The media's pimping of Mirna Valerio, while inevitable, completely undermines their own messages while spotlighting the industry's endemic race-grifting

A 2018 Runner's World piece about the already veteran ultramarathon and trail runner, coach and teacher reads like a perfectly crafted advance rebuttal to the refrains of today's "disruptors"

I have mentioned slow but eminently credentialed long-distance runner Mirna Valerio before in this sanctified discursive space, but without emphasizing the most important thing about her: Valerio’s long history in the sport and her own observations about its people obliterate the core idea that running’s “antiracists” have been pushing for over three and a half years now. According to this manufactured narrative, citizen-level distance running is both inherently racist and unwelcoming to fat people—often in degrading combinations—with this bane is especially pernicious in the long, off-road events (races that have typically been the purview of egocentric affluent white people whom even most white people, including other runners, strive to avoid anyway).

The media have no choice c. 2023 but to exploit Valerio because she's fat, black, and runs trails. The inherent or explicit conceit lodged in recent stories about her is that she’s benefiting from new, more inclusive policies sport-wide, and would have been or at least felt discouraged pre-2020 from participating in running events—especially in the redneck-riven North American boonies.

Yet it doesn't take much digging to see that Valerio’s agate resume and backstory undermine every core claim that sham social-justice mavens have made about the need for more inclusivity within the trail-running community and especially about overt racism within that community. It is not surprising to me or most old-timers that Mirna Valerio was doing just fine and was eminently secure in who she was and what she was doing before drooling representatives of running companies run mainly or entirely by white men all magically decided en masse that they actually cared about Valerio and who she really is right after Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd were killed.

The passage below is from a Runner's World article in June 2018 by John Brant, who cares deeply about his subjects. The piece describes Valerio—actually 42, not 39, at the time—doing her first marathon in Washington, D.C. in October 2011 on a dismally uncooperative ankle and then soon discovering something that attracted her even more:

She also liked the comradeship and spirit of the trail-running community. “My first long trail race, an 18-mile loop course, I was out about nine miles from the start and was suffering,” Valerio recalls. “I had blisters, cuts, mosquito bites, you name it. I stood at the side of the trail. I didn’t think I could go on. Then a runner came along, an older guy. He asked if I was all right, if I had enough water and gels. He could see I was tired and discouraged, but I wasn’t sick or injured. ‘Well, it’s a long way back to your car and there’s only one way to get there,’ he said. ‘Maybe you better get started.’ I love that attitude about trail runners.”

Huh.

Valerio started running in 1998 and has been running consistently since 2009. She has an Athlinks athlete profile she seems to have abandoned in 2017 that includes 100 races going back 25 years. She also has around 34 unclaimed results to her credit since then. 

Valerio was able to get under 40:00 for the first time in 2010 after about a year and a half of running and down to 36:24 after about three and a half years, when she was 36. She was still able to run under 40:00 at age 42 five-plus years ago, and she did a 10K last year in 1:35:58. That age-grades to a 1:26:00 or so and around 41:00 for 5K, so she hasn't really lost much over the years; besides, I don't think she really cares about road races, especially short ones. She has completed a truly remarkable number of longer events.

So, in a nutshell, Valerio is a fat black woman who—by the time Alison Desir and the running media’s white leftist harridans accused the entire running world of systemic racism in 2020 and got plenty of decent and generally cognizant people to go along with the rot—had already done over 100 running events going back over two decades, many of them very long ones. She had been celebrated in the media in an article that acknowledged extant racism (which, granted, was a given, as Valerio was in rural Georgia at the time) while suggesting that the running milieu was a critical exception to this insult, and she had already discovered a welcoming trail-running community around a dozen years ago.

Everyone with a pulse and any integrity at all has known from the outset the systemic racism allegedly plaguing the sport was a “problem” invented to serve Wokish needs and drive spending from groups like Black Lives Matter and their farrago of avarice-first spin-offs. But the oft-referenced Valerio actually highlights this encouraging reality rather than making the opposite point that degraded running pundits and marketing reps seek to make by lazily exclaiming, “Oh look! It’s fat, black, female, and does road races! Let’s sponsor and celebrate that.” It's the "exception proves the rule" maxim in effect, with the industry’s swarming mass of wide-open scammers being the sad and glaring rule.

