Runner's World unloaded the shittiest article exceeding 5,000 words in the history of the genre last Friday

As Rachel Levin demonstrates, treating athletes as entertainment and article-fodder and caring about their serious health problems are mutually exclusive

Today is World Mental Health Day, and even The Olympics are making sure to emphasize its importance. That’s because “mental health” is no longer a concern but a cultural phenomenon in its own right. This is no accident; the more a society collectively believes its own thinking is collectively unreliable, the more inclined that society becomes to accept patent absurdities from official sources.

The Google News results snippet for a Runner’s World story published on Friday, two days in advance of the Chicago Marathon, looks like this:

As the title announces, however, the story itself is primarily about something other than Molly Seidel’s chances of success in the race.

In a story reaching nearly 5,300 words, the author, Rachel Levin, waits until the third-from-the-last paragraph to even mention the Chicago Marathon. And of Molly Seidel, a professional distance runner and 2021 Olympic Marathon medalist, Levin opines:

Does it matter how she does? Nah. Not if you see Molly the Runner for who she really is: Molly the Mere Mortal.

Actually, it does matter how she does. It always will every time Seidel lines up at a race as a pro. She gets this, even if people like Levin don’t. And the excitement over Seidel delivering a bonzer result on Sunday suggests that other people do in fact enjoy it a great deal when she succeeds at her primary task.

The story is about Seidel’s mental health, and not about how it’s improving, because the story goes to great pains to emphasize that it’s not. Levin instead proposes that Seidel’s public disclosures about her own volatility are, as a stand-alone phenomenon, objectively great for her and everyone else—even when Seidel explicitly says that she often abhors having to make these contractually obligated disclosures.

I’m not sure when we* officially entered an alleged era of female athlete empowerment, but this story both describes and serves as an example of the exact opposite: a female athlete who chronically suffers from health issues that overwhelmingly affect women, but is forced to post on social media and submit to self-serving interviews by cookbook authors or else lose risking being paid to do what used to be the sole job of a professional distance runner: Succeed on the race course, and avoid getting busted for doping until late in your career.

Yet Levin portrays as a good thing Seidel having 232,000 Instagram followers she clearly feels obligated to please, sometimes at a granular level, even though Seidel admits she "hates having to post" on social media.

Levin treats scenarios like the following as just another period in the life of an athlete whose comeback is merely experiencing the usual ups and downs:

She’s been running 110 miles a week, feeling healthy, hopeful. Happy. A month later, severe anemia (and accompanying iron infusions) interrupts her summer racing schedule.

Levin describes Seidel as having a “round, freckly face.” This is a traditionally inapt way to describe a woman in the throes of an active eating disorder, but all former media traditions rooted in basic consideration for others are gone, including the practice of contacting authors when you remove their stories from the Internet for any reason.

At one time, the media were flooded with stories about studies demonstrating the clear adversarial relationship between social media and women with eating disorders, and demanding something be done about it. These have given way to stories highlighting that this and a flurry of related problems are just as extant and just as banal, if not more so—but that we should embrace our mental-health problems more as quirks than as anything in need of fixing so we can live better, more peaceful lives.

Runner’s World is glorifying athletes’ occasional or even routine submission to unhealthy habits because Runner’s World is a corporate media outlet, and all of these are presently tasked with screeching about how screwed up America’s mental health is—and about how, like roaring levels excess mortality, inflation, censorship, and yet more wars, this is just the new normal.

Levin surely means well with this piece. But maybe someone who, according to her mini-bio under the article, is the “co-author of the cookbooks Eat Something: A Wise Sons Cookbook for Jews Who Like Food and Food Lovers Who Like Jews, and Steamed: A Cathartic Cookbook for Getting Dinner and Your Feelings on the Table” isn’t the ideal candidate for writing a story like this (and, in case the Anti-Defamation League is watching, not because she’s Jewish).

Of course, that depends on whether you prefer to see athletes continue to struggle so you can keep writing the same stories intended to make the unwell pretend they’re okay, or whether you fundamentally want to see a nation of healthier athletes and humans. The way Levin describes Seidel’s experiment with Adderall—which anyone with sense could see would only go one way, and quickly—underscores her eagerness to see psychopathology normalized:

She ditched the drug, and her life—professionally, physically—unraveled.

Great way to advocate against the use of a universally dangerous drug, pal. Everyone on Adderall might as well be trying to engage in the semi-homeopathic use of crystal meth.

I love Molly Seidel the runner—who couldn’t?—and I root like hell for Molly Seidel the person, because we have a lot in common, even if she just surpassed my personal best in the marathon (and should beat my half-marathon PB soon, too). And I believe she will eventually run the 2:20-to-2:21 marathon I predicted after her silver medal romp in Tokyo two summers ago.

But there can be no pretending here that between Puma, social media, the corporate media, and Seidel’s charming but mercurial personality, this woman is not remotely in charge of her own destiny. Such disempowerment of the vulnerable is precisely what both sane people and a long-dead media strive to avoid, and their coming through when it counts as athletes is no excuse for either continuing to pretend unhealthy habits are healthful for anyone or extracting the talent, hard work, and peccadilloes of women athletes for clicks.