The running rags give a "YA NEVER KNOW!" to Dean Karnazes' "coyote attack" story two days after its exposure as a hoax
Karnazes and his boundless ego deserve a nod for their repeated, if unconscious, attempts to eradicate whatever remains of his unearned credibility
Can't old white men do anything right?
Dean Karnazes, a gracelessly aging narcissist and runner from the San Francisco Bay area, first embarked on his career as a dissembler-for-hire over fifteen years ago. His once-unchallenged in-world popularity among ultrarunners has since been extensively eroded by a tide of similarly ostentatious and obscene jokers, bored housewives doubling as vapid Instagram ass-wagglers, and serial cheaters. Ironically or not, the members of this burgeoning online scourge-class of waddlers and airheads owe their own persistent “legitimacy” largely to Karnazes, the perambulating mandible who first made it clear how wondrously easy it to hypnotize slugs and hobbyjoggers alike with emotionally seductive whoppers while monetizing the process in plain sight.
Karnazes hand-jobbed himself into headlines anew recently by claiming he was attacked by a coyote on Saturday, August 13 near the Golden Gate Bridge. (Alert readers may have recognized his face in this post, but if so, none acknowledged as much.) A bloody-faced Karno made an Instagram post in the immediate aftermath of the alleged attack and a follow-up post on Monday somberly warning people not to feed coyotes.
On Tuesday, Karnazes made a post unrelated to the “attack.” That was the same day the Twitter account of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area (GGNRA) flatly debunked the load of buncombe Karnazes had fed to a gibbering, incurious reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle.
The Chronicle story remained unamended as of last night.
Karnazes didn’t allow comments to his Saturday post, or at least there are none showing up there now; none of the comments I saw to his Monday or Tuesday stories pushed back against his account. Meanwhile, Karno was getting all sorts of great press for surviving his ordeal with an extremely elusive form of nocturnal aggressor—an energy-bar-craving coyote-shaped mugger—including a shout-out in that august bastion of journalism for armchair philosophers, People Magazine.
But on Wednesday, the Daily Mail, long known as a tabloid favoring breathlessly gossipy headlines (an oft-lugubrious feature also seen on Beck of the Pack), published a story that mentioned the events in the above sequence as well as clarifying information from a GGNRA official. When Karnazes couldn’t resist mentioning wildlife in an Instagram post that day, he finally drew some criticism for his weekend yarn-spinning, but stoically chose to ignore it.
In the four days since, this shameless, babbling trash-factory has made five more posts, obviously intent on pretending his story is true no matter how obvious it is that he lied. When it comes to making shit up, I don’t think Dean Karnazes can help himself, at least not for more than a few weeks or months at a stretch.
A pair of stories about the episode appeared on Friday in the running-specific press, one in Runner’s World and the other in Trail Runner “Magazine.” The authors of both had the benefit of access to the Daily Mail story, but if either scribe saw it, their stories didn’t explicitly reflect this. No self-respecting information service links to that outlet.
Both articles included this quote from the GGNRA official, possibly swiped from the unmentioned Daily Mail story:
“We want to emphasize that the injuries shown were caused by a fall. The coyote did not bite the individual involved in this encounter.”
Despite this, both stories not only didn’t push back against Karnazes’ story despite this and other contradictions between Karno’s tale and that of the park, but they gushingly lionized Karnazes’ career. Predictably, the Trail Runner story was more explicit in its excusing of Karno’s keening burst of prevarication, including this “Hi! I just fucked up an already bad story!” line:
The coyote did not bite Karnazes, but in his defense, he never said it did.
The authors also could have contacted the GGNRA and at least asked someone there something—say, “Why does the National Rifle Association need a Golden Gate chapter?” Instead, each piece was a litany of Karno’s vast contributions to the sport, along with the sage observation that animal attacks do, in fact, happen in the nefariously amoral wilds of Mother Earth.
Karnazes' "inspiration" has always burned in the flame of his systematic preening fraudulence. Running had a jump-the-shark moment when this blowhard and his overflowing bucket of fish-stories wound up on the talk-show circuit back in the days when waxing grandiose about self-styled, self-monitored “achievements” had long been scorned.
It seems that I have mentioned Karnazes three times on this site or an immediate ancestor. The first mention was almost three and a half years ago, when Substack did not yet exist. I was mostly busy bitching about something else, but veered into this:
In 2006, a previously unknown individual named Dean Karnazes published a book that was so patently full of shit it was clear from the start that he didn't really care if anyone challenged his claims … a kludge of confabulations, lies, and apocrypha blended with mundane blather.
