Running from the Facts: "MORE CITIUS PLZ!" edition

The patriarchy is everywhere, and Chris Chavez is not your white knight

At some point last year, I started writing occasional “Running from the Facts”-themed posts to review whatever nonsense the sport’s disruptors, agitators, and confabulators had recently ejaculated into the public domain. The stalling of this undedicated series this spring coincided roughly with the beginning of my “images only” dispatches; although I didn’t plan it this way, I’m obviously been trying to relate the same kind of stories using headlines and article snippets instead of new, unkind sentences of my own.

So now we’re back to this mode, because in this bold space, a picture is worth considerably less than a thousand words, even when the “pictures” contain nothing but the words of other people.

So then:

• I knocked the pre-race media coverage of the Berlin Marathon—or really, The Washington Post’s idiotic story and American Keira D’Amato being regarded as the favorite—so for completeness’ sake, here’s how the postmortems look.

  • Richmond Times-Dispatch: “Neither the place nor the time of 2:21:48 — nearly two minutes slower than her personal best and the current American record — were what she came across the ocean to do.” Two minutes and thirty-six seconds is not “nearly two minutes,” but it’s not “nearly three minutes” either, so I’m not sure what the writer thinks the American women’s marathon record is. (Fun quote from D’Amato’s husband: “The whole family came out, except the kids.”)

  • Runner’s World: “D’Amato pushed herself so hard in Eugene on less than ideal training that she was briefly hospitalized the following day.” Everyone for some reason wants to pretend that Keira D’Amato had been sitting around bloating herself on Cheetos since January when the call came offering her a World Champs spot. If her training was less than ideal then, it’s less than ideal now and was less than ideal before she ran 2:19:12.

    

  I know mileage isn’t the whole story, but the lack of it is impossible to not remark on regarding someone who runs 2:19:12 without ever having broken 15:00 for 5K or 31:00 for 10K. Ask the next 2:18-2:19 male marathoner you meet what his 10K best is—I’ll PayPal you ten bucks from a stolen account if he says it’s slower than 30:00. If it is, and he’s not regularly running 100-mile weeks, ask to inspect his medicine chest.

• Speaking of chests, this appeared in Alison Wade’s “Fast Women” Facebook group, which is a place for people who know nothing about running but watch it anyway to bemoan the peripatetic patriarchy.

  

  Observers have been using the term “barrel-chested” to describe distance runners for a long time. And it’s probably not warpable into a sexist slur.

  

• Speaking of Citius Mag, under no circumstances would anyone with a functioning brain want Tim Hutchings, or Tim McGraw, replaced with Chris Chavez. This is easily and emphatically decided on the grounds of Chavez’ basic incompetence, but he’s a shifty one, too.
  If this Fast Women complainer thinks Chavez as an announcer would clean up after other people’s imaginary examples of unflattering references to people’s physical attributes, he or she should reconsider. Sure, there was this burst of faux-aggrieved virtue-signaling, but that gambit accomplished nothing besides triggering a few women like Mary Cain to spatter their deep-rooted neuroses and peccadilloes all over their social accounts.

  Moreover, that seemed inconsistent with the “Best Male Portraits in Track and Field” series Chavez put out in 2017.
  

  

  Was this all in good fun? Were all the men whose photos were used contacted? Maybe and maybe, but are Wade’s followers concerned about this? If not, they could still be annoyed that he’s a semi-literate Nike shill, but since most folx are pro-Nike these days, I doubt that would matter. Perhaps something in here might.

• Speaking of Alison Wade, a couple of readers commented about my including this in a recent list of ostensibly goofy, off-base, or plain funny tweets and other expulsions:

  

  I agree that the coverage was “unbalanced”; it’s the way this woman always goes straight to the cancel factor that stands out. She’s fond of coming up with unenforceable standards, which I assume makes it easier to build a loser’s case for “DROP IT FROM THE SERIES!”

  Besides, the deal with Wade and anyone else who wants males competing against females as pretend-females is this: They don’t deserve any input. They just don’t, any more than someone suggesting that runners should get to ride scooters once they get too tired to hold goal pace.
  Maybe every fiber of their being legitimately believes that boys and men pretending to be girls and women is good for the world; maybe they’re just consciously seeking to ruin nice things. Either way, these people are bad for any sport they come near, and anything they say about matters unrelated to their gender agonies should be viewed through the lens of their urges to deface nice things.

• Speaking of gender weirdness:

  

  Why do you suppose these dudes want women’s qualifying standards to apply the “nonbinary” category? It’s one thing to divert resources to accommodating this cosplay for narcissists, but prize money? It’s the ultimate JV race.

• Speaking of “trans women are women,” the David Roche passage of the week (readers’ choice) is:
  

  "Some athletes are primed to adapt, whether due to genetics or background. Those athletes can take almost any intervention and progress, their physiologies buffering any excess stress in harder plans, or soaking up the smallest amounts of stress in easier plans.” (Source)
  

  My stab at a translation: “Some people are naturally gifted thanks to their natural gifts. It doesn’t matter whether they overtrain or undertrain—they get better regardless.” The lack of content is typical, but here Roche uses a truly startling number of words to say nothing whatsoever.
  
  I thought his more recent article about Eliud Kipchoge was more quintessentially David Roche.

  

  I think one fair capsule summary of this is, "Here are four takeaways from the training of someone whose training is unknown to me. Thus blinded, I will be stealing from another writer's work—happily, a fellow far more capable than myself." Love it! And it’s great that Roche mentions Steve Magness in this one, because Roche’s pseudo-scientific rambling in Trail Runner and Magness’ Twitter flatulence seem to be converging into the output of a single two-headed, bullshit-breathing anti-guru.

• Speaking of Magness and physiobabble, he came up with this recently:

  

  This is odd, because I’ve always understood talent to be something that by definition shows up quickly, and often forcefully, after someone takes up a new sport or other skill-based activity. Let me try my own version:
  

  “Some people are incredibly gifted at math. Their talent doesn't express until years of struggling to master basic arithmetic. We all knew kids who flunked kindergarten and wound up at MIT. Don't be fooled into thinking Magness will ever run out of material like this.”
  
  Not funny? Give my latent talent a few more decades to bloom and I’ll literally have all of you in stitches. Maybe masks, too.