Taylor Swift is the perfect icon for lazy, dumb, unoriginal runners who somehow manage to be arrogant, overconfident attention-hounds
Mediocre know-nothings who insist on both maximal online visibility and immunity from criticism seem unaware of what this combination invites outside their bubble of objective flailing
Toward the end of summer in 1984, a 26-year-old stock-pretty American pop singer unfurled a performance at that year’s MTV Music Awards that broke new territory and pissed off millions of religious conservatives, who were then enjoying an ascendancy under the presidency of Ronald Reagan, whose two-term administration is memorable for introducing helpful valued-oriented homilies such as “Just Say No.” The singer started her number on top of a wedding cake and ended it writhing on the floor with her blond hair dirtying the floor and her panties slightly showing.
I was 14 years old, so this episode on the then-three-year-old network Music Television caught my attention. But I thought the song itself was crap, and that the singer herself, while “brave,” probably lacked the talent to keep the one-woman show going. The 1980s had already produced a string of one-hit wonders, and this lady seemed destined to join the same category.
In the winter of 1985, this woman’s second studio album, released on December 1, 1984 and afforded the same title as the song that had rankled the religious conservatives, was at the top of the charts and would soon become the first album in history by a female recording artist to sell five million units in the United States. Despite these data, the album’s second single, while catchy, was a boilerplate ditty about wanting to marry a rich guy and seemed to portend this singer’s impending popularity flame-out even more than her first overbaked single had.
As it turns out, Madonna Louise Ciccone, stage name Madonna, was barely getting started. “The Queen of Pop” is now 65, and in October, the Guinness Book of World Records declared Madonna the top-selling female recording artist of all time, with the paid distribution of over 400 million of her records, CDs, and digital downloads being exceeded only by Elvis Presley, the Beatles, and Michael Jackson. She has been repeatedly associated with the hottest and most skilled gay male dancers in the history of choreographed human movement. She graduated from high school early and reportedly has an IQ in the range of 140.
The photo below was taken on June 11, 1985 at Madison Square Garden in New York City. Behind Madonna are Adam Horowitz and Adam Yauch, two-thirds of the Beastie Boys, the dubious opening act for Madonna’s “The Virgin Tour.” I say “dubious” because no one knew who the Beastie Boys were at the time; Licensed to Ill was still over a year away, and a trio of kids throwing beer cans around on stage didn’t seem to bear much promise.
I'm not a big fan of Madonna's music, and if she dated Sean Penn, even the 1985 version, then there’s only so smart she can possibly be. But she's had more of an overall cultural impact than all but a handful of living people. She was also micromanaging her career before it was cool to be a girl boss. She also benefited enormously from the creation of MTV and the network in turn from her. She was practically everywhere for years.
Only two things have ever really interested me about Madonna. One is that she has written and arranged not just her own song lyrics but most of her own music, at least at the level of melodies. She seems to understand composition, which from the start has made her more than a performer even if few people seem to care about this aspect of her career. The other is her ferocious and much-celebrated dedication to aerobic fitness. My college years coincided with Madonna’s Justify My Love tour, when her body was so lean and ripped she looked almost nasty.
Five years ago, Vogue looked back on the Madonna of the late 1980s, a woman noted for a routine boasting “two hours of exercise, seven days a week—including a killer program of biking 25 miles, then running five sets of 100 stairs.” And although Madonna is not known to have entered any road races—entry fees were already becoming crazily expensive by 1990 or so—she was regularly hitting the pavement in those days, usually with her trainer.
Madonna is far from the only rocker from back in the day who figured out the value of being fit—not just pleasant-looking, but capable—onstage. After David Lee Roth (above left) left Van Halen, the singer started running five or six miles a day with Keni Richards, the drummer of Autograph, as part of a ruse.
But Madonna’s fitness routine would probably be of special interest to Zoe Rom, a fitness-routine enthusiast who’s technically both the editor-in-chief of Trail Runner and the managing editor of Women’s Running but demonstrates no evidence of being interested in doing any editing of anything, anywhere, primarily herself. Rom is among the whiny and confused quasi-liberals who castigated the operator of Ultrarunner Podcast in the spring of 2020 for sharing one of my posts, though like the rest of the cowards who rose up in indignation to shart up the UP comments section, Rom didn’t offer a reason for her outrage.
This was before Rom, a race-baiting, anti-science hypocrite, began receiving a steady paycheck for her invisible work at both of the publications she purportedly helps manage, so you can gain a sense from this one episode of the kinds of loserly dimwit one needs to be to enjoy stability in the contemporary fitness media. And Rom’s reliability level is cemented by her having admirers like the uncommonly addled, gullible, and obtuse Peter Bromka and says things like “as a female, vegan, endurance athlete living at altitude, I know I’m not making it easy for myself” from a position of ascribed physiological know-how and while shilling for the scam-based company Inside Tracker.
Rom really couldn’t be dumber or more obnoxious if this were her unrelenting conscious intent, and yet this is the one look she strives to avoid. She is hopeless and should exit the media forever, including shuttering her self-debasing social-media accounts. But because she would rather put her own dilapidation, ego, and lack of athletic, personal, intellectual, aesthetic, and creative qualifications on nonstop display for other lowbrow jogger-neurotics to admire—primarily in the form of excited if unfocused grunts accompanied by sporadic retching and mewling sounds—she just keeps churning out garbage while neglecting the sewage-stream flowing her way from freelancers as on-the-ball as Rom herself is.