"Karno" begins his litany of mythological deeds by describing how he went from being a slug for a couple of decades to spontaneously launching into a run from a bar in his street clothes—a magical solo effort that went on for hours in the dark—and ordering a pizza to a set of grid coordinates in the middle of nowhere (maybe he'd just seen Seven). He then supposedly hitchhiked a ride back to town in his underwear and passed through a drive-through that way. (I’m muddling some of the details, but believe me, it doesn't matter because I'm sure none of them were accurate to begin with.) In the usual style of the bullshit artist, he offers anecdotes that, like alleged miracles, cannot be strictly disproven because he leaves out names and exact places and times. An example is his claim of coming up on a couple of Army Rangers in the Western States 100—a duo that, as literary license would have it, Karno had also seen training together in the Presidio in San Francisco where he lives.
As flagrantly implausible as this all was, it got him what he wanted: Notice. He appeared on Letterman, and probably in some other places, looking quite serious for a guy who quit living a serious life the moment he embarked on his literally fantastic climb toward not just running fame, but general renown. While he never became a household name, he secured more publicity than any of the elite athletes of his day, or since. His ill-gotten zenith, appropriately enough, coincided with the advent and rapid ascendancy of social media, which has led to the visual side of running being stained with countless clamoring goons, many of them even more shameless than Karnazes, who could at least fucking run. Whatever he's up to now, I have to credit him with making his mark and having what it takes to grub for cash without any apparent concern for what thinking people think of him.
The next two mentions are recent. The passage below is from a post in March, when I was complaining about the humorlessness of running and the world in general:
Dean Karnazes, whose 2006 autobiography was so riddled with obvious falsehoods that it was hard to not laugh out loud in places, just wrote a subscriber-only article for UltraRunning Magazine in which this huckster laments “the gamification of training” and urges runners that it’s “best to keep it real.” Dean Karnazes evidently wants to limit the ability of runners to project illusory versions of their own personas and accomplishments to Dean Karnazes. Too late! Everyone’s a bullshitter now.
Then I flattered him again last month in a post that has somewhat disturbingly collected nearly 7,000 page views:
I blame Dean Karnazes for almost 100 percent of the influx of cheaters and self-promoters into ultramarathon running, a discipline that unfortunately selects for the cheating-prone because of the sheer length of the events and the inability of race officials to fully monitor some courses. Karnazes’ book Ultramarathon Man reeked of bullshit from the first chapter and at a distance of several coffee tables, and he normalized the pursuit of embellishment-fueled glory masquerading as a higher spiritual pursuit.
Karnazes’ first book really should have set off the running world's collective bullshit-detector from the opening pages. It wasn’t just the far-flung nature of the stories but the overall style—the absence of non-anonymous witness to events key to the narrative, the way the text was plainly edited to allow for no more disputability than “I remember things very differently.” Karnazes is exactly the kind of putz who would invent a no-witness story about an animal attack and then stupidly fuck it up by offering especially unlikely details about the animal’s supposed behavior.
Despite this, Karnazes retains an apparently sterling reputation in all the right places. I’ve seen scattered grumbling about him, but he and his antics have generally proven as depressingly free of meaningful criticism as those of other in-group luminaries in this tattered, shit-streaked pair of skivvies of a sport. He does have the standing protection of the Lance Armstrong factor in his favor, albeit a furiously watered-down version, as he has donated to charities and racked up some objectively impressive athletic achievements.
When Karno was first getting rolling, a friend of mine used to take the piss out of Karnazes and his deluded admirers. He did this with such regularity and effortless, piercing eloquence that it was sad to see the blog eventually disappear. It seems that Karnazes sent this fellow an e-mail asking for his mailing address, which my friend interpreted as a sign that Karnazes was about to send him a cease-and-desist letter.
Dean Karnazes can take any such letters he prepares in response to this or any other rightful ridicule and hang them either in his ass or somewhere in his cavernous jaw. He knows he lied, again and remorselessly, and anyone who reads even the laugh-track RW and TR stories with a skeptical eye, never mind the Daily Mail takedown, knows it too. But I fear and rue that a burdensome fraction of the populace just adores bullshit.
On July 9 of last year, Eric Schranz of Ultrarunner Podcast included this bit in his news and links of the day:
OK, OK…I’ll defend Dean’s influence and importance in the sport til I’m blue in the face, but headlines and stories like these make my head hurt and make me dislike the guy. Is there an editor on staff, or was this insane hyperbole intentional?
I myself would probably rage against the value of that influence ‘til I was blue in the balls. But at last, here’s someone willing to admit to a sizable audience consisting mostly of tempestuous dimwits that he finds the legendary Karnazes unlikable. Perhaps Schranz also finds him either completely ignorant of human physiology or—get this—inclined to just make shit up to make himself look literally unique.
