Running's influencers, editors and "journalists" are now indistinguishable from each other (conclusion)

We're getting close to one huge non-fun-run, and it's not just older runners who are turned off. Now what?

(This is the third and last lament in a microseries; Part 1, Part 2)

Despite looking closely for purposes of this bloglike enterprise at only a small slice of the overall media, I’ve lost count of the number of editors and writers who have participated in fabrications, cover-ups, and distortions: In stories about transgender and intersex athletes, pieces that have invariably been meant not to inform but to persuade the public into illegitimate positions; in stories promoting anti-white racists, course-cutters, and anti-women’s running activists—Wokish grifters all, and cast by duped or malign editors as heroes; in anything concocted by the “Who can we try to ruin with lies next?” Outside editorial bumblefuck-team of Molly Mirhashem and Martin Fritz Huber.

This kind of bullying, to say nothing of “political correctness” overall, doesn't sit well with most Americans. But most of us* are too hypnotized, baffled, afraid, or (worst of all) complacent to say anything. And lot of decent people have become trapped in the goo of the compost sandwich the running media has become, or so I continue to tell myself: Deluded against their will in the course of following decent impulses, like countless other religious converts. But most of those involved are, I’m afraid to announce, just gross human beings—happy to lie while suggesting or demanding the ouster and silencing of their honest but discolored, improperly gendered critics, and eager to cram themselves into that compost sandwich between moldy slices of slime-seeping Wonder Bread.

I found this apt observation in a comment to a post that’s behind a paywall, so I couldn’t credit its author even if both of us wanted that:

I've sadly come to the conclusion that it's no longer a loose analogy that Woke Twitter is the 2020 version of the Moral Majority. They're the same thing. We can debate the comparative merits of a sincere belief in Evangelical Christianity vs. a sincere belief in social justice, but we can't argue that both movements were captured by grifters who used their respective belief system's tenants to fear-monger, generate cultural power blocs, and to enrich themselves.

I look very harshly on anyone who uses lies to advance even a defensible personal or social agenda, much less a diabolical one. This horrible, irredeemable human being, and I’m only certain about two of those, caused me and numerous people I have omitted from any narratives about Ms. Duclos at their request a great deal of grief for no reason whatsoever and showed how much difficulty even an insane idiot with no standing can cause just by being connected to the Web. So that’s the lens I see a lot of this ugliness through, and a glance at cultural trends in recent years suggests that it’s a wise point of view to adapt.

But come on: Running, as a matter of both personal integrity and public discussion, is supposed to be tied above all to sincerity. I am always some considerable distance from my personal human ideal, itself a fuzzy and shifting concept. But when I run, I don’t lie to myself. I couldn’t even if I wanted to. I don’t just mean the obvious running-related elements themselves—paces and distances—but whatever else is on my mind. Running’s mood-elevating effects are well described, but this de facto narcosis also allows for a level of self-honesty and introspection that can be hard to replicate sitting alone in a room or even with a therapist.

At some point last year, it became evident to me just how powerful a magnet running had become for the Wokish, a class of mostly young, educated, fragile, miserable, insecure, brainwashed, but otherwise normal enough Internet warriors whose primary character traits include humorlessness and an inability to accept that some people are slow-footed, wide-bottomed, sexually unappealing, and witless—often all four—and that, while this sucks, it is no one else’s fault. This group was plainly intent on making its dismal mark through lying, whining, simpering, canceling, and other gutless manifestations of the cuntic arts, all of this aimed at ruining (yes, really; ruining) running as a valid and promotable sport by portraying the status quo as a toxic, miserable environment filled with people who need to be replaced on the basis of their skin color, gender or age.

The Wokish call this “challenging power structures,” or some such, but it’s not. It’s a power-grab, and “anti-racism” led mainly by acne-scarred harridans is the perfect cover for it. The last people I wanted or expected to be pulling the same evil stunts were representatives of the running media. But Ms. Duclos is not the only woman alive who resents being less attractive to men than her peers, or dislikes men in general, or likes leaving the unique stain of personal resentments on other people’s things simply because she can.

When I began circulating the idea last summer that the running media was becoming broadly untrustworthy, it was for a single reason: The intentional dissemination of dishonest ideas framed as facts is never a good thing, no matter the ultimate aim and any justification for seeking it. Any progressive issues supposedly being advocated for had nothing to do with this. The idea that I suddenly decided for no defensible reason to start hammering away at people and publications closely tied to one I was still freelancing for doesn’t really hold up.

So either I’ve gone off the deep end and none of the people I’ve called out in some way can be bothered to deal with what to them should constitute serious charges of editorial, social, or interpersonal malfeasance, or I’m at least a little bit correct and the carnival of mud-slinging stupidity is either not something a lot of runners see as a serious problem or a problem most runners don’t think they can do anything about.

