Running from the Facts: "Wokism grabs a board, but continues surfing personal waves" edition
Also, it's time to start a fund for victims of the 2021 2:45-to-2:37 Disaster
With winter almost here, few footraces of consequence remain on the 2021 U.S. schedule. One important exception is the Eastbay (nee Foot Locker) National Cross-Country Championships in San Diego on Saturday. Those two races are bound to feel like more of a postscript to the prep turf season than its denouement after the fusillade of fast times at the Garmin RunningLane Cross Country Championships, which were held on the same day as the Eastbay West Region Championships. (If you have doubts about the GRLCCC course length, a lot of coaches on-site shared those concerns and wheeled the layout, confirming its accuracy.)
That regional meet is always a week later than the other three in the Eastbay series thanks to the California state finals not happening until the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Thus, it might be said that California’s bloated and generally calamitous population if nothing else enabled the 2021 Garmin meet to be everything it turned out to be; were the state a remotely normal place, the Eastbay National Finals might traditionally also occur on the first weekend in December, and would have created a direct scheduling conflict with what turned out to be a feast of ultra-fast times in Huntsville. (Then again, the NXN National Championships are usually held on the first weekend in December as well, but were nixed this autumn.)
Despite the slate of scholastic championship cross-country seasons ending and the flow of major road races easing to a trickle, the running media is still obligated to churn out content and expend what is left of their 2021 editorial budgets, which in 2022 should become zero dollars for almost every publication still enjoying an SEO-driven, clickbait-happy existence.
This edition of the running and fitness media’s recent exploits starts with an article I didn’t read, as it’s behind a paywall. Nevertheless, the title and The Shining-esque artwork alone make the piece worthy of inclusion.
“Toxic masculinity” was originally conceived in the 1980s to refer to social pressures experienced by non-alpha males. Today it has morphed into another foreboding, catch-all term to refer to evils perpetrated mostly or, for all intents and purposes, solely by males.
There is to my knowledge no corresponding label for the specific harms that women do to one another—often under the aegis of feminist unity—that spill over into greater society. Hmm. “Corrosive estrospasm” doesn’t have the same ring, or if it does, it’s probably not a ring anyone needs to echo.
Regardless, if we* are now judging gear literally intended for survival purposes as too manly in some way, we may have run out of realistic complaints in the relevant area, or are not looking very hard.Outside also published a piece titled “The Wave of Body Positivity Is Finally Coming to Surfing.” Its thesis is that surfing itself has long been an intimidating, ergo hostile environment for plus-sized women, none of whom have ever been spotted on beaches before. This line scuttles that thesis:
There was never a place for me to be seen
The prevailing mentality among younger today’s fitness enthusiasts is one of paralyzing insecurity combined with a helpless drive to be both noticed and universally hailed. Human nature being what it is, this is clearly a prescription for repeated bouts of navel-gazing depression.
A friend who has been heavily involved with the SoCal surfing scene for decades had this to say about the story:
Sure, the advertisements in surfing magazine did show good-looking women in bikinis. I remember stories about Rell Sun for her surfing and what she did for the sport in Hawaii. A number of years ago, Surfer ran with a headline on the cover, “Lisa Anderson surfs better than you.” I remember stories about Nancy Gardner body-surfing at the wedge long ago. She more recently became mayor of Newport Beach. There were a lot of Brazilian women body-boarders in the magazines, and women like Carroll Phillips got a good amount of coverage for riding big waves in Hawaii in the late 80s or early 90s.
They got coverage for what they were doing, not because they were fit and thin. Being fit was a product of being in the water a lot.
The one lady felt she was not allowed to surf because she wasn’t thin? No one cares. Anyone can get out in the water.
I can see why some beginner women would want to get together when they start out. They can share their experience and get over some fears. The plus size thing seems like it is an us vs them tribal thing to drum up more bonding when, in fact, no one cares about size in the surfing world. You just won’t be one of the best if you are big and out of shape. There is nothing wrong with that, just like there is nothing wrong with people playing in softball leagues.