Rom recently discovered that Taylor Swift, another voraciously self-glorifying female pop megastar, also works out. Rom is a natural ally of Millennials with insatiable egos, especially those who, unlike her, possess the talent to parlay their demand for ever-increasing levels of unwaveringly approving attention into objective success. Swift is an undiluted egomaniac.
Rom opens the piece with “Last week, Taylor Swift released her training regimen for the Eras Tour, her three-and-a-half-hour stadium extravaganza, and the running internet went wild.”
Actually, no. A bevy of shallow-minded female joggers, most under 40, may have “gone wild” at the “news” that a narcissistic American female was exercising. No one else noticed. For one thing, the average American runner is around 40, and three-fourths of trail runners and ultramarathon finishers—Rom’s bailiwick, as she’s too slow for the roads or the track—are men. For another, most serious runners aren’t inclined to drool over the disclosed exercise regimens of celebrities; this is strictly the purview of the self-absorbed and perpetually coddled.
This excerpt captures the futility of Zoe Rom, trail runners as a group, and trail running as a competitive discipline:
I’m an ultrarunner. I’ve knocked off 50- and 100-mile races and won them on occasion. I haven’t been this excited about a specific training regimen since Nils van der Poel dropped his Olympic training log.
Here Rom brags about having won at least one ultramarathon race while in the process unconsciously admitting how trivial a sporting accomplishment this is. If a supposedly serious ultrarunner and knowledgeable editor gets especially fired up about the training of celebrities, not athletes, then the whole shooting match is worse than second-rate.
The piece is really an excuse for Rom to yammer about being on a mortised treadmill for three and a half hours—not the best example, incidentally, of “sustainability” without a good reason to run indoors, and being an operationally retarded Taylor Swift isn’t a good reason—and revel in her own personal powerlessness. She also used a rasterized header image that makes her look thinner than she appears in real photographs, so I guess she can’t’ be accused of doing no editing.
The piece links to a tweet by Steve Magness, a man who I swear at one point had more brains in his head than a replacement-level duck-billed platypus. Magness claimed that in his training days, he “did a variation of [Swift’s workout] without the singing.” For reasons the bag of cells still named Steve Magness at one time would have understood on sight, the singing is the indispensable, specificity-first part of the session. Given this editorial self-license, Magness would probably say that he’s engaged in a variation of sexual intercourse at some point in his life, just not with “another party” present.
Rom is a defiantly do-nothing bucket of anxiety-riddled failure. According to whoever is responsible for the Women’s Running newsletter, a story published one week ago was somehow the site’s most-read of 2023.
That one is merely lazy. The example below is better because it shows that Mallory Arnold somehow landed on two different spellings of the same plural noun in the same sentence, with no one above her in the editorial chain noticing the error in the very first paragraph.
Rom and David Roche are being paid for their roles at Outside, Inc., which publishes Trail Runner, Women’s Running, and Outside Online. They are clearly morons, irresponsible, churlish, and childish. They have it extremely easy because the CEO of Outside, Robin Thurston, is a greedy, cross-eyed turd in his own right and just lets people publish unedited and counterfactual, and even outright dangerous trash.1
Thurston is currently trying to sell 2.13 acres of Boulder land for $7.2 million after buying the plot for $5 million even just over two years ago. He probably rides around in the same private plane as the Roches, who also live in Boulder. Someone should remove a critical a screw from the fuselage of that plane if these chortling twats don’t clean up their collective shambolic act.
Everyone who regularly reads this site understands that every time I take a swing at someone as stupid and refractory to input as Zoe Rom and the unhealthy, puking-and-starvation prone sad sacks she pals around with, I am swinging at low-hanging fruit. Anyone can see that it’s almost impossible to be wrong when slamming anyone involved with Outside’s suite of publications, or for that matter Runner’s World. Jobs at these places are now being given only and specifically to broken, self-hating, and chronically dishonest people.
Rom exemplifies how the running media has been hijacked by a species previously unknown to me: The Mean Girl Skank. In other words, the classic Mean Girl of eras past was at least pretty or fit or otherwise competent and could back up being arrogant, while the classic Skank was just a bag of resentment and envy. People like the Roche cult members are somehow both, as bitchy as can be in their aesthetically malignant prosperity.
If Rom or one of her friends in the S.W.A.P. cult led by David and Megan Roche can explain why she thinks my criticism of people like her is unfounded—assuming she still believes this, and I’m betting she does—than I welcome any explanation to this effect, here or anywhere. Because what it looks like from here is that a bunch of low-brainpower, spineless attention-hounds consistently humiliate themselves in every Internet setting. Sure, they’re insulated from the adverse consequences that once would have accompanied their intentionally abysmal performance levels owing to everyone involved at Outside (and Runner’s World) being morally compromised and a livid, gutless, incompetent joke. But everyone outside the circle-jerk can still see them for who and what they are.
Both of the evil Roche clowns need to answer for promoting the covid vaccine when at least one of those two unethical bozos knew that neither Moderna’s nor Pfizer’s jab been properly safety-tested—by definition, because insufficient time had elapsed. They need to answer for everything that has happened since, especially the member of the couple who holds a current medical license.