Zoe Rom is the latest distaff hypocrite to grace the cover of a book aimed at shallow-minded, complacent joggers
Self-parodic freelancers like Emilia Benton underscore the laziness and wholesale emptiness of Rom and the rest of running's fulminating "feminists"
Zoe Rom is the editor-in-chief of Trail Runner and also serves an editorial purpose at Women’s Running. In these roles for Outside, Inc., a demoralized media entity being cajoled slowly in the direction of becoming an amoral tech company, Rom does no discernible editing. Instead, she solicits and accepts pieces by and for people whose closets include multiple $400 jackets and who, like her, are typically transplants to or near Boulder, Colorado, now listed by many sources as the most absurd and dispensable medium-sized town not just in the U.S. but in the entire world. She also regularly writes her own “social justice” tripe.
As a standard-issue “white” human who identifies as a writer and a vagina-possessing trail runner, Rom is statistically prone to possessing a socioeconomically privileged background, low science literacy (and a low brainpower-to-confidence ratio generally), a propensity for spouting bold-sounding nonsense, and a staunch refusal to defend any of this nonsense from serious challenges or challengers. Her boilerplate political philosophy consists of “Democrats are automatically great, and Republicans all suck, and members of ethnic- and sexual-minority populations are perfect beings who can teach us everything about life.”
This is not because Rom is stupid. It’s because she’s a shitlib who has been trained to trust insincere and usually malevolent people, leading her to embrace all manner of insincere people and policy-gambits. Rom and other shitlibs claim to believe in fanciful concepts such as male-female transmogrification and the infallibility of brown people, and they support the country’s authoritarian, warmongering, promise-shattering government nominally headed by a pants-crapping, bribe-inhaling neocon with exactly ten thousand functioning neurons left—that’s not many—and a skittish, vodka-swilling dunce who slept her way to the top of California’s criminal-justice system.
Boulder—which many analysts describe as an ideal target for either a rogue meteorite or a carpet-bombing sortie by the U.S. Air Force—has considerable gravitational pull for the habitual joggers within this cadre of blunted thinkers. Many of them just want to try out a Boulder ZIP code for bragging purposes, convinced that it’s cool to be associated with a place that should be leveled in the night by a thousand armored bulldozers indiscriminately flinging cluster bombs without the advance notification of any of the city’s hapless residents, me included. Maybe they’re right, but by the time the rest of their friends join them here and their misbred and misprogrammed children become old enough to become independently annoying, I’ll be long gone.
Rom has proposed that today’s professional/managerial class (PMC) women are deft and innovative workers and civic leaders who deserve more money. This is an amusing thesis given the level of attention she devotes to her own job, but it’s not the only manifestation of irony in her activist persona. Born-lucky people like Rom, perhaps feeling mildly guilty for having it easy in life despite their superficial ambitions and porous collective work ethic, enjoy stumping on the Internet for popular causes that require them to do absolutely nothing. And like her shitlib peers, Rom is a reflexive and pretend climate-change activist.
Rom has admitted that she has no plans to alter her behavior despite climate change being, from the perspective of the Outside, Inc. suite of publications, an existential threat. Not, that is, until the 1 percent of humans richer than her and the waterheads she works and writes for make changes first, meaning “never.” Rom et al. are well known to fly all over the world just to jog around in the woods at embarrassing paces in costly events dominated by dopers, who are also winning professional track races and prize-purse marathons. So it’s safe to say they’re just as insincere as Bill Gates and the rest of doomed civilization's psychopathic helmspersons and would live precisely as they do even without people like Gates giving them excuses to both promote the idea climate change is a crippling solecism and take a pass on sacrifices that might make a difference. Just pigs at the trough letting fly with occasional half-hearted oinks about the common good.
