Tracksmith proposes the radical idea that some runners are faster than others, triggering an army of lazy softies and neurotic wretches to blubber and jiggle in wounded fury

More examples of why sensible people want nothing to do with organized running, especially its cowardly appeasement of slobbering illiterates and racist grifters

The Boston Marathon has had qualifying standards for entry for a very long time. It used to do this more to limit entry to runners who were almost inarguably capable-enough marathoners by all but the strictest standard (the original men’s open standard was 2:50:00). The standards were relaxed for a long time to 3:10 for open—under-35, I believe—men and 3:40 for women. Then the standards started creeping down again.

The race now limits the field to around 20,000 people for mostly logistical reasons. It also selectively excludes citizens from countries whose leaders are widely accused of starting wars. And it has been letting in people through various non-time-related loopholes for decades, mostly “charity bibs.”

More recently, the B.A.A. has fallen increasingly into the control of the same destruction-bent loons of privilege, purple-haired chipmunk-people, and anti-white racists—some of them white—who have helped ruin the New York Road Runners and many other organizations. As a result, some of these loopholes for entry have become frankly obscene.

Someone in the B.A.A. no doubt realized by the late 1980s—by which time the event has secured an ongoing monetary commitment from John Hancock Financial Services—that as the population of the United States and the world it systematically torments inexorably expanded, there would eventually be too many people alive and breathing to offer bibs to without either tightening the qualifying standards or widening the roads along the way, even if the worldwide incidence and prevalence of 2:50, 3:00, 3:10, etc. marathoners remained forever static.

But the marathon has run into two problems more serious than this. One is that a startling fraction of the active population is annoyed by the very concept of qualifying standards based on differences in proficiency. The other is the rise of a toxic brand of sham social justice companies and organizations are forced to adhere to or else be driven extinct, also called Wokism.

Tracksmith is a company that makes needlessly expensive clothing for runners, with its ownership appearing to justify the price gap on other companies not on the basis of the quality of Tracksmith apparel, but how the company invests its “extra” revenue in the sport. Like Starbucks, but without the smell of flash-burned tires. Martin Fritz Huber, the chin-stroking, no-value-added David Brooks of Outside Online, wrote a piece in January 2021 that questioned Tracksmith’s sincerity, which, given the practically universal overlap between the target demographics of and Tracksmith Outside Online, reads like a Burger King marketing intern obliviously criticizing the products and business practices of McDonald’s or Wendy’s.

Tracksmith’s Instagram account had the audacity to post this on Monday:

Not so long ago, this kind of exhortation would have overwhelmingly drawn either approval or sighs of “whatever”—not explosions from butthurt dingbats whose frazzled minds are obliged to treat praise of feats they can’t themselves accomplish as derision of themselves and anyone left out of whatever ad hoc club is being celebrated.

But in 2023, we have a crisis: A company is making singlets people can wear to advertise having made the Boston qualifying standard for their age and sex. Not everyone does this! Feelings are at stake!

But the running landscape of today is littered with idiots who willingly flit around Instagram and elsewhere looking for reasons to feel inferior, so they can spout what feels to them like morally superior pablum to offset feeling omitted. The fact that they know they’re being omitted from a club already badly watered down by elite standards only chaps their hypersensitive selves even more.

Alison Desir is a chronic troublemaker. She’s a coddled racist and a low-IQ grifter whose own days of running slow marathons are far behind her and has no skin in this game other than instigating discord and gaining visibility—and perversely, sympathy—from the results.

Owing to athletes needing to have run 5:29 faster than their posted qualifying times to actually gain entry into the 2024 Boston Marathon—which will feature 44 “nonbinary” runners, all of whom got in by running the women’s Q-time for his (or her) age group—the Boston Athletic Association rejected 11,000 or so runners who met the standards across age groups. This led some people to go the other way from the whiners and ask if the singlets were appropriate for runners who indeed qualified but won’t be running the race, indicating that Tracksmith knows its audience well, the hecklers in its social feeds notwithstanding.

Desir is so remarkably stupid that she’s eager to publicly equate being left out after running a qualifying time with being left out as a result of being too slow or in fact not even trying to secure a qualifying time. And why not? The Boston Marathon has a recent history of letting in an unqualified runner who, like Desir, is an undisguised clown, though not as stupid or toxic to humanity overall.

The other day, I pictorially reviewed Latoya Shauntay Snell’s brief and hilarious history at this marathon. She showed up unprepared to move at even 15:00 per mile and quit at 5K. Now she’s blaming this on poor health at the time and looking to offer Tracksmith marketing strategies.

