Runner's World's ratlike editors zapping my stuff is less problematic than their publication of incoherent wordbursts by the likes of Emilia Benton (Part 1 of 2)
Benton is either a human subconsciously intent on twat-punting herself 95 yards in the air or the most sophisticated example of Artificial Unintelligence yet implemented by the fitness media
Runner’s World’s purposefully recondite editorial staff consists, by modern-day obligation, of cowards, know-nothings, and do-nothings whose public-facing product is—with the increasingly glaring exception of Sarah Lorge Butler’s work—rank advertorial garbage. Like every corporate-run media entity, RW has busied itself since 2020 with the profligate circulation of false, hypocritical, and damaging narratives around the transmission and impact of the coronavirus “pandemic,” covid vaccine safety and efficacy, ethno-racial discrimination, proxy warfare, and global warming. This steady disgorgement of variegated misinformation would be sufficiently dismal on its own even if every “article” weren’t mainly an advertisement for something as degraded and dingbat-targeted as RW itself has become.
In focusing so extensively on the RW’s persistently ESG-scam-driven content and the gutless antics of certain staff members, I haven’t given nearly enough attention to these editors’ apparent inability to read for comprehension, perform simple calculations, or fact-check easily verified or refuted claims. RW’s editors are also either ignorant or unconcerned about the basics of distance-running training, and both these people and the outlet’s preferred content contributors are often seen engaging in autoerotic public wankfests organized around wildly unfounded and unflattering bouts of self-flattery. In other words, these people are both grossly negligent and perfectly suited for the dismal ethical and epistemic climate of Wokeblown corporate publishing.
An example of an article that Runner’s World was editorially negligent to publish is “The Case for Running Lower Mileage to Avoid Overtraining,” a November 2020 piece by Emilia Benton. Though the article is already getting musty, both Benton and RW have only gotten worse by every visible metric in the past three-plus years.
This is a rare fifteen-karat, fifty-six facet inverse masterpiece—a thoroughly terrible article from start to finish that seamlessly, if inadvertently, refutes the thesis it attempts to prove using multiple oblivious examples. As such, nearly every word of it invites howls of derision at both Benton and anyone who praises anything she does.
The opening paragraph:
In today’s age of social media and (virtual) group training, it’s hard not to notice that the majority of runners who are shaving down their marathon and half marathon times are running a lot of miles in their race build-ups. Many runners get caught up in the idea that in order to see gains, you have to do more—myself included.
You don’t say. I might be wrong, but I believe that even before the Internet, people noticed that more running training is strongly positively correlated with better competitive performances, all else the same. Oddly, this application of “practice makes perfect” strikes many of today’s less-experienced, less-swift runners as radically counterintuitive, leading usually flaccid waterheads like Benton to try to demonstrate that all of that “hard work” messaging is overblown and for elites only.
At 33, I’ve run 10 marathons and more than 30 half marathons with personal bests of 3:45 and 1:39, respectively. Along the way, I’ve experimented with varying levels of volume and intensity, often simply based on what I saw my running peers doing. Ironically, I ran some of my worst marathon performances with high mileage training, feeling fatigued and overtrained by the time I made it to the starting line.
In contrast, I’ve run my best marathon and half times with lower mileage training.
Attentive readers unfamiliar with Benton but familiar with running can glean from this paragraph alone that the article it contains is utter nonsense. For one thing, Benton is a slow runner whose marathon time is worse than her half-marathon time would predict. For another, she doesn’t give any useful data, failing to quantify either high mileage or low mileage or the length of her training cycles. And for another, she omits a critical and equally obvious confounding consideration: People tend to get better at running marathons for the first few years of doing them even without significant increases in mileage.
This led me to wonder: Could some runners just be better suited for lower mileage training cycles? Can I reach my longtime goal of qualifying for the Boston Marathon without getting upwards of 60 miles in preparation?