People who organize their lives around travel and leisure, especially sloppy-looking non-athletes and wobbly middle-of-the-packers, and don’t want to come across as callous jerks have one option: Being honest. This means expressing some version of, “I’d rather see and do things in faraway places than worry about carbon emissions, since these are not close to the world’s most urgent problem right now. I have the money, which is mine whether I either earned it or it was handed to me, and that’s what I’m doing with it.” This kind of declaration (or perhaps a moderately toned-down version) strikes other honest people, even broke ones, as far more benign than fakeries and lame justifications for demanding that other people be the ones to initiate the required chain of personal sacrifices that will preserve the planet for future generations of turd-flinging upright-walking howler-monkeys to ruin in other ways.
Instead, Rom, after admitting that she doesn’t actually care about climate change and displaying hypocrisies in other areas, has co-authored a book called Becoming a Sustainable Runner with another self-inflating gadabout, Tina Muir. Muir is a macro-Wokish podcaster from England who claims to have a background as an elite runner and does not (33:24, 1:13, and 2:37 stopped being impressive at scale in the 1990s or before). Whether she is even more of a simple-minded thinker than Rom is moot and not worth investigating.
Rom is the latest low-wattage, squawky agitator in or adjacent to distance running who has been given a book contract in recent years despite boasting a wealth of attributes that, pre-Wokism, would have halted any ambitions of being published by any company willing to pay people for assembling words and sentences into paragraphs and chapters.
Alison Desir, an unusually daft and hostile industry token and a roving blob of anti-white slobbering and stankposting, had her book Running While Black published earlier this year. Lauren Fleshman, a lying bucket of Stanfordian sleaze without a single defensible thesis who has stolen what few reasonable ideas she’s ever presented from other women, recently had Good for a Girl published. Christine Yu, who pretends that women didn’t start running until 2016 or so and therefore likes to ramble about nonexistent groundbreaking feats by women runners, joined the fray with Up to Speed.
And for all the celebration of Kara Goucher’s supposed courage, she hasn’t figured out it’s okay for a high-profile jogger to pipe down about issues of the day now and then. She routinely lends support to overtly destructive figures liker Desir and Latoya Shauntay Snell when she doesn’t have to and displays a backbone only when it’s convenient. She jokes with Nikki Hiltz about the aggressive behavior of the self-misgendering loons who inanely complain that others have misgendered them. She is, despite no ill intentions, a major part of running’s fuckhead problem.
It is not surprising that Rom is expanding the scope and scale of her squint-eyed dissembling. She and whoever is working alongside her at Trail Runner and Women’s Running almost go out of their way to advertise their lassitude.
Rom obviously uploads contributions to the Web without even looking at them, let alone trying to make them readable. This piece by Emilia Benton almost looks as if it was written and submitted specifically to create a whole afternoon’s worth of work for a responsible editor. But luckily for her, as someone regularly published in the Outside, Inc. e-rags as well as by Runner’s World, she never has to deal with responsible editors.
Benton got on my radar in 2020 when, in response to a post I wrote about the anti-Laz Lake bullshit she helped push, she complained about what a terrible writer I am and how stuff not published by “reputable outlets” doesn’t count. I doubt this clowning and posturing hackstress would have offered the same opinion had I been present for that Facebook discussion, but I’m glad she did offer it, because she’s an endless source of material for anyone seeking to expose the darkly comical, floundering antics and perversities of the Wokish.
Benton does not know how to use commas or conjunctions and has no grasp of how to create parallel sentence structure. This is typical of her prose:
Now in its fourth season, the team includes Olympians such as Joe Klecker, Alicia Monson, as well as 2022 Commonwealth Games 1,500-meter run gold medalist Olli [sic] Hoare of Australia and two-time Olympic silver medalist Hellen Obiri of Kenya, who is also the 2023 Boston Marathon champion.
Benton probably has no idea what’s wrong with this, or with “After accepting the role, her family made the move to Boulder and she began working with OAC last week,” or with “The OAC has runners from several nationalities who will be trying to qualify for the 2023 World Athletics finals.” She also doesn’t know how to use “disparities,” applying the term to individuals instead of to the running-coaching environment as a whole:
Quinn, who will continue to coach her individual athletes on the side, was well aware of the disparities between male and female coaches, and with even fewer coaches of color, particularly at the professional level.
