Women athletes are the real targets of the running media's "feminist" takes, and we* leave it to them to fight for their own respect
Women athletes are the real targets of the running media's "feminist" takes, and we* leave it to them to fight for their own respect
Professional runners don't need exposure from outlets actively working against them
Lindsay Crouse is an unabashed social climber, a relatively accomplished fitness jogger, and a flagrant, unapologetic liar. She’s also an employee of The New York Times, a one-time news outlet now dedicated to pro-government propaganda and clumsy op-eds from a coterie of neurotic Millennial women whose core mission is sharing, in numerous dolorous guises, which of society’s failures best explain their own inability to be happy about anything.
Using her disreputable but mammoth corporate platform, Crouse dissembles without restraint or accountability, alternating between cheering on her own overblown undertakings and issuing triumphantly error-riddled essay-belches about whatever professional women athletes have just entered the news cycle. It’s unclear how many of these fake, eagerly circulated stories Crouse’s tiny ember of an avaricious mind has come to embrace as fact. Maybe all of them, because sometimes she seems like a nutjob; maybe none of them, as it’s tempting to credit her not with a formal mental illness but with being alarmingly bereft of moral intelligence, i.e., a nasty bitch, no more, no less.
Despite being a liability to everything she touches or even discusses, Crouse is convinced that she represents a potent and transformative figure in—among various other realms—competitive women’s distance running. In the not-so-distant past, this would be more hilarious than problematic, making Crouse the perfect all-purpose Internet punching bag for runners around the world before and after her unceremonious canning by the NYT for various ethical violations.
But we’re* unbelievably far from the recent past, and the women now steering every conversation about women’s running from their own corporate or independent publishing platforms have opened their legs to Crouse’s keenly parasitic overtures. Rather than heckle this beady-eyed nonsense-machine to the sidelines, these “journalists” and their outlets have instead energetically amplified Crouse’s output—you wouldn’t see this mild rebuke of Crouse’s work in the Fast Women newsletter of today—and, more importantly, have as supposed professionals embraced the same strategy Crouse has: Lie about the reasons for your “pro-women” campaigning while occasionally giving away your real, anti-women motives, sometimes explicitly.
Crouse’s incoherent fantasy-world pieces, despite their superficial WE ARE STRONG WOMEN messaging, would be dismissed as girlish tripe by the dedicated running media were they merely the psycho-uterine effluvia of a random blogger. But Crouse, despite unrolling openly antifeminist stances and lies painfully evident even to her most blinkered fangirls, is packing a big bullhorn, by running-chick standards, under that size-oops dress, so she gets lots of blind suck-ups.
But even that wouldn’t matter if the women in charge of women’s running magazines, newsletters, and Instagram accounts were propelled by intellectual honesty rather than the same untrammeled desire for running’s pitiful, pipsqueak version of notoriety that has come to sicken the soul of Lindsay Crouse and a whole generation of upward-failing dunces of privilege throughout the northeastern United States.
It all does matter, though, because gaining exposure by any means necessary is now priority one among women running journalists and content creators, and the disconnect between their stated goal of advancing women’s running and their indisputably damaging contributions to the sport really couldn’t be more thorough and self-evident. I will nevertheless explain it at tedious length anyway, so I can hopefully ignore competitive women’s running going forward (which I’m supposed to do since, according to Crouse, men can’t possibly be interested in women’s sports for noble or merely innocuous reasons).
Alison Wade is happy that Francine Niyonsaba, who literally doesn’t have a woman’s body and is not a woman by any stretch of the wildest imagination, is knocking down more women’s world records. Wade, despite a consistent man-bashing vibe, loves it whenever an athlete with testicles stomps all over fast women.
Alison Wade’s otherwise curious habit of laboriously typing up elite-level race results for a weekly publication, information anyone can find on Letsrun within hours of the finish of any major competition, offers cover for her obvious hatred of successful women, white female American dopers excepted. At this point, no one with a brain seriously believes intersex athletes should compete against women; the only resistance to rewriting the rules is that doing so would offend people and seems kind of mean despite also seeming unquestionably wise. Sports are supposed to be inclusive only to the extent that people who want to compete in one of the categories on offer must qualify for that category. Perhaps in the near future World Athletics and other sports governing [sic] bodies will establish separate categories for intersex and trans athletes, just as has been done, to great positive effect, for people who have inherent mental or physical limitations.
If I find myself confronted with someone who believes such an arrangement would be wrong, and that the status quo is preferable, then I can safely bet the farm on my interlocutor being a resentment-laden but well-off female jogger who can offer not a single justification for her belief. Somehow, it just feels right for her to “believe” certain non-facts. Under a combination of hypnosis and narcosis, she would be able to admit why her emotions drive her decisions about what is true and what isn’t.
If that all sounds mean, not to mention next-level mansplainy, it can’t hurt as much as having the bejesus kicked out of you by a male Army Ranger turned woman-brawler-for-cash. Remember, it’s not about winning or taking anything away from “birth women”; hell, what are a few black eyes and broken bones along the road to women’s equality, especially when it’s some other bitch getting punched in the face?
