Wherein value is extracted from a recycled Erin Strout article aimed at keeping flaccid runners soft

A mile-wide array of artificial light sources couldn't alleviate the effects of the toxic dismay emanating nonstop from running's most prolific and celebrated Evil Eeyore figure

Wise soul that I am, I’m signed up for a variety of e-mail newsletters dispatched by running publications I dislike. Scanning these invariably pile-drives my regard for the entire running industry into an even deeper layer of bedrock, and within each new stratum I occasionally strike blogworthy ore.

One of these regular updates is a Women’s Running newsletter that consists of three or four links to stories with brief previews of these stories. Usually, at least one of these is an article published months or even years earlier. Always, at least one of these is an article written by someone with no business going anywhere near the topic they’ve elected to bloviate about.

In a newsletter from last week, one of these linked stories was “Winter Running Doesn’t Have to Be Cold, Dark, and Lonely,” written by Erin Strout and published on November 7, 2022. Despite the promising title, the content of the piece suggests that part of it was truncated: “But Here’s How to Keep it That Way.”

The choice of headline is already bad for an article ostensibly aimed at getting people training during the winter. Strout naturally makes the a priori assumption that most runners who experience cold winters aren’t merely forced to adapt to the conditions; they’re faced with the apocalyptic decision of whether to even bother or not.

Even someone like Strout who incessantly projects her torpor onto the rest of the world could still write an article boiling over with reasons to not only not fear winter, but even be creative, reflective, and playful with whatever nettlesome aspects the season might present. After all, Strout is used to pretending to be she’s things she’s not: informed, brave, accountable, widely respected, and most of all a real journalist. Why, then, can’t she fake being an everyday, year-around runner—there are millions of us out here available for imitating—when she sits down to write purportedly rah-rah pieces?

Also, to ensure a wide range of responses, Strout decided that Twitter users she personally approves of represented a useful pool of runners—or would-be runners—to consult for a piece on overcoming the problem of getting your cold, dark, and lonely behind in gear. This is problematic, as misery is deeply and famously enamored of mood-matched companionship.

The first three paragraphs of this piece are best imagined in the tone of a minister delivering a eulogy at the funeral of one-year-old triplets who died in the same house fire. Some poetic excerpts:

The shortest days and the longest nights are upon us … it’s getting cold…at this sub-optimal time of year… What’s a runner to do when motivation is low? And listen, we’re all in this together. So we asked readers to tell us how they muddle through … even when Old Man Winter deals the harshest conditions and the alarm goes off at the darkest hour…

I wonder, when Strout says "listen, we’re all in this together," is she addressing only other flaccid, weak, occasional, or mostly aspirational or former runners like herself? Or is she including the many people she's blocked, at least one of whom once ran over 600 miles in a cold and snowy February and has no trouble being a daily cold-weather winter runner in his comparative dotage despite not even training for anything in particular?¹

It’s almost too convenient that in the past year, I have written several times specifically about running in especially frigid or otherwise wintry conditions here in Colorado. Last December, after a 20-minute run on an afternoon when the temperature was −4°F/−20°C, I listed some of the coldest known temps I’ve run in. I also wrote that once I had warmed up, “I was actually comfortable. I could have kept going for another ten minutes, I’m guessing, without my toes becoming an issue.”

Not once in Strout’s article does she remind, or inform, readers that once they’ve been out there for a few minutes, they'll feel warmer. This is an inevitable consequence of exercising. In fact, the word “warm” doesn’t appear once anywhere in the piece.

I suspect that Erin Strout does not know of this phenomenon simply because she has not experienced it in a long time, if ever. She even quotes an expert whose advice is “You can still be consistent even if you only get out for a few minutes.” Not to hammer away at the obvious, but why would you turn around after a few minutes of running knowing that the hardest part is already over and that the run is becoming more welcoming with every step?

Strout divides her advice into seven sections. In the first, “Let there be light”—in which the terms “depression” and “Seasonal Affective Disorder” helpfully appear—Strout suggests “using a light therapy box or lamp as soon as the alarm goes off” for thirty minutes.

Now where did I leave that gadget? Probably in the garage with the flux capacitor I bought on layaway at a Denver pawn shop. And what else might I consider doing instead with those thirty minutes, now that I’m up and awake and getting focused on my upcoming run?