This sample of complaints omits criticism of the content itself, which includes the usual gaseous rambling about how women face structural barriers to entry in everything. But Benton is also just a belching ignoramus. In a piece published today for Women’s Running about Oiselle signing four “nonwhite” women, Benton wrote (emphases mine):
The Denver-based athlete has also been one of only a handful of non-white distance runners competing at the U.S. track and field championships…
Graves was signed to the team, along with fellow steeplechaser and training partner Madie Boreman, 1,500-meter runner Melissa Tanaka, and 800-meter specialist Brenna Detra.
The signing of these athletes, who are all women of color, is especially noteworthy, as this demographic is still vastly underrepresented in distance running events in the U.S.
How indolent does Benton have to be? Especially counting the 800 meters as a distance event?
I’ll assume she knows about active athletes Athing My, Raevyn Rogers, and Ajee Wilson. But she must never have heard of Regina Jacobs, Jearl Miles Clark, Hazel Clark, Kim Gallagher, Meredith Rainey, Alysia Montano, Steph Garcia, Delisa Walton Floyd, Joetta Clark, Brenda Martinez, Chanelle Price, Treniere Moser, Darlene Beckford, Weini Kelati, Marielle Hall, Aliphine Tuliamuk, Ednah Kurgat, or Sally Kipyego, and those are just Olympians, athletes toward the top of the all-time U.S. lists in events ranging from the 800 meters to the 10,000 meters, or both.
The fact that Benton and Rom receive paychecks for anything they do should signal them that they’re actually the beneficiaries of an unprecedented gravy-train feeding whiners, grifters, and frauds exclusively. But like most people, they need to believe they’re being published because she’s talented, insightful, and brave, not because they’re beneficiaries of fortuitously timed social chaos and being platformed solely because they’re loud and equally eager to dump on white people despite their conflicting epidermal hues.
Meanwhile, David Roche, who coaches Rom and was given a regular column in Trail Runner despite dogged literary ineptitude before being given his own editorial title to accompany the column, seems to use his platform to invite derision from consumers of English. But by going along with every patently unwise libtarded idea and appealing to the cranky sensibilities of fellow attention-hounds, he and his wife have nevertheless done very well as a coach, numbers-wise.
In 2017, Podium Runner, now thankfully deceased, ran a profile of Roche outlining his coaching philosophy. Roche explained his goal thusly:
I try to create a community that is centered around ‘everyone is an elite’. If you run, you are an elite runner to me. There’s no difference between the pros who win World Championships and people who running 10-15 miles per week with a crazy busy job.
The Roches’ coaching page incudes this blurb:
This page has a sample of some of the fastest athletes who [sic] we coach and their race results (in no particular order) to illustrate that the methodology works. But the SWAP team is made up of runners of all abilities and ages, all with a unifying goal to love the process and to live like a puppy while doing it.
There are 96 athletes listed below this notice. Why would Roche claim he sees all runners equally and then openly advertise he sees more value—at least to his business—in faster runners?
As someone observed to me privately, “For $140 a month, he must be raking it in, if he still had 100 (or more obviously) clients. How much personal attention can one give 100 athletes not on a team? How is this guy so popular?”
I don’t care how much money the Roches make from credulous people who can afford to set fire to $140 a month and not miss it; clearly, it’s not possible for two people to give 100 or more runner-clients adequate attention unless they work around the clock, but that’s not my concern either. What bothers me is what the world would look like if he, his wife, and the dupes who gravitate SWAP-ward were allowed to run anything or make the rules for everyone else. It’s an old saw, but people can be as do whatever they want as long as it doesn’t adversely affect my life.
You will not find a lazier, more enfeebled demographic anywhere in the world than the approximately one hundred and fifty trail runners who find themselves attracted to Boulder and its still-growing stock of trust-funders grunting and flailing around in the woods, many of them running coaching or other scams in which their peers take part to create the equivalent of a corrupt internal economy. The sort of people who pay for Inside Tracker’s useless monitoring service are the same sort of people who pay coaching-mill operators like the Roches for “coaching.”
