The truths inside Letsrun's April Fool's Day extravaganza
In all seriousness, running has become a motherlode for ruthless humorists, and the humorlessness within only jacks up the laugh factor
Letsrun.com has been offering a slate of April Fool’s jokes for as long as I can remember, probably throughout its 23 or so years in existence. At one point the site even posted AFD-themed submissions; that idea has lapsed into irrelevance now that every runner and pseudo-runner has a social-media account and half of these are unintentional gags every day of the year. (Okay, not entirely.)
Today, the LRC crew took aim at various zeitgeists, including the Shelby Houlihan “burrito defense,” the idea that transwomen and women are athletic peers, the notion that the fastest football players could be world-class sprinters if they chose to, and the continued use of Tom Schwartz’s “Tinman” name by the Boulder track club that canned him last April as its founder and coach.
The site’s foray into literal toilet humor is actually the cleverest of today’s LRC spoofs, but as it’s also the least controversial, I’m ignoring it here. The “NFL vs. sprinters” story mocks Miami Dolphins wide receiver Tyreek Hill for a February tweet vaguely resembling a claim to being the fastest man alive, having fun with the persistent idea that the gap between superior NFL speed and world-class speed is smaller than it really is; that topic doesn’t really pluck a lot of emotional strings, either, so I’ll leave remarking on that piece aside as well.1
LRC is now selling “BURRITO Track Club” and “TinMOM Elite” shirts along with its regular site-themed gear. Site co-founder Robert Johnson explains that the jokes at the expense of the Bowerman Track Club (which is filled with fast runners and unconvincing liars) and Joan Hunter (who assumed the Tinman Elite coaching duties after Schwarz’s ouster, and whose son is the club’s flagship member) were originally to not include real T-shirts. But then Johnson decided to make the shirts after all and donate the profits to Houlihan’s legal defense fund and the Tinman Elite Track Club, in theory adding a pair of a reach-around jobs as consolation for these uninvited bursts of buttfucking.
As much as I wish Houlihan would fade into obscurity and admit that her professional running career is over, I think Nike should be on the hook for her legal bills. This is because Nike knows full well how drug-soaked the sport is, but prefers to let the public think its own caught athletes are either fundamentally innocent or ethical deviants. The general sporting public can never be allowed to learn that doping with banned substances has been the norm at the top level of endurance sport for decades and always will be. (When’s the last time you saw anyone even remark on the drug polices of the NBA, the WNBA, MLS, or the NHL? Does anyone not in a coma while reading this believe that LeBron James, who rarely bothers dribbling the ball anymore because rules pertaining traveling don’t apply to him, would be suspended for even one game if his system turned out to be steroid- or hGH-enhanced?)
So, good for LRC for offering material help to these strapped and un-strapped running entries while properly taking the piss out of them for their human failings. It’s unclear to me whether the donating proceeds from shirt sales to Houlihan is supposed to be part of the joke as well, and on that basis alone I declare the entire gag a major success.
I’m not so sure the club still going by Tinman Elite is in similar need of a cash infusion. This is a crude judgment—”crude” in the sense of being surface-level at best, not in the sense of being dickish—but the cars some of those guys drive around are far beyond the price range of what a typical 13:30-to-14:00 5,000-meter runner can afford with his race winnings alone. I doubt many runners join Tinman Elite without securing in advance the means to joblessly blend into the economic and cultural realities of Boulder. Either way, if they want to do “merch drops” while benefiting from a popular name, they should trust that someone in the group can come up with something as catchy as “Tinman” and start using it, unless the idea is extend a “fuck you” to Tom Schwartz in perpetuity.
“We Were Wrong: Biological Males Don’t Have an Unfair Advantage in Women’s Sport” is, since the title is non-explanatory, an insincere mea culpa aimed at the dunces and liars—and no other choices exist anymore—claiming that men who identify as women don’t have an unfair advantage over actual women.
In fact, I don’t think many people have ever believed that this unfair advantage doesn’t truly exist—when you look at the advocates for allowing transfemales to compete in the same categories as females, you immediately see people whose concern for sports is secondary or tertiary and whose resentment-powered concern for “social justice” activism, which has no rules, is their primary reason for expressing public opinions.
LRC is demonstrating anew today the absurdity of so-called feminists and champions of women’s sport, many of them uncloseted misandrists, using men as a hammer to bash away at the integrity of girls’ and women’s sports. Hard-left types don’t like any kind of enterprise in which winners of genetic lotteries are allowed to enjoy the fruits of their natural gifts while slow, plain people don’t get enough recognition, so they are happy to serve as arsonists of social institutions while whistling around pretending to be fire marshals.
And that is the real joke in this—the fact that these loons are completely opaque to their own motives, while the rest of us can smell it from afar despite the smoke from unrelenting local wildfires.
I don’t really care how funny the site’s jokes are every year. I’m just glad they’re willing to keep at it and not worry about the inevitable blowback. You can say, “They just love the attention,” but everyone else with a running bullhorn loves attention just as much, so why is Letsrun.com alone willing to make unapologetic hay of the human running circus?
Sure, I’m pissed off that dolts and liars and fuckups and weirdos have gained such traction in a sport with minimal expectations—report your time for a give distance accurately, and enter the right categories, and you’ll find that very few runners are actually troubled to have other skin hues and self-stylizations in their midst. But this stuff is also very funny from almost every angle. If everyone would learn to laugh more—as well as adopt basic politeness standards, rather than create, dispense, and propagate needless sophistries and cuntistries founded in shallow minds on clangy personal bugbears—running would be like TOTALLY AWESOME JUST THE WAY IT IS. AND SO WOULD YOU.
Sort of. Total Running Productions made a video in 2020 comparing Usain Bolt’s highest recorded speed of 27.8 MPH to that of the fastest known players in other sports. That’s boggling, but so is Russell Westbrook moving a basketball up the court at 21.6 MPH in hardwood shoes, MLB stolen-base king Rickey Henderson reaching 21.8 MPH on dirt and in cleats while preparing to slide face-first, and Real Madrid winger Gareth Bale zipping down the field at 22.9 MPH. And no one really knows how fast history’s greatest overall professional athlete, Bo Jackson, ran for the 40-yard dash, but it’s certain that he ran the 100-meter dash in 10.38 seconds weighing 225 pounds. Even at close to 6’ 5”, Bolt had a listed weight of 207 pounds during his career.