This “We love women, so here’s a roundhouse kick to their twats” theme has emerged on far grander scales than that of a covey of harridans wallowing in their own cosmetic and competitive inadequacies. The maker of Michelob ULTRA, a beer even most alcoholics reject except when Massengill and vanilla extract are the only alternatives, is pledging $100 million in the name of “increasing the visibility of women in sports.” One of its causes célèbres is CeCe Telfer, a long hurdler who has the distinction of competing as both a 6’ 2” man and a 6’ 2” woman in collegiate track. This is Telfer’s rewards for being denied entry to the Olympic Trials for having elevated testosterone levels, an outcome easily predicted when someone with testicles who values “personal truth” over reality has their testosterone levels analyzed. I get the reluctance on the part of anyone with testes to mess with their output; no doubt this causes great listlessness. But you can’t have it your every “truthy” way, even if you still get a lot of free stuff from a beer company for what amounts to exhibiting and exploiting the symptoms of an untreated mental illness.
Wade’s superficially misandrist cant and craven behaviors are uncreatively echoed by Erin Strout, whose IQ added to that of Chris Chavez roughly equals that of a replacement-level Ohio State student, but who has hijacked Women’s Running for purposes of spewing semi-systematic gripes she reproduces on her now-“protected” Twitter account.
Strout and other vocal Salazar haters in the media are willing to give Jerry Schumacher a free pass despite Schumacher having the same bosses Salazar did, with the same diabolical approach to winning everything in sight, along with a penchant for amassing runners who become injured (or otherwise avoid racing for extended periods for vaguely explained reasons. Therefore, none of their quasi-posthumous jabs at Salazar hold any real heft. None. No matter how much of a subdirtbag Al Sal is, the idea that Nike reworked its whole approach when he left is beyond laughable. Yet no one in the media seems to mention this, maybe because losing interview access to all of those athletes as a result of doing some real journalism would be too damned much. Or maybe John Capriotti will try to punch you in the face. Lotta that going around.
Moreover, if someone who constantly brags about being a journalist while not only making her tweets private but bragging about that, too, is practically begging to be maligned. She’s like someone offering to sponsor a room full of Alcoholics Anonymous newcomers while refusing to divulge how long she's been sober or even if she avoids alcohol. She is an oblivious sad clown on a power trip, one whose potency she vastly overrates and certainly isn't curing her personality woes, any more than my own (equally pissed off, but far more defensible) ranting is curing what ails me about the craplords among us.
Wade’s most recent Fast Women newsletter goes into great detail about Nell Rojas’ rousing victory over Jenny Simpson at the Cherry Blossom 10-Miler in Washington last Sunday. Another Women’s Running contributor who could be seamlessly replaced by a typing donkey, Malissa Rodenburg, interviewed Rojas after the race (and the results are SCARY! Jeez!! But winning, it’s fun, amirite?? Can’t the Outside colossus at least get a kid not high on Pop Rocks to conduct these interviews?!?). As detailed and breathless as these treatments are, neither mentions the repeated sin of the USATF.TV announcer who repeatedly emphasized how “strong” Rojas is, a direct reference to Rojas’ rugged-in-context build. Recall that crass obscenities like these were thoroughly litigated last year in a cascade of heartfelt outbursts, originating with a tweet from the peripatetic Chavez, essentially a woman himself. Perhaps this is because that announcer was former Olympian and longtime running voice Carrie Tollefson rather than some unnamed Australian. (I can’t link to the webcast because it’s only for RunnerSpace PLUS subscribers, one of which I occasionally and grudgingly become.)
Even if you don’t watch for textbook examples of undiluted hypocrisy from this bunch, it jumps up and bites you in the tender bits anyway. One day, it might manifest as promoting the efforts of someone with an unfair advantage over women; the next, it might be joining in a chorus of jeers over an innocuous, even enlightening comment from an announcer that is miraculously ignored when it comes from a woman’s mouth. Later that same week, it might be trying to help bury the reality of an American darling’s doping suspension. And their ongoing treatment of eating disorders, which I’ll specifically address soon, is openly damaging to people with eating disorders as well as brutally dishonest and divisive by design.
You almost can’t do journalism worse than this crew does it. But when you interpret their failures as the inevitable result of anti-female jealousy topped with enough man-hate sauce to mask the aroma of cattiness, you can at least rationalize its origins and promulgation.
As I’ve wondered before, why do elite women, most of whom follow elite women’s running, even agree to do interviews with Women’s Running, which does nothing but wipe its asses on them in between using them strictly for clicks and ego gratification? Wade is a different story, as these days she just snipes at her targets from a newsletter and leaves the trench work to others, an approach I admit sounds somewhat familiar. But Crouse, Wade, Strout, and a dismal and expanding flock of freelance whiners together provide virtually 100 percent of the distance-running content aimed specifically at female distance runners, who get absolutely nothing from the chapped-vag element in return other than an extended “Pull my finger!” joke.