Lying from a media pulpit is worse than just an obvious disregard for one’s professional duty. It’s bad for society. It’s disgusting. It’s bad for kids to be growing up in an environment where the truth is something that is only valuable when it serves any given cluster of adults’ own ends. Most of the people who reap the short-term benefits—Michael Avenatti, anyone?—wind up incurring serious long-term costs, even if they believe themselves to be protected.

There is nothing worth holding sacred about even the most appealing people who participate in running, but at root, the activity itself demands a certain level of honor, at least if you’re going to integrate it into your being and not just graft the pretty parts of it onto your outward-facing persona. At a minimum, don’t present fictional efforts as real. You can’t possibly lie to yourself about doing this, any more than a not-yet-caught doper can really convince himself with his own bold denials that his efforts are untainted. So what’s the point, other than to legitimize misinformation and even disinformation?

Since last fall, in addition to the craven bag of estrogen who in effect ran to the principal’s office after discovering this blog, the dissenting responses to those who have shared my content have consisted of a very adult combination of Oh look a white man and Don’t link to that. This is despite having pulled most of my punches to this point. I knew this would make no difference, but I wanted to establish the massive pattern of lying and ignorance-laden articles before I really turned mean. Turning mean is about the only defense anyone has against the Wokish, for they display their weak spots in bright neon colors with every newly contrived grievance.

Apart from these things, principally as a result of my purposeful exposure to this stuff and a gradual loss of objectivity, I’ve had it with “running chatter.” The NCAA Division I Cross-Country Championships were held on Monday in Stillwater, Oklahoma (which, let’s face it, is among the coolest place-names in the entire lower forty-eight). You can and should watch the women’s and men’s races, as I did live. The wide-open course made it easier to take in the enormity of a couple of hundred bodies slamming themselves up and down hills at full bore, with nothing at stake for most but a triple-digit placing and possibly contributing to a podium finish. Both races are worth watching for this visual effect alone, especially the women’s, with the 6K distance narrowing the window in which most of the competitors finish. It is nice to see fast runners charging all-out and defying whatever challenges life has thrown at them and their collegiate athletic journeys.

This kind of “what is it really about” thing has been on my mind lately anyway, for reasons unrelated to the Wokish.

The next night, I saw a tweet that, despite bearing no malice at all, was simply the coup de grace in terms of my willingness to openly identify as someone who ever put on a uniform and even paid money to jog up the street with an assortment of other goobers. (See? Loss of objectivity.) It was a complaint about one of the commentators remarking that the Northern Arizona men’s teams has a no-donut rule, and how this kind of absolutism is unhealthy and on and on. I don’t even recall whether the comment was even sincere, but either way, it attracted the usual scolds and stern head-nodders about Rules We Should Have About Rules and so on, and the thread gained the imprimatur of a few pros.

And I just thought to myself, you know, there is only so much running can or even should change to accommodate people’s fragilities. I know “fragile” is a loaded word, but I’m using it as clinically as I can. We* could spend the next 50 years trying to weed out everything claimed to be making the sport somewhere between imperfect and inhospitable—men, supermodels, hell, even the very capturing and streaming of photos and videos—and what would remain is an environment full of eating disorders that is simply not a good fit, not healthy, for a lot of people. Even a lot of those who are pretty good at it. The fundamental problem is humans being human and having human faults, and right now there is just a little too much pouring out of all of them at once onto running to make it remotely attractive to follow. I mean, I was all-in during the webcast, making my viewing of the aforementioned donut thread all the more jarring of an experience.

If runners are going to demand an absurd level of accommodation for their personal bugbears, I can assure all of them based on personal and destructive experience that this not only doesn’t work, it is also invariably counterproductive. My years of binge-drinking can be framed realistically as an ongoing effort to avoid the reality of a life I was not enjoying owing far more to personal failures than ambient noise, and a cycle of wanting to avoid the further chaos that drinking caused by avoiding it in the same way. Whatever the case, I can talk all day about the damage I caused to myself and to a great extent to those close to me, but all along the way I was setting small and large fires for others to put out.

No one deals with personal pain in a good way without sharing it somehow, and there are good and bad ways to go about it. When you import your own noisy pain into a social environment and simply expect everyone to accommodate whatever it takes for you to feel okay there—including lying, justifying, refusing to listen, angry dismissals, and a lot of the other characteristics of a substance-abuse habit—then you are not only going to get your way, you are going to cause a lot of hurt that you may only be able to later see, much less assess soberly.

In the spirit of avoiding environments bad for my mental health, I deactivated Twitter and my other antisocial accounts, not for the first or second time in whatever combination. The clincher was not any single dollop of unpalatable content, but being asked with increasing frequency if I wanted to follow, both on Twitter and Instagram, people I would actually sooner urinate and defecate on from a tremendous height than “follow” anywhere, even online. I bet some of these folks have seen my name, and had much the same essential reaction.

I’m far from done complaining, but I will be taking a short detour into some stuff readers hopefully find equally, or more, useful.