Trail Runner's editor-in-chief vows to remain a hypocritical, privileged imbecile who dismisses athletically, intellectually, morally, and creatively superior people as "trolls"
The madly winking but otherwise lazy bungholes in charge of soliciting and publishing content for Outside's e-rags could at least aim for bad advice that maintains a veneer of internal consistency
I have no idea what Trail Runner editor-in-chief Zoe Rom is like in person, but the online evidence is clear: like the company she keeps, Rom is a dippy-doo, lazy, self-absorbed hypocrite who wildly overrates her minimal-to-absent inherent gifts to society. She’s able to keep what amounts to an online no-show job because Robin Thurston, the CEO of Trail Runner’s parent company Outside, is not merely “hands off” but an unapologetic vulture-capitalist who doesn’t care what the content of his media advertorial outlets looks like as long as it means Outside and its e-rags meet corporate DEI requirements (which, encouragingly, are becoming less profitable—and hence less popular—by the week) and is merely waiting for a “runway” to take his wreck of an operation public.
Rom had a New Year’s message for these within her shitlib-jogger bubble, one she also aimed obliquely at her detractors.
Rom’s aggressively self-entrenched and often entertaining insufficiencies would be one thing were Rom willing to engage with her critics. But instead, like all members of White Woketrash Nation, she’s a gelatinous, whiny, emotionally riven bucket of dumb who maintains both her astonishing level of topical ignorance and her illusion of being an appealing by systematically dodging critics and criticism and referring to adversarial input, or external reviews, as harassment and abuse.
Zoe Rom and her obnoxious, stupid, industry-disposable and galactically clueless friends are free to call people smarter, more athletically accomplished, ballsier, and more honest people “trolls” if she likes. But for as long as she continues signaling that she is aware that people are criticizing her and that it gets to her, then she’s continue receiving the same “harassment” until she develops some personal integrity and courage and starts taking her job seriously. Since not even one of those two (three?) things will happen, she and her insufferable, ethically bereft pals—black holes of narcissism who have put themselves in a deep mental-health hole by being the opposite of admirable, capable, strong, or creative—can expect to remain the target of freewheeling derision for as long as the media status quo remains.
“How to Maximize Winter Training for Peak Performance,” an article by Megan Flanagan published (or uploaded) on January 9, is an archetypal example of shameless Rom and David Roche—Rom’s “coach” and (as an obvious result) another attention- and attention-span-starved Trail Runner “editor” suffering from an alarming shortage of guts, knowledge, and coherence—have become in their paid roles, and how shameless Thurston is for letting things get this tragicomic.
The title might as well be “To be ready to race in the spring, up your mileage, run considerably less, cross-train, and focus on the more important things in life,” because this is precisely the combination of advice Flanagan offers.
Why is it that (ultramarathon runners, a bunch of people I once regarded as admirably running-obsessive, now seem so running-averse as an online, pouty, torpor-philic unit? A friend who has finished at least one 100K race e-mailed this to me recently:
Am I the only one who just enjoys running? If I could do 3 hours a day of running without getting injured (or fired from my job) you know I’d do it. Running isn’t something to avoid, it is something I look forward to from the moment I finish one run until the next one starts.
Hope you have a nice weekend! Expecting a big snowstorm tonight through tomorrow. Meeting REDACTED for a couple of hours romping along the back roads of REDACTED.
As for the startling level of internal inconsistency in this piece, the main reason is evident in the number of hyperlinks you see in the text. Almost everyone quoted is some kind of coach, and at least two people involved in the piece are clients of Roche; Flanagan links to all of these people’s external profiles and websites. Each paragraph is essentially a mini-advertisement, and no one in charge seems especially worried about the order in which these appear or whether some of them should be perhaps segregated into separate pointless “articles.”
Trail Runner is therefore merely becoming lazier about concealing its real purpose, which is not to offer valid or actionable information, but to push the services of the people and companies it both formally and informally advertises. It is a churning digital latrine of beaming, neurotic, rambling know-nothings who become irritated at people who refuse to confuse their crowing incompetence with societally transformative wisdom and moral superiority.
Rom, Roche, and the rest of the madly winking but otherwise indolent bungholes in charge of soliciting and publicizing this crap for both Trail Runner and Women’s Running could at least aim for internally consistent bad advice in its "articles," i.e., advertisements for the dubious services of the running-averse grifters its writers use as sources.
I’ve written many posts about Rom’s on-the-job flailing and her stoic resistance to various aspects of common reality. She should be ashamed to accept any payment at all from Outside given what Women’s Running and Trail Runner. now look like and how much of their decay is clearly the result of her own basic negligence. But how could Rom possibly know this, let alone feel guilty about it? Anyone who quits a work-from-home job in the fitness industry because she occasionally has to wake up for a Zoom meeting has, by any standard, a serious mental disorder.
What Rom may not realize is that not even ten years ago, she would have been derided by the entire running industry as a curiously egoistic airhead and mocked to the fringes of public conversations with the rest of the neurotic and delusional yutzes presently supplying the fitness industry with all its content. For example, anyone who pretends that males claiming to be females belong in female-only sports for any reason—let alone solely to protect the emotional pathologies and delusions of the male claimant—is an idiot. That this idea has been forced into nonstop mainstream-media circulation and supported by imbeciles like Rom does not change its epistemic barrenness and kaleidoscopic irrationality.
What Rom really needs to understand, however, is that what annoys people about her isn’t that she’s dumb (she didn’t choose this), privileged (same), doesn’t know what actual work is (see previous item), and thinks anyone other than herself and about 500 other people worldwide care about other people’s ultramarathons, trail races, or any of the other things Rom writes about and packages in stock pieties and bedraggled metaphors.
What irks me most about Rom and her ilk is that their brazenly unethical and avoidant approach to life—including overt demands that others not share content that upsets them while dodging the real reasons they find it upsetting—has been normalized, and that people churning in cognitive waters about 14 IQ points above hockey-helmet-and-drool-bib territory are slinging pure nonsense almost unchallenged as a result, even and especially from official media platforms.
As a final anti-shout-out, any male who calls himself a professional ultramarathon runner should at least be capable of running a road 50K at sub-six-minute pace, even if they don’t usually or ever race on roads. I was a complete nobody who stopped to take a gigantic dump in his fastest marathon, and I often forget I am technically an ultramarathon finisher (a mostly flat paved 50K at close to sea level is obviously as easy as these events get).
A 3:06:24 50K (6:00 pace) is worth maybe a 2:35-and-change marathon, and that’s nothing to brag about even for an American woman nowadays. Why, then, has it become so easy for anyone who avoids races on pavement and is willing to roam around in the woods for a few hours to become a “pro runner”? Might a chain of mutual hand-jobs, real or symbolic, be somehow involved?
This is my absolute best effort this year at a Get Off My Lawn post. But I plan to break and re-break this “record” several times in the days to come, because I may be indoors more than I would like and perhaps dyspeptic about it.