The article Schranz links to is among the most clueless I have ever seen. It boasts claims such as, “Karnazes has a rare genetic disorder that allows him to run pain-free" and “He has a special ability to flush out lactic acid as he is exercising.”
But an ignorant interviewer’s tortured rambling is standard fare nowadays. The most telling stuff is stuff that Dean Karnazes himself contributed to this mess, including this:
No matter how hard I push, my muscles never seize up. What eventually happens is that I get sleepy.
Perhaps Dean Karnazes—the world’s first human to strategically generate not metabolic waste products from glycolysis but more glucose, plus a need for a nap—should try other events if he can run all-out without experiencing fatigue. Consider the potential! And yes, for you idiots out there, that’s exactly what he meant by “No matter how hard I push, my muscles never seize up.”
Please don’t advertise being either kindergarten-level gullible or monumentally obtuse by speculating otherwise. Karnazes is exactly as dumb as he sounds. Or maybe he reads a lot of Jack Reacher novels or regularly binge-watches all five Jason Bourne films. Or maybe he just feeds nonsense to his audiences for something akin to sexual gratification, ratcheting up the stink to whatever level he thinks he can get away with given the perceived wisdom of his interlocutor(s).
Regardless, he obviously can’t help lying his ass off, and a lot of people enjoy remotely nuzzling his ballsack in cross-eyed approval.
I have no idea why so many alleged and even proven runners have come to rally behind so much outright bullarkey, other than the government’s missed opportunity to enforce universal sterilization starting in the mid-1980s. Lindsay Crouse and her employer The New York Times are unaccountable for lying, Latoya Snell and her various sponsors and enablers (notably HOKA, the Boston Athletic Association/Amazon, and the New York Road Runners) are unaccountable for lying, and the ultra-unbelievable asshole starring in this post has been giddily unaccountable for lying since at least 2006.
Almost everyone in any remaining editorial position at a fitness or running publication is either spineless and petty, a racist-sexist liar contributing to the mayhem, or simply absent. Most of these people are demonstrably hypocritical in their dispensation of online justice and conversational norms, and a significant fraction are clinically brain-dead.
To make the scene even more alluring, the “trans women are women” credo is stronger among female running pundits than perhaps anywhere else in sports—burn it all down, bitches in sweatpants!—and convicted U.S. dopers in the sport who offer the same inane excuses that once earned derision are now treated almost universally as innocent victims. And the American arm of the sport and much of it elsewhere is functionally owned by one greedy, Machiavellian shoe salesman— a consideration that, even absent all others, should be enough to compel a lot of former devotees of the three-beats-a-second discipline to kick back a-cackling and firing wadded-up boogers at its scabrous flank just to deface it even more and help shovel-fuck the whole enterprise toward global invisibility.
You can easily find “big name” former and sometimes current runners (again, “big” in context; for increasingly good reasons, most of the sports world doesn’t recognize distance running exists until some idiot gets in trouble) rallying behind some or all of this horseshit. Apparently, running is laden with even more porous thinkers and cheerleaders for the delirious apocrypha of fifth-degree attention-whores than I suspected, and I have never been especially optimistic or forgiving on this front.
I had a disappointing week overall, although I did manage at least four individual runs of an hour or more. I don’t get a lot of e-mail complaints about what I write, and the few I’ve received in the past two years have come mostly from deeply scatterbrained and unconvincing strangers. But I was shaken by a message I got midweek because it indicated how clearly brainwashed even this constitutively smart and open-minded news consumer had been become by relentless exposure to the propaganda networks CNN and MSNBC. It utterly missed every point the "offending” post made in favor of rambling about slanted Civil War coverage in textbooks from the 1960s and Anthony Fauci's effort “to save lives.”
Oh, this also dropped last week:
The best way to characterize this blog, I’ve decided, is extended suicide note. The main reason I continue to bother with this project at all is to unspool the elements of my case for, on balance, not wanting to experience sensory input anymore. While I can claim credit for altering the behavior of a handful of dogged, even ruthless bullshitters—a topic I’ll soon get to along with the dozens of others I’ve been putting off addressing—the hive mind of jogtastic America obviously has a stronger appetite for fiction-as-news and contrived drama than for anything that would actually improve the sport or its promotion. I fail to understand the ass-probing, finger-sniffing appeal of any of it, and I’m evidently a two-standard-deviation outlier when it comes to tolerating flagrant lying in running and—far more critically and upsettingly—everywhere else.