Two of Outside's forty or so most dilapidated articles this week
The combined message—"learn to be okay with competing in vain with millions of other neurotics bullshitters for attention"—could use a few refinements
One thing I fail to adequately stress about the abysmal articles being supplied to the running media is that the authors and editors responsible aren’t merely lazy writers and sloppy thinkers, but damaged psychological goods and misguided people committed to delivering psychologically damaging messages. Mostly women under 40 or purposefully androgynous men, this loose cast of deeply unoriginal egomaniacs has come to believe against impressive odds the general running public cares who they are or what they do, an illusion these people maintain via an energetic online circle-jerk and the exclusion of traditional, objective ideas about biological sex, medical ethics, factual accuracy, personal integrity, and other increasingly disputed rhetorical territories.
Outside’s three running-related e-rags uploaded a lot of useless material this week, but two stories in particular vie for the dumbest of the lot.
In “5 Ways Runners Can Ditch Self-Comparison on Social Media”, published in Women’s Running on Tuesday, Malissa Rodenburg goes to great lengths to describe how much worse people who use social media feel about themselves, and how this is phenomenon both dose-dependent and self-amplifying.
For anyone wanting to feel better, the natural conclusion that follows from these observations is “Delete your social-media accounts and you’ll probably feel and behave like less of a loser.” But because this piece was published an Outside, Inc. e-rag, the advice accompanying these “new findings” is to simply learn to use social media in a less self-destructive manner.
The metaphors and other analogies practically write themselves here. Rodenburg’s advice bears a suspicious resemblance to "Switch from vodka to beer" aimed at drinkers and cocaine users already at the Amy Winehouse or Bon Scott level of substance abuse.
Actually, that’s too straightforward. The neurotic freelancers supplying content to running-related rags nowadays are in love with the idea of being addicted to things, as long as running or exercise in general isn’t among their terrible habits. So, the primary target of this story is someone who, say, has a cat that scratches the shit out of everyone and everything in sight every time it’s allowed to drink beer, and wonders exactly how much alcohol is too much for a stealth-feral, fanged-and-clawed house pet. Or is that’s too complex, dudes inclined to ask, “At what voltage level should I not piss directly onto an electric fence from a range of one inch?”
Although Rodenburg’s advice is clearly foolish, and helps explain much of the ignorance and personality-disordered conduct that characterizes today’s running-pundit class, it’s not an accident and Rodenburg didn’t come up with the idea for this story. Every corporate outlet likes to “slyly” frame social-media use a choice between “Lots and less,” with the most healthful and simplest option intentionally omitted; this is because social-media platforms are the most powerful drivers of false narratives on the Internet for non-geezers. All of Outside’s offerings will tacitly command its readers to continue consuming social-media garbage because this helps ensure that the same people will remain consumers of Outside material and click on the ads within and alongside these criminally idiotic articles.
On Thursday, RUN published “How to Build Volume Heading Toward Summer Race Season” by Stefanie Flippin. This piece invites readers who can read to dismiss it sometime before completely wading through the first paragraph.
This Flippin genius was a participant in a recent Lululemon-sponsored six-day-long festival of multiethnic grifting called FURTHER, in which a company with a $59 billion market capitalization paid for a highly diverse cast of self-promoters to waddle around in the desert for nearly a week, thereby re-establishing how little Lululemon and the women involved actually care about the real plight of ethnical minorities or whatever they’re pretending lies at the core of these queered-up marketing extravaganzas.
It’s obvious that this Flippin dingbat enjoys projecting the idea that she's a medical doctor and not a podiatrist. You can see that the mini-bio in her Thursday story identifies her as a foot and ankle surgeon, while in the FURTHER story, the incomparably bimbotic Abby Levene describes her as a doctor. My guess is that social-media sites are largely responsible for this Flippin fool feeling compelled to “slyly” inflate her professional credentials, although there’s a complicating factor in that most women who are drawn to, or even aware of, very-long-distance races these days are chronic bullshitters anyway.
Funny thing, too: I have no memory of interacting with this Flippin fraud, yet when I clicked on the link to her Instagram profile in Levene’s story, I learned that I was blocked. Somehow, the word about what a horrible fellow I am circulates with eerie efficiency among running's most cowardly and determined dissemblers and egomaniacs, especially the ones who have no idea how few people even within “the running community” care or could ever be made to care about women's ultramarathon running and the people who seem to go out of their way to make that environment as organically and comprehensively unappealing as possible.