These are not the only voices for women’s running on the Internet, of course. It would be difficult to dismiss Lize Brittin as either new to the game or a Trumpist loon, yet she is troubled by the same things I am, increasingly so, even if her criticism is, well, a little more feminine stylistically. But she, Alia Gray, Becky Wade, and plenty of other women out there—who, like most people with the nerve to remain daily runners for more than a week at a pop, don’t whine about fattening up on the couch during pandemics and attribute their shortcomings to evil externalities—have great things to say, all based on experience and a desire to see things done right rather than on rage and a desire to see things done in a vengeful but emotionally necessary way.
That we live in a society that so consistently and grotesquely creates mismatches between the worthiness of Internet noise and its visibility is one of the reasons I have disengaged, with sadness but without hesitation, from many of its traditions and norms. I can empathize to some extent with Crouse’s tweeted lament above about her big ass, or whatever’s up that ass, concerning her perfectly mundane appearance, and how it would be ideal in some ways to be oblivious to the entire concept of mating. Since we’re discussing testosterone, in 2018, during my brief return to road racing at 48, I had my levels checked for the first time ever. I was half-hoping it would come back low, so I would at least have something in the excuse bag after I ran what promised to be a bunch of uninspired races. Instead, it came back at 26.8 nmol/dL, on the high end of normal for my age. Of course, anyone familiar with my hulking physique and other giveaways would not be surprised by either this value or the crappy racing that attended it.
I have decided that medical science needs to produce a way to selectively abolish all libido-related effects of the testosterone without affecting overall health. Sadly, this is rather akin to sailing an ocean liner across the Sahara Desert. Were this endocrinological arrangement possible, it would already no doubt be in use in the U.S. “correctional” system to check the impulses of convicted sex offenders. Then it would trickle out to, I dunno, guys who aren’t doing anything creepy or even noticeable, but wish to be untroubled by prosocial thoughts of any kind until they finally grow limp-dicked from a combination of sheer advanced age or global revulsion at everything with a face that walks on two legs. But in any case, I don’t use any of my angst as an excuse to embark on whimsical cancelation campaigns, hide from critics, legislate the opinions of entire classes of people out of existence in the name of social progress, and in general allow my asshole side to prevail to the extent it could. Or maybe, as strident as I can be, I just don’t have it in me to lie about people and situations, in a desperate attempt to curry favor with the slack-jawed rabble or otherwise.
If the harpies in charge of today’s female-running conversations represented an accurate slice of American adult women, it would be reasonable to assume that the typical American woman is brain-dead, shrill, impulsive, malignantly immoral, and driven in large part by an unquenchable need to wipe their asses on the things they purportedly love the most. I know this isn’t true, either of runners or of the general population. But if I decide to become a biological woman, I’m sure I will become even more dismayed by this trend, even if there wasn’t much I could do about it.
It’s cross-country season, which means that much of my professional and writing focus will lie there for a few months. But the more time passes, the less I care about professional running or even collegiate running, and the more I like to focus on high-school running. Pro running is a doping circus and riddled with the kind of corrupt douchebags that mostly—mostly—get weeded out of youth running before they can destroy things in their midst beyond repair. I can absorb the doping, but in another one of Wokism’s inevitable ironies, I as a male am washing my hands of paying attention to professional women’s running. It’s too much of a joke and too many people like it that way.
I can sit here, having wasted too much of my life on running but with a ton of experience as an inevitable result, and be a relegated to a complete non-authority in the minds of the people operating the running media simply for having the temerity to call out their lies. I'm someone who has averaged over 100 miles a week for an entire calendar year, developed an eating disorder in college but kept at it and ran my fastest times at age 34, then came back from drinking myself onto the streets and was third and second in my age group at a large and relatively prestigious 10K. Along the way I managed to develop one of the first true online coaching sites, got my name on the cover of a couple of books, wrote over a hundred fact-based if often throwaway articles, came within a few minutes of the Olympic Trials standard, and coached high school for a couple of short but very sweet years. I still run 40 to 45 miles a week despite being perfectly fit, charming, and psychologically well-adjusted without them.
None of this is remarkable on its own, and plenty of people have at least this much experience and wisdom to contribute. But not only is most of that of no general interest, it doesn’t fit the paradigm of being purposefully disgusting in every way if you want to be a role model, especially for women.
I so automatically look down on these joggers and fools that even as I’ve churned out these posts, I’ve never bothered to pause and list the reasons. I'm no superhero, but compared to this wave of nimrods and rot-merchants, I present as a combination of Galileo and George Clooney. So do most of you.
If people who offer useful experience, but have become too noisy for spineless bastards like Jonathan Beverly to tolerate, are now useless, then whoever is useful can go right ahead and mold running, and in particular women’s running, into whatever macabre anti-party they want to create. In ten years, all of women's running will most likely be controlled by unshorn harridans crouched in a circle in a windowless basement, passing a butane torch around to light their ghastly granny-panties fire to get blasted on the menstrual fumes. Maybe then it’ll be interesting enough to write about again. But for now, fuck it.
In the meantime, I'm waiting for the first serious transgender controversy to strike the ultrarunning world, as this is not merely inevitable but on raw statistical grounds imminent. That will make for some high-octane online parleying, as it will pit a generation of Wokezillas against people whose beards first reached their asses during the Reagan administration. As Carrie Tollefson might say, it's all good.