Why would Runner's World fire someone from its editorial staff for brazen lying? This isn't the dark ages of publishing, when basic ethics and brainpower were oddly valued
Expunging white males from the fitness media in favor of narcissistic, neurotic, fact-averse harridans appears to have been an imperfect strategy
The United Kingdom has its own version of Runner’s World. It also boasts its own ragged complement of neurotic white middle-aged day-drinking female joggers with terminally haunted expressions, authoritarian-leftist politics, and inexplicably powerful appetites for personal attention. Because these kinds of women—known as harridans in the formal medical, anthropological, and psychological literature—have developed a habit of hijacking editorial positions at fitness-oriented publications, the U.K. version of Runner’s World is at least as worthless as the one based in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania.
On January 30, Derek Murphy of the liar-and-cheater-snagging site Marathon Investigation published yet another beautifully rendered exposé of another cavorting narcissist, this one named Kate Carter and employed as an editor for Runner’s World’s British version. Despite the undeniable evidence of Carter’s meticulous but ultimately unsophisticated forgeries and Carter herself having admitted to lapsing into some sort of malfeasance, as of Tuesday, Carter, according to The Sun, still had a job:
A Runner’s World UK spokesperson told The Sun Online: “We are aware of an online article regarding Kate Carter.
"At Runner’s World, we are committed to upholding the trust our audience and the running community has in our brand, and are investigating these claims internally.”
This is, of course, a joke. If whoever dispatched this knows how to read at all, he or she doesn’t need to investigate a thing, as this spokesperson already knows that Carter is a blatant fabulist who in a primarily rationality-based civilization would have been canned and—far more tragic from Carter’s perspective—quickly forgotten.
When Murphy first launched Marathon Investigation, he had no way to know how deliciously controversial his task would in some ways become, because no one was predicting that by 2020 or so, most people caught lying or cheating about their own or anyone else’s running were sponsored “athletes” or otherwise industry insiders. In other words, Murphy probably imagined himself writing about a string of random course-cutters and dataset-fudgers and rarely if ever encountering cheaters who were already known and even respected perambulating quantities.
I didn’t see any of this coming, either. But it’s undeniably true that in 2024, the greater a given jogger’s visibility or ascribed responsibility, the more likely he or she is to be morally, emotionally, and intellectually crippled beyond belief and repair. Not only is it not surprising that Carter still has her job, it would be outright strange to see Runner’s World fire her given that both Runner’s World’s own U.S.-based editors and those heading other running-centric publications are proven dongsuckers and dungweasels, too. Hence so many adopting the term “clown world” to describe not so much how cartoonishly degraded everything is but the pretense by so many NPCs that living in a world of inverted rules of personal and professional conduct is precisely how things should be.
The corporate media are hemorrhaging consumers and hence money and jobs. The reason is simple: as more and more Americans come to recognize the galactic, even manic unreliability and illegitimacy of corporate “news” outlets, non-traditional sources of information are booming in popularity, which is why representatives of these fallen corporate media outlets want independent journalists censored. While it’s fun to watch the degraded figures within this shrinking and septic pool of wine-buzzed spokespeople for sham establishment narratives desperately squirm and blame factors other than their own lying and the palpable contempt for their own viewers this requires, the refusal of these outlets to reckon with their own crimes and illegitimacy is a serious issue.
Runner’s World has been published for over six years by Hearst, which in October 2017 purchased Rodale, Inc.’s media brands. The year before, Hearst had entered into a partnership with now-beleaguered vanity-publishing colossus Condé Nast to form an enterprise called PubWorX, the apparent—and apparently flagging—mission of which is using finely tuned metrics to drive profitability across media brands.
Not so long before these shifts, Rodale itself had grown comfortable in the role of “avaricious media giant.” In 2007, the company purchased Running Times, a magazine for which I had been a senior writer for close to seven years and a publication that served as a de facto rival of—or, to optimists, a complement to—the much-larger Runner’s World in maintaining a near-exclusive focus on competitive rather than recreational running.