If you read Brant’s article, you learn that Valerio is or was both a Spanish teacher and a cross-country coach. (This makes sense; her social-media posts are far better written than the crap her ersatz and opportunistic admirers write about her. It seems that her desire to see others tap into the rewards she experienced from basic movement overcame her shyness and the stares she knew she would get even from well-meaning, non-racist people sizing up her physique: “She is the school’s running coach?” As a result, she started helping kids new to the activity enjoy running. That all leaves a real mark.

Compare this to the running media’s glib celebration of gambits like companies flying a few black people to remote, mostly “white” places like Montana and Alaska and Idaho or even to Europe so that they can, in their own words, “waddle around Chamonix with pride.” In addition to flagrantly ignoring the climate disaster that otherwise consumes much of their reliably insincere and misinformed chatter, this clearly does nothing to broadly attract anyone into running. It’s an advertisement for how sneeringly superficial companies like Hoka, Strava, Brooks. Altra, and many others have been and remain about growing the sport from the socioeconomic bottom.

This is why the cowards within these companies hide from inconvenient e-mails and postings that would force them as individuals to step up and explain why they are financially and otherwise supporting obvious fountains of nonstop, destructive bullshit. Like members of U.S. Congress who all lie about the same issue and then all change their stories at once, they know they can only get away with being moral deviants who should be ousted from the sport altogether if they both do it in harmony and ferociously ignore or repel anyone with both the sense and the nerve to demand answers directly.

But running now consists of entirely of either neurotic scammers intent on silencing sensible people or craven parties who enable them. It’s a carnival of flaccid, wailing losers who cheer for American distance-dawgs who suck on the world stage despite clearly being doped up to their chapped nipples or demand media attention for excelling at fringe disciplines that no one would care about even if most everyone involved in them wasn’t a spindly basket of self-aggrandizing virtue-signaling and consistent topical ignorance and a full-throttle clown-car who makes Donald Trump look like a paragon of eloquence and studied expertise, but is at least free of charismatic emissions.

In what also couldn’t be a more jarring contrast, you have figures like Martinus Evans, the beneficiary of a transparent diversity swindle in 2017, now being upheld as icons of legitimate can-do.

In addition to his other character flaws, Evans, who has been championed with mysterious enthusiasm in the media lately, claims to have completed eight marathons, but according to Athlinks he’s only completed four—Detroit Free Press in 2013, New York City in 2018, and both of those events in 2019.

That Evans has associated with Latoya Snell is no surprise, as Snell also exaggerates the number of marathons that she’s finished by a factor of very close to two, and has also gotten markedly slower since taking up completing marathons—but also since gaining attention from companies as indolent as can be about satisfying their diversity requirements and from the low-cognitive-power, vengeful white harpies now controlling the smoldering, darkly comedic remnants of the running media.

It’s theoretically the media’s job to check the claims of their sources, but of course that went out the window as soon as media jobs became the sole domain of women who can only be described as both unintelligent and broken in addition to being conscious race-grifters.

The first sentence in Outside Online’s December 5 story about Evans is “If he’s being honest, Martinus Evans thinks running is boring.” This is a true ell-oh-ell, because if either Evans or running media were remotely honest, then this story never gets written, the world forever knows Evans as part of an uncreatively crooked couple if they know him at all, and the author of this story, Christine Yu, is working at a Starbucks, doing data entry, or otherwise employed in a field that doesn’t penalize her intellectual dishonesty or other above-the-neck limitations.

Luckily, not everything about running’s diversity impresarios as bad. For one thing, since no one cares about running, there’s only so much money anyone can swindle or outright steal even if they persist in turpitude for decades. To those grifters whose aboveboard salaries are insufficient, the real DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) cash available for swiping lies with tech megafirms such as Meta Platforms.

I felt duly reassured by this comment from a Federal Bureau of Investigation special agent:

If this is a serious claim, someone should alert Keri Farley to the existence of Wall Street, the pharmaceutical industry, and the United States Congress.