If there is any environment that makes it easy to exclude people without any hint of unfairness, it’s running races with necessarily capped fields. If you can run the time, you should be able to get in, or at least this should remain an initial weeding-out step.

Anyone who can’t make the current qualifying standards with relative ease isn’t much of a natural runner, with "natural runner" in my mind meaning someone who's good enough to make state meets in high school. Many people know this; in fact it’s exactly why they try to qualify for Boston. If I had played the piano as a child, I wouldn't be so obsessed now with trying to conquer songs originally performed by bell-bottomed longhairs of yore that countless 9-year-old Chinese girls could master in five minutes just from the sheet music. And most who do make it don’t pretend that getting them in makes them the neighborhood jock of the week (though in many neighborhoods it might).

Desir’s ideal Boston Marathon field would be nothing but a lumbering parade of high-BMI people “of color” pausing every few blocks to break windows or set something on fire while yelling about how racist the city is. The course would remain open for one week, and the police charged with ensuring the “runners’” safety for all 168 hours would be subjected to catcalls and insults from the slobs slowly tumbling toward Boston Common through a slew of overly white towns (I wouldn’t count Framingham as one; some might, and Brookline and Newton are both comparatively rich in Jews—people we’re still unsure of how to ethnically classify, especially with Nazism being glibly and unpretentiously championed in the mainstream media over the last week.

Desir had lots of support from Wokish rage-bots.

That comment is from a nutritionist who deals with runners. The three overriding traits of such people are: White, female, and extremely neurotic, and with loads of unresolved issues around size and weight. As a result, most of them are leftists, leading to the kind of garbage you see here, which includes green-lighting Desir’s false claim of a racist episode at last year’s Boston Marathon and saying, “Make and sell other shirts so no one feels bad.”

Starting around forty years ago, humans destined to become insecure, socially retarded narcissists began emerging from American vaginas in massive numbers. Year after year, babies were born to parents who had no clue that they would be forced to shuttle these poor little creatures through an Internet that, starting at around the time the U.S. invaded Iraq on false pretenses, was beginning to be a drearier place for children and especially adolescents. Most susceptible of all were the children of well-off parents who were groomed to believe they were extremely capable humans by both fiat and demonstrated competence.

In many cases, this tacit message was true; well-off, educated people tend to produce the majority of society’s genuine visionaries and apparent overachievers in business and finance. But kids raised in academically and otherwise competitive environments in the 2000s and 2010s were the most susceptible of all to having their brains—however inherently powerful—turned to jittery mush by Facebook and Instagram and all their bastard spawn. And as I may have suggested from time to time, some of these erstwhile privileged kids, who are now chronological adults and considered Millennials and Generation Zers by multiple online sources, have very mushy brains to accompany their inability to even communicate with people from outside the suburban cul-de-sac bubbles in which they and other future snowflakes were raised.

It should not be surprising that people who have typically been gifted whatever it is they have in life, and lack the brains, charisma, or drive to achieve or secure anything more, are often vocally opposed to Boston’s qualifying standards, or any qualifying standards. Often without knowing it, these people are terrified of a world in which people of few means can outdo them in any setting by having more talent or working harder. How else is a talentless yutz desperate to maintain high social standing supposed to think?

The other problem is the advent of Wokism, a term I use to mean anything encompassing false efforts toward “social justice.” A major component of Wokism is the redistribution of resources through intimidation, cancelation, and other previously ill-tolerated antics, which Wokish people call “equity.” For running, this has meant a cascade of obese people and “people of color” who don’t even pretend to be trying to train demanding to be included in every possible setting. It has also meant a flurry of viciously incompetent and indolent people such as Zoe Rom and Emilia Benton taking jobs as editors of fitness publications and supplying these “editors” freelance content that passes few fact or grammar checks. The dingleberry on the dung-sundae with these lowbrow characters is their unwillingness to respond to or even tolerate criticism.

This theme of non-responsiveness has proven to be more of a source of irritation than I realized. I don’t care that people employed by Runner’s World deleted my Running Times articles from the RW site, where they never belonged anyway, and in some cases replaced them at the same Web address with outright dreck. I just want a simple explanation for why these things were done so we can all move on. Until that happens, we won’t be going anywhere.

This somehow failed to produce a reply, just another block.

I’m perfectly happy with my long-ago work not riding along on this train of illiterates, cowards, cretins, racists, lazy whiners, and people who refuse to admit that males can never be females. I just think it’s fair to seek specific grounds for my progression exclusion from the revered space of citizen-level shuffling.