In conjunction with the 2009 Boston Marathon Expo, I attended a Runner’s World-Running Times joint editorial meeting. The editor-in-chief of Runner’s World was a man named David Willey, whom Rodale had clearly not onboarded for either his warmth or creativity. It was obvious at the time of Rodale’s purchase that RT would cease to exist in any meaningful form, and that all corporate running publications were rapidly devolving into irreversible editorial irrelevance.
By the end of 2019, I’d been mostly dormant for years as a running-publication freelancer and had resigned myself to making about five to ten times as much per word by writing about popular science or "editing” papers, mostly for wealthy foreign students from the Middle East attending U.S. colleges for fun and with this task often starting from suspiciously short documents. But I’d been stockpiling ideas about running “content” that seemed at least as suitable for what was left of the running media as it did for my own site, then hosted on Blogspot and also called Beck of the Pack. I’d also worked extensively with former Running Times editor-in-chief Jonathan Beverly, at the time the editor of Podium Runner (the direct descendant of Competitor Running).
Over the next ten or so months, Podium Runner would wind up publishing ten articles with my byline. I doubt that my mini-resurgence into writing “professionally” about running—and folks, there is no such art form, there are only convincing fakes and takes—drew notice from editors elsewhere, so it was probably a coincidence that in mid-August of 2020, a Runner’s World editor sent me the e-mail below.
As I’ve repeatedly mentioned in this space, the article in question was about tempo runs. It was in fact from “a while back”—indeed, from a bygone century. And I did not write it “for us,” meaning for Runner’s World. I wrote it for Running Times, and it became the property of Runner’s World upon the latter’s 2007 purchase of the former. Not until 2018 did Runner’s World decide to repurpose the article, and the version they uploaded was significantly different from the original 1999 version.
The most relevant takeaway from this whole scenario is that in 2020, someone with pull at Runner’s World, a publication for which I had never written a single word after over two decades of floating around the industry, decided that something I created for a dead publication was worth “celebrating” over twenty years after its appearance. That’s remarkable considering the trove of material that had accumulated in the interim, including stuff from Kevin Beck that has to be far more useful than that tempo-run review.
Ands this “honor” was something of a surprise given that I had been occasionally bashing Runner’s World in public forums for two decades, the most recent example before Ritterbeck’s message being “Dear adults in the Runner’s World editorial room” in August 2019.
I should also emphasize that my communications with Molly Ritterbeck were perfectly pleasant throughout the month or so we were intermittently in touch. Once I supplied the required details for the upcoming print issue, I asked her how much Runner’s World was paying for freelance stuff these days. When she informed me that “a pretty straight forward service story that’s around 800 words might be about $400,” I pitched a story about nasal-only breathing that she immediately accepted. Runner’s World’s online version published this piece—in my mind worth closer to $40 than $400—on September 14, 2020.
Meanwhile, throughout the fall of 2020, as the print issue noting my ancient article was heading into production, I was busy pissing off almost everyone with a distance-running platform because, like many sectors of society, the entire industry had lost its mind in the 2020 summer of freewheeling Black Lives Matter riots and anti-white, anti-non-maskers hate, and had concluded like retards that anyone who opposed racism in all its forms, not just against “people of color,” was an asshole. Ditto anyone who refused to go along with the delusion that males can in any way become females by fiat. To this day I regret not one word of what I wrote, as everything I was worried about three or four years ago has unspooled at least as morbidly and stupidly as I expected it would given the unchecked ascendancy of dozens of shambling fools within the distance running “community.”
I wrote about this unexpected Runner’s World experience in February 2021. I tried to be as fair and open-minded as possible toward the explosion of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” content, but I’ve since learned by lesson about the kind of scum that willingly involves itself with these degraded games.