A pithier way I’d put it: People come in all sizes, but the world’s oceans dwarf all human beings put together. If you’re worried there is no space for you there, you have created your own problem.
As it happens, it’s not just the water that’s unfriendly to certain people, it’s the entire outdoors, and it’s not just plus-sized women who are oppressed.
The cooperative spirit of equality in action. When someone refers to the outdoors as non-inclusive, this suggests one of two things. Either that person has trouble performing basic executive cognitive functions, or that person has an undisclosed or canted agenda. Contra the idea Suunto, via Mr. Montgomery, is advancing here, proudly phallophilic men and their female counterparts have been populating the running ecosystem for decades. I know this in part because in my salad days, awash in generous if not toxic levels of glistening masculinity, I would occasionally be hit on by a members of the LGBTQ community in a running setting. Being something of a cad myself, this only annoyed me when I was in a dry spell with my own preferred brand of human mate.
That aside, I have never found it odd or off-putting to see pride flags or shirts at road races. It’s a common part of the scenery. More to the point, though, it’s obvious that all of these "get everyone in the tent" efforts are really “Give more to the 'oppressed' minorities already well-off enough to be in the tent."
You have to have a little money to burn to even be a real ultrarunner, or at least not be ketchup-packet-hoarding-broke even if you have to work hard and live on very little to generate sufficient free time to make running a meaningful hobby. Or to simply have the luxury to flit around on Instagram for large portions of the day. I include myself as "well off" compared to most, even if I’m now forever unemployable and, as such, satisfied to never again serve the diseased human machine in any way except as a boisterous critic of its multiplying, suppurating sores.I scanned a few of the responses to the changes last week to the U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials qualifying standards. These contained nothing surprising. Alison Wade wants some unspecified power to establish the equivalent of a candlelight vigil for the casualties of the new standards who would have gained entry under the old ones:
Wade also complains that the women’s standard should be equivalent to the men’s. It arguably already is, but in the same article she admits that the purpose of the Trials is to select Olympians, she says that a bunch of 2:37:01 to 2:41:28 marathoners should be dumped onto the women’s race to ensure “equality.” This twisted view of equality would, if applied consistently, actually demand that twice as many men get into the 2024 Trials as women to “make up for” the disparity in the 2020 cycle, but never mind.
Whether this idea has merit—and I doubt the 2024 Consolation Marathon for Elite-Sniffing Also-Rans would be a smash hit—isn’t the point, which is that it reveals all of Wade’s talk about an expanded Trials tricking down to everyday levels of running to be a joke. She is openly agitating to specifically “elevate” a narrow group of women she perhaps feels she could have joined back in the day had things fallen into place. Either way, her quest is not about the interests of anyone outside her narrow area of focus, and it’s inane for her to pretend otherwise, especially when almost everyone else in the running world is playing the same “This is all about you, so love me!” game.
Mario Fraioli suggests a larger version of my idea—make the cut-offs based on field sizes of 250 rather than establishing automatic qualifying times, but include an A standard for each race correlating with the Olympic Games standards (currently 2:11:30 and 2:29:30).
This could be workable. But no matter the plan, I am left trying to square the idea of a large Olympic Trials Marathon with, among other things, the results of the U.S. Half-Marathon Championships over the weekend, which saw a men’s winning time (1:00:55) far closer to the recently set women’s world record (1:02:52) than to the even newer men’s world record (57:31).Trail Runner published an article arguing that 1) there is no solid evidence trans girls have an advantage over cis girls, marking him as a liar or, in the best case, a fool; 2) says it's wrong that competitively successful trans women should have to document or even undergo hormone suppression in order to race as women, tantamount to "men have no advantage over women"; 3) says it can be traumatizing and triggering for trans people to provide documentation of their status when entering a race.
It's full of the usual stuff about how bad trans people in general have it, and concludes on this basis that people have no standing to complain about the "supposed" advantages of trans females when these competitions are inherently unfair to trans people anyway, even though trans girls and women often win.