It’s true that light is good for you, but sunlight is better than boxed light. In January, in forgetting my role and devoting almost an entire post to reflections and sights experienced on a 40-minute run, including a gaggle of hotchicks (see? Get. Out. SIDE!), I speculated that getting ample sunlight even in the winter was among the things that has helped me avoid colds and the like since sometime in 2019 (still true) and cited research highlighting the value of vitamin D.

Even with sufficient supplementation, most of the vitamin D in your body is made in the skin and derived from cholesterol—the contrived and needless pharmacological war against which has made a few people very wealthy—and requires sunlight for its intradermal conversion to precursors of the metabolically active form of the vitamin (the liver and kidney sequentially do the rest of the processing job).

In lifting already published guidance from a Harvard Medical School professor, Strout advises that “Even just going for a 30-minute walk or run at daybreak can help offset that feeling of sluggishness or listlessness.” Why is the word “walk” even included? What’s the name of this “magazine” again?

Here’s how I would convey what I’m pretending is Strout’s intended idea: “Going for a 30-minute run at daybreak can invigorate you for the rest of your day, according to Lucy Van Pelt, an outdoor psychiatrist who offers sharply discounted rates.” (This is another theme with Strout: she likes to offer expert support for the utterly mundane or uncontroversial, e.g., “It’s rarely sunny at midnight at Earth’s equator, according to Buffalo-based meteorologist Bruce Nolan.”)

The next section is “Embrace the peace.” Strout observes that “it’s nice to exist in the outdoors when most people are inside” and quotes someone who appreciates that “Streets are empty, quiet, and peaceful.”

Here’s how I might have expanded on this idea, given the same job:

It seems like you can hear for miles for once, but for once, there is nothing to hear because normal people are sheltering in place. And a high-density neighborhood that is almost completely silent and still on a bright and sunny afternoon doesn’t quite add up in the brain, lending a touch of surrealism to the surroundings for whatever strange souls insist on trying to enjoy those surroundings window-free.

The main reason I did a run at all was to identify and berate anyone else dumb enough to be out there instead of on a treadmill or merely chilling in front of the CNN fire … I did not see any other runners.

Embracing this kind of peace, however, is probably impossible for people who live and run in crowded cities, or who run on treadmills in crowded gyms.

The article’s third section is titled “Remember that to everything, there is a season.” Here you’ll find time-tested inspirational nuggets bound to get you dreaming of a fast spring marathon, such as “accept the limitations of the season” and “don’t measure success by how far or fast you run.”

The fourth section, “Be flexible,” says if you don’t have to run at 5 a.m., then you might want to wait until it’s warmer and lighter out. I bet that most of Erin Strout’s regular readers have figured out the sleeping-in trick already; it’s the running part they struggle with, and Strout seems an unwilling or inept shepherd concerning this key aspect of the exercise transaction.

Strout’s next section, “Find company for the misery,” is solely an excuse to link to Dana Giordano’s podcast; even Strout knows how obvious “Meet a buddy so you have to show up” is. The section after that, “Don’t call it the dreadmill,” is unconvincing given that Strout uses the word “dread” in the subhead of the piece, and also because there’s no evidence that people who actually feel like running are adversely affected at any time of year by slang terms of any kind.

Fittingly, the seventh and final section, “Call it when you need to,” tells you not to feel bad if you don’t run. The main problem with this is that Strout has already expressed concerns about depression and SAD, implying she understands that people who don’t exercise on a given day are, all else the same, probably going to feel worse for their goose-egg no matter their desires to the contrary. It will increase their chances of being beset by season-specific coldness, darkness, and loneliness of the sort readers are being primed by the title to learn how to avoid.

In February, I argued for the raw psychological value of doing some kind of run on a day so bad you know almost no one else will be out there, something that less-motivated runners should be the quickest to experiment with. Runners are supposed to be unusual but adaptive people who sometimes do and experience unusual things, some of which can be milked to reinforce—or better yet, reignite—an extended burst of determination aimed at remaining properly unusual.

Apart from the goofiness Strout’s masterpiece of motivational magic includes, the story misses a lot, not an uncommon problem when bozos write far outside their range of experience and seek input only from fellow bozos. It excludes, for example, the huge swath of people who not only train seriously for both fall and winter marathons, but live at latitudes that make the heat of summer both more limiting and more unpleasant than the extreme cold and slickened surfaces of winter (if any). 