At the time of Ritterbeck’s e-mail, the link embedded in the text “this article” led to a version of the tempo-run article credited to both me and “The Editors of Runner’s World.” The exact same URL now hosts a vaguely similar but far less useful article about tempo runs by Chris Hatler. In addition, the lame-but-accurate nasal-breathing article I supplied to Runner’s World was replaced on the sly in March 2022 by a garbage piece written by someone named Jennifer Acker, who I soon learned was both a newly hired Runner’s World editor and, correspondingly, a standard half-literate bonehead as well as an unprofessional coward.
Also, the forty or so other articles I’d written for Running Times that Runner’s World had put to its own use were removed from the active Internet sometime last year, as close to a direct response as I’ve gotten from any of the sniveling douchebags involved—including Runner’s World’s alleged editor-in-chief, or “runner-in-chief,” as the retards now running the place have dubbed this position. This is a man named Jeff Dengate, who’s married to a woman who evidently likes giving blowjobs to Kermit the Frog and who just can’t quit Strava despite being a recreational runner in his forties.
I’ve had not luck getting either Acker or Dengate to reply to me, but I’ll save what I’ve complied about these two lately for part two of “Runner's World's ratlike editors zapping my stuff is less problematic than their publication of incoherent wordbursts by the likes of Emilia Benton.” By the onset of summer, I’m going to make sure both of these faggots either quit their jobs or despise having them. That Kate Carter is still employed is a perfect reflection of Runner’s World’s global operating ethics.
Finally, in the spring of 2021, those ten Podium Runner articles I wrote in 2019 and 2020 were also deleted from the Web without anyone telling me or giving me a reason. That’s a lot of online carnage in an impressively short time, all conducted behind my back. It seems that everyone in the industry is desperate to avoid communicating with me while eagerly signaling to me that I should disappear, as surely as my old work has (sort of). The material cost to me of all these actions is zero, and they just offer me more excuses to hammer away at chronically inept, slimy people and fresh evidence they deserve to be hammered.
At least wimps, simps, cucks, know-nothings, shut-ins, misinformation-peddlers, and lying assholes not otherwise specified can find and retain the jobs in writing and publishing that were calling them all along since they were children—chronologically as well as psychologically—and prone to eating random objects such as rabbit turds and the caps of ballpoint pens off the ground.
These people are a joke and continue to advertise it, as they’re churning out amazingly bad content so quickly that I couldn’t keep up with Trail Runner’s nonsense-stream alone even if I dedicated an article a day to maligning that pointless website. Next up, probably, is a review of Zoe Rom’s February 6 essay, “How Fan Service Is Changing Running Media.” “Fan service,” as it happens, is a concise term for “catering to the raw, throbbing emotional needs of self and readers,” which—not so you’d notice—now takes precedence over factual reporting in the harridan-dominated fitness media.
I don’t want to spoil anyone’s reading experience, but I have to offer a teaser:
Our process involves several rounds of interviewing, editing, review, and fact-checking a production work that slows down the process (in a good way!). Influencers and content creators just working to get their newsletter, blog post, or podcast out the door are beholden to no such process. What you gain in efficiency, you lose in quality.
From a story on RUN published the same day:
Lazy doofuses and incompetent crybabies like Rom don’t even need to defend what they do anymore. Just as surely as everyone can see that people like her, Carter, Acker, Dengate, Benton, and everyone else still clinging to running-media jobs are useless and disposable idiots, it’s plain that being an unethical, septic worm is about the only trait offering these clowns any job security. It’s a good thing for them—and for those of us who regularly enjoy beating up on unresponsive, emotionally challenged victims—that they clearly can’t do any better.
I did not apply for the dollop of recognition generously afforded to me by Runner’s World three-plus years ago; I simply acceded to it. So, if I had something good to offer the running “community” in 1999 and 2020—and therefore presumably between those years—but am no longer an asset, it would be great to hear at least one person explain what suddenly happened to the body of running knowledge to necessitate the erasure of my widely sanctioned, even internally applauded contributions. Maybe it died of either the covid-19 virus or one of its diligently edited-and-proofread injectable remedies.