In the 1 year I have been following ultramarathon running, I have been pretty weirded-out by this progressive trend toward ESPN style "sportiness" regarding the commenters on ultra running blogs. I used to skateboard when I was young...actually, I skateboarded for over 10 years and was really good at it. One of the most important things to me about skateboarding was that the people who talked about it, worked in it and had their lives invested in it ACTUALLY RODE THEIR SKATEBOARDS.
Very consciously, this was something I liked about ultrarunning. If you really are dedicated to and love something, you can laugh about it and not get all stern-faced and lame about it. Geoff Roes, Dakota Jones, Bryon at iRunFar, Lucho, JT, Jesse from MI, etc. all elucidate my point: Make sure you love DOING something more than you love TALKING about doing something.
If what you really want to do is talk stupid shit about a sport, please go back to watching and not playing any of the following: basketball, baseball, american football or football. These are well-established zones for totally uninteresting bullshit. Feel free to proceed. Please, stop slinging your boring commentary all over a sport that does not want or warrant it. Maybe, all the bored "i'm training for my first ultra" house-husbands of the internet will realize: Hey, maybe the thing that all of your running heros (read: man-crushes) know that you don't is that running in the mountains/trails/etc. is insanely more fun than reading about someone's sport-commentary regarding running in the mountains/trails/etc. (yeah yeah, with this post I'm a potential hypocrite here).
Over 200 comments for money in ultramarathons? I read maybe 10 and then went for a run and then went to do interesting things. Incredible, right? Yep, there's a shitload of life out there just waiting for anyone to scoop it up, free of charge. Best deal in town. I mean, what is going on in these people's lives that they are angered by something as totally reasonable as paying someone for being superb at their chosen profession? No, man. I don't get my dick sucked as often as I'd like (sometimes), but that doesn't mean I vent my frustrations on niche-sport message boards. Get a fucking life. Hey, while you're at it, make it running and not the Internet.
Yep, I guess my irritation in this blog post indicates I am a little behind schedule on a nice (consequence-free) dick sucking. I hope that's never untrue.
Conclusion: I like reading running blogs. They give me inspiration in my own running and