the idea projected nonstop by the remnants of the running media, most running-related podcasts, most Twitter accounts maintained by runners or running-adjacent bozos like Erin Strout and Alison Wade, and most short videos featuring a roly-poly halfwit in exercise gear spewing lies through his or her madly winking face-anus.

If Runner’s World has really decided to let people write honestly about cheating and lying, it means we* will see a lot less of the garbage RW has been sharting webward in recent years.

Those headlines and the associated stories were absurd in real time and look even worse now. Anyone who thinks masking at all to run outside, let alone using two of them, is never going to make it in life without a caretaker-financier. Alison Desir is a low-IQ racism-stoking grifter whose theories I could demolish in three minutes or less in a moderated discussion, which Desir is too gutless to agree too. And although RW apparently ended its relationship with Latoya Snell soon after it started in late 2020, it never should have put her on the cover in the first place—she is pure filth anywhere else she drags her boozy, overstuffed carcass around.

And RW doesn’t just promote losers and loserly bullshit; like all such demoralized entities, it contradicts itself in the process. The December 2021 Kelly Roberts article made no mention at all of her florid history of banditing multiple races.

More recently, Runner’s World did a truly hilarious thing. After allowing me to write a story more or less mocking the idea of nasal-only breathing, someone quietly replaced my article within a few months with a contradictory, anti-scientific one by a different author at the same website address.

I could conclude that RW is simply racist because Choi appears to Asian-American and, according to people like Alison Desir, every single event that results in the punishment of a nonwhite person ultimately stems from structural racism. I’m not making that up. If you’ve perceived a media a shift in recent years from the sensible premise that racism exists to the ridiculous premise that nonwhite people are morally pure, it’s because this is exactly what the media have been proposing (viz. “Mostly peaceful riots,” etc.).

But I don’t think that’s it. Clickbait is clickbait, and a story about a cheater will draw eyeballs whether the tone is approving, neutral, or contemptuous. Hatler’s is a fair story that allows readers to make up their minds, although it’s weird to be living in a world with a baseline climate of “Some forms of cheating are defensible”—which is never true.

I predict it will be less than two weeks before RW publishes something at least as stupid as gushing praise for Desir or Snell or Roberts, and at least three months before it publishes anything that suggests people can’t just say and do whatever they want and have society cheer it on.