I think the writer really needs to pay more attention to his own words about the prevalence of mental illness among transgender people, and decide whether it’s a wise idea for trans people to even go to races if it’s that traumatic for them to be there (and compete in accordance with their birth sex). If trans people are this delicate, then why thrust them into such a terrible setting at all? They can still run. The other alternative is expecting society to not merely try to accommodate people with novel needs or desires, but change everything about how it does business in accordance with their fears and whims.
Society doesn’t do this with the delusions of schizophrenics or the reckless behaviors of substance abusers, even while recognizing the parent maladies as treatable mental health conditions. Why should comorbidities associated with transgenderism be any different, when and if the Wokish dust around this group of humans settles?Y’all yelled, and the University of Oregon wants you to know you are seen:
The University of Oregon strengthened protocols in late October to prohibit athletic programs from requiring athletes to be tested for body fat percentage.
According to the revised written protocols, athletes can choose to be tested. But results of the test “should not be reported beyond the student-athlete, dietitian and relevant medical personnel. Reporting of individual results to coaches is not permitted.”
As Wade observes, this will probably amount to squat. But Wade, ever a fan of using the nuclear option even for nonexistent offenses by the opposing force, wants colleges to start firing coaches who are “obsessed with” weight and body fat. The existence of that mindset should be, like, super easy to prove. Cancel the fuckers!
And to top it off, she lacks the nerve to say, “Robert Johnson needs to go." It's funny how Wade socializes her array of gripes, hoping her unaccountable minions do the dirty social-media work of slamming her targets. I do the opposite, receiving tips from others and concentrating whatever unkind output arises on myself, for better or for worse.
From the influencer shitworld: Latoya Shauntay Snell, HOKA’s nod to unfettered, thick-soled woke-washing, is up to 24.6 running miles for the year, and needs to keep supplementing her 15-second exercise videos with hard, clean wisdom. She wants everyone to know that contrary to what the fatphobes think, fat people are capable of consuming food and are actually there.
“It's a great day to normalize fat people eating, existing … and all of the other things that people swear we can't do,” she proclaims. “Mind your apple cider vinegar tablet, diet water ass business - #respectfully,” she finishes, heedless of her own vehement—it’s all fucking vehement—advice to not trigger people with eating disorders, or something.
#Respectfully, HOKA will probably still be throwing goodies at this relentless, normalized scam-toad even when she becomes a wheelchair-restricted mess of diabetic ulcers, at which point all of Snell’s 2021 “fans” will be long gone and on to the next shiny, stupid Instagram object.
Anyone who follows Snell and views her favorably is the kind of shithole person who watches shows like Jerry Springer chronically hoping a hillbilly brawl breaks out on the set, because someone who might deserve it takes one in the tooth. There is no other explanation besides “Fuck everything, life sucks, let someone or something burn” for supporting such an obvious grifter and dubious human being.It’s been a month, and The New York Times Lindsay Crouse Reality Management Department still hasn’t moved my e-mail inquiring about its star columnist’s bold, systematic lying to the top of its capacious to-do list.
I hate to spoil the mood, but Total Running Productions has been doing some fantastic work lately. Stats and history junkies will get a special kick out of their videos, but these productions are an fact as holistic in their approach to the sport as the cheeky name implies. This is the best YouTube channel about competitive road and track running.
Full. Stop.
People are free to promote themselves to their hearts’ content, and to chatter endlessly about bona fide matters of equality of opportunity, abuse by coaches, and so on. But the ongoing coupling of dishonesty-riddled, money-grubbing personal glorification to “It’s all about giving folks a space” invites ridicule, and the fact that butthurt-centric Woko-loco machinations continue to proliferate despite their almost flammable levels of insincerity is uglier still. (I always like to reference the butthurt of others after expending a couple of thousand words lasering in on things that, while annoying and wrong, affect me about as much as Sri Lanka’s immigration policies.)