While Strout seems aware that serious runners who live in Florida, Southern California, and Texas don’t see wintertime as unwelcoming, anyone who lives in the United States anywhere south of perhaps the District of Columbia and does serious marathon mileage is surely happier when doing a training cycle from December through March than when doing the same training from June through September, sometimes depending on whether they can offset the heat of summer by running at unusual times (not just in early mornings, but well after sunset).

I grew up and had my most prolific high-mileage periods in New Hampshire, and the especially high-mileage periods all fell in the winter. I have never once cringed at the idea of winter running, any more than I have cringed before taking a sip of something I know will be temporarily unpleasant, such as overly hot coffee or undiluted bleach. It will typically be cold and often dangerous because of cold and ice, but other than when doing speedwork, it's not that big a deal to dress for the conditions and pick your way along. And the treadmill is fine for faster workouts for those who have no access to an indoor track or a clear outdoor strip of track or flat road.

Regular runners who really hate the outdoors when it's dark and cold will simply also do as much of their easier running on treadmills as they need to in order make up any shortfalls in their desired training volume.

Did I miss anything majorly about the ways in which this article sucks? To me, the main source of banality lies not so much in the lazy content as in the hilariously cynical assumption about how serious distance runners—who aren’t reading these pieces, at least not to become any smarter—view this subject. Even if Strout is addressing others who are looking for every excuse to take days off—in the summer, Strout switches to using wildfires anywhere west of the Mississippi River to not go outside and run in Arizona—she could at least infuse her work with some active pep. And if she doesn’t know how to do that, she could at least try eliminating all the mood-deflating phrases, since she’s already assuming this as a starting point for her readers.

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This is one of a glut of stories Strout has supplied Women’s Running since her full-time tenure there ended at the end of 2021 along with that of the publication’s editor-in-chief, Jen Ator. All signs point to both of their jobs having been terminated; neither left for a different job, with Ator advertising herself as a self-employed brand consultant for the past two years and Strout, details-oriented gal that she is, having left her LinkedIn profile unattended since her exodus.

The fact that these two worked together and apparently managed the unlikely feat of involuntarily leaving editorial jobs within the Outside, Inc. publication empire—also together—is what adds the perfect dash of absurdity to the already ridiculous ”interview” Ator did with Strout that was published on November 5 in the very magazine that let them go.

Rather than attack the whole thing at once, I’ve been administering a series of paper-cuts to this archetypal example of how low the running media have sunk, because there are so many tantalizing facets to this grand mal rhetorical epileptic seizure that each requires its own preparation. Besides, Strout has been fervently scanning the Internet for the last month looking for reactions to this interview, and devoting more attention in this hunt to certain critical sources than to others.

Although Strout and her antics are at least two levels of unintentional cringe-comedy beyond mere self-parody, it’s worth devoting a few words to just how inept an interviewer Ator is. And I don’t think this merely stems from this not being an interview at all but an attempt at positive publicity for Erin Strout. And this PR piece was apparently commissioned or at least granted by Women’s Running managing editor-in-absentia Zoe Rom, recently seen performing an arguably fatphobic comedy bit.

I’ll delve into this more soon, but someone on an earnest and objective truth-seeking mission would never salt her interview questions with gushing like this about her subject:

• "That obviously has been a constant through-line in your career—your amazing profile and cover writing about these athletes."

• "You’ve also been instrumental in highlighting the dark underbelly and problems within the sport"

• "You still have a lot of career left and a lot of important things you’re going to do"

Between Strout’s strict and longstanding habit of blocking and repelling all contrary input and thunderously illegitimate praise like this garbage from her former slacker-queen of a boss, it’s no wonder Strout—for all of her Evil Eeyore nattering and obvious case of the unending blahs—has no earthly idea how unqualified she is to be doing any of this, even in a terminally degraded information-provision environment.

1. Other, perhaps, than remaining healthy enough to take advantage of what apparently animates me and would have bemused at least one phlegmatic 19th-century German: “a lecherous taste for what is odd or painfully paradoxical, for what in existence is questionable and ridiculous.”