I doubt that even Benton really believes that runners exist who can achieve peak marathon fitness on less than nine miles a day of training. But the revelation that she considers a longtime goal worth only so much expenditure of physical effort is deliciously revealing. Hey, I once really wanted to be a sharpshooter, but I wondered if I might become more accurate with long guns if I practiced less, because the noise of the rifle reports in my ears was annoying and I tended to get angry when my shots were too far off the practice target.
Experts say yes: Running truly is an individualized sport and the volume and intensity you’re better suited for to perform optimally can depend on fast-twitch and slow-twitch muscle fiber predisposition.
In readable English, this translates to something like, “Owing to variations in fast-twitch/slow-twitch muscle-fiber ratio across the population of marathon runners, not everyone thrives on higher mileage.” Anyone who understands muscle physiology recognizes this as a non sequitur. No matter who you are, you need to run a lot to maximize your marathon potential. How an individual best structures his or her training relates to his or her muscle-fiber composition, but that’s not what this article is, or is supposed to be, about.
A 2020 study in the Journal of Applied Physiology found that runners with more fast-twitch muscle fibers—which are better suited for short bursts of power—were more likely to suffer from short-term performance dips after periods of higher-volume training.
Now you probably understand why I bolded “longtime” above. It’s almost as though Emilia Benton understands that getting better at distance running is unavoidably a long-term commitment, yet hunts for reasons to avoid this commitment while still hungering for the same results. But that would be clownish, and as Benton is happy to remind her online followers, she is not a clown but a girl-boss.
I used an outside consultant to unravel Benton’s next paragraph.
The next paragraph quotes David Roche (while advertising his and his wife Megan’s “coaching” services), which keeps both the article’s jittery prosaic style and its ruthless mangling of exercise-physiology terminology consistent. It also says that one of Roche’s clients “logged just over 40 miles per week in training before finishing third place at the 2019 100-mile Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc.”
Really? For how long? When I was capable of at least a 2:24 marathon, I’m certain I could have dropped my volume to 35 miles a week (for the hate-readers, this is five miles per day) for 12 weeks and run a marathon in no slower than 2:25-2:26. I’d have grudgingly dumped almost all of my easy running and trained four days a week, with individual days including mileage totals of 5, 10, 5 and 15 or 5, 5, 5, and 20. If readers accept this premise, then by Benton’s unspecified and therefore wide-open standards, it’s possible for even a decent local-yokel-class marathoner to approach his or her personal best on just 35 miles of running a week and break 2:30 in the process.
In other words, for some people, less truly is more.
Well then, since Benton has already proven her point, why must she write more words? Evidently because she’s worried that people like me might one day run out of heckling fodder.
The tricky part is that it’s hard to know what your specific muscle fiber ratio is, and thus what type of athlete you are. Plug a recent 5K time into a race equivalency calculator, and compare it to your marathon results. If your 5K time suggests you can run a 3:59 marathon, but your best marathon time is 4:10, you may be stronger at shorter races that require more fast-twitch muscle fibers. But if your best marathon time is actually 3:45, you may have more slow-twitch fibers.
There is some validity to a more adroitly expressed version of this concept, but the overwhelming majority of people who fall well short of their predicted times in marathons either never train themselves into top marathon shape or execute their marathon races poorly. And despite pushing the idea that people with a higher proportion of fast-twitch muscle fibers can run their fastest marathons on modest mileage, Benton offers no evidence for this whatsoever.
The next paragraph is a good demonstration of David Roche overreaching to say something extremely stupid when merely being himself would have produced a sufficiently frivolous result. Also, I’m thinking Benton meant to write something after the word “estimate” but never decided how to phrase what she planned to express and never discovered the fragment. Whoever “edited” this macabre assortment of partly related words may have been experiencing blurred vision of his or her own that day.