These complacent fools wouldn’t care if the rest of the world burned as long as they could continue giving each other virtue-signaling online tug-jobs in the parts that were spared. Not one of the straight folx siding with the idea that trans women are full-fledged women would even touch the junk of a transgender person, let alone consider marrying a trans person. These “socially conscious” bozos and bozettes are unconcerned, and probably unaware, that black neighborhoods and black life in the United States has taken a sharp downturn since the advent of BLM, so their lawns and social-media profiles are all about BLM. Everything about them is performative and deeply debased.
Taking stock of the people in the Roche’s orbit: Jonathan Levitt could not have been more misinformed in agitating for covid-related mandates (I’m giving him unearned, putative credit for not consciously wanting to injure or kill people). As an Inside Tracker rep, his job is 100 percent disposable. Megan Roche is a medical doctor and epidemiologist who trumpeted the value of masking while running outdoors and getting jabbed with experimental “vaccines,” meaning she was dumber about covid-19 than a standard convenience-store clerk. Ellie Pell could not be more of an unoriginal blithering hammerhead when it comes to banging the transgender drum and bashing oldsters who can run and think circles around her, and she has a 100 percent disposable job with Skratch Labs. Sam Robinson, one of the primary agitators against my writing in the cunt-mite-infested comments sections of the Ultrarunner Podcast, is married to an extreme social-justice shrew, and both of them are stereotypical crybabies. Rom, obviously, could not be much worse at her job even if she woke up daily with the singular aim of making Trail Runner even more absurd. Grayson Murphy could possibly be a little dumber, but not more off-putting.
There’s still time for someone to edit rapidly aging crap this:
Megan is my mentor when it comes to running and life. She coaches me, and I’m very lucky to have that. So much of this philosophy comes from the philosophy of learning about love through her—the sappy answer that people probably don’t want to hear! My favorite coach is Steve Magness because of the way that he is so intellectually flexible and willing to adapt for each athlete. And the trail running community as a whole—people here are truly accepting and all that matters is community.
Steve Magness wasn’t even half of the tripe-spewing figure in 2017—when white men didn’t have behave like self-flagellating simps to maintain professional standing in the sport—as he is now, and Roche was already praising him for his “intellectual flexibility,” which sounds suspiciously like a willingness to say whatever is needed to most impress a given audience even when this “whatever” conflicts with his past or even present-day statements.
It might come as a genuine shock to some of these folx to learn how clueless they really are, because they hold degrees from colleges they were only accepted by thanks to having affluent parents who coddled and lied to them, unintentionally creating a panoply of neurotic snowflakes who rail boldly at each other on social media but retreat like suddenly chilled scrotums whenever an interloper invites them to defend their indefensible and unoriginal beliefs and claims.
Empty-headed motormouths willing to both serve as and fund the careers of obvious posers like these were once rare in the sport—even in Boulder, where I admit my perception is skewed even more toward the negative than it would be elsewhere by the sheer concentration of gibbering, credulous slacktivists. Their ideas and actions are not representative of anyone except for elitist Democrats, a shrinking, myopic, and farcical (e.g., soft, gluttonous, shiftless, and somehow arrogant) demographic.
It would be wrong to judge runners, or even just trail runners, based on this dilapidated sample. But just as lying cocksuckers are the now only individuals working for or even allowed to work for corporate media outlets, dilapidated liars are about the only people writing for corporate running publication. Even if most everyday runners don’t pay any more attention to what’s in these than the people writing and editing them, it’s still disturbing to see the whole scene hijacked by people exhibiting the charming combination of prissy overconfidence and the social intelligence of eleven-year-olds.
If none of these fools had intentions of voting—not that the 2024 election will be valid, but none of these saps knows this—then their staticky frailties and gooberisms wouldn’t matter. But because they are dolts without a single earnest bone in their bodies who insist on supporting evil politicians deleterious policies, they represent a broadly and actively disfiguring demographic. They represent the grim apotheosis of how easy it is for an immoral government to not only fool huge numbers of people but to galvanize these misled people into insist it’s everyone else who is misinformed, creating the preconditions for an authoritarian kakistocracy only a masochist would want any part of.