Had Roche claimed that a pair of 4:10 marathons achieved after extended periods of significantly different training volumes provides “valuable info,” this would have been sketchy enough, since we’re talking about extremely slow marathon runners and Roche doesn’t elaborate on the nature of this information’s value—he just asserts it. But by framing a 4:08 as significantly different from a 4:08 in an effort to sound like a wonk, he just squeezes his eyes shut, forms two fists, and brings both hands crashing down directly into his dick at once, over and over again, like someone performing a demented variety of cardiopulmonary resuscitation.
Next, Benton homes in on Nell Rojas, not seeming to notice that Rojas has both the fastest marathon time (by far) and the highest claimed mileage totals (ditto) of anyone Benton mentions in the article.
It would be interesting to learn how many elite American women actually reach 120 to 130 miles a week for more than a month to six weeks at a time. It’s almost as though Benton made this up to make 80 miles a week—at least one-third more than Benton is willing to try—seem like a trivial amount.
Also, Rojas’ path in the past three years hasn’t done much to validate Benton using her as an example of someone content to chill at a modest-for-elites mileage level.
Benton quotes Rojas:
“Professional elite athletes are going straight home after their workouts, and they’re eating well, stretching and napping, because pretty much everything in their lives revolves around running,” she explains.
I don’t know whom Nell Rojas dines with, but she has to know that some surprisingly fast runners pay no attention whatsoever to their diet, with some of them proud to advertise their aversion to greens. And she has to know that some people never stretch. I’m not being critical of the article here, just strongly questioning the idea that elite runners as a rule take especially diligent care of their bodies compared to slower but still-dedicated runners.
Most elites like those training at ZAP Fitness in North Carolina have extensive routines that include hot and cold therapies, massage therapy, and chiropractor appointments every day.
Most of the activities are a waste of time, but they’re a great way to justify not having a job to do all day if you’re a professional runner. Someone who is putting in 120 miles a week at an average 7:00 per mile is working sufficiently hard, but this takes barely two hours a day. People like these probably feel more professional if they load their spare time with as much body-focused work as possible, not just video games and social-media expeditions, even if the demonstrable gains are scant to none.
Benton then introduces Rebekah Mayer as someone with three sub-three-hour marathons to her credit without mentioning that the fastest of these was a 2:59:05 recorded in 2008. And it's easy to demonstrate that Mayer, a USA Track and Field-certified coach these days, almost certainly paid a substantial price for being undertrained.
It should now be clear why I bolded the phrase “race equivalency calculator” above.
Benton concludes this unintentional bout of self-satirizing by explaining that some coaches advise exercising only four or five days a week—and no cross-training, you obsessives!—without showing that this produces good, or in fact any, competitive results.
That this article would completely suck in every way, to the point of genuine hilarity, was a foregone conclusion given that Emilia Benton is its source. But I think I’ve done a good job of demonstrating the various crippling problems with this piece and am wondering why Runner’s World has completely given up on basic editing, even just copy editing. Outside’s publications stopped bothering with these obsolete interruptions to workflow years ago, but I had maintained the idea that RW was at least wrapping its giant piles of steaming manure in pretty-enough bows.
Benton obviously has no business doing any of this, but the same can be said of the lazy-asses who are green-lighting badly written misinformation—not about covid and race-relations, which they have to lie about, but about running-related topics, which they only hurt themselves by lying or being wrong about.
The next post in this edifying two-part series will consist solely of insults, many of them repeating grievances I’ve mentioned multiple times. Therefore, all decent, easily offended people, along with the very few of you who can even remember what you’ve read here for more than a week, should quit reading and go back to dreamily pulling your puds or caressing your coochies over the prospect of executing a fast marathon on low-to-absent running mileage. I may start paywalling my more florid attacks, not to make more money but to protect the hypersensitive and mentally challenged among you.
Anyway, I have a social conscience, too, and for this reason you’ll find Part 2 filed under “The Media and Culture Wars,” not under “Competitive Running.” That part won’t take long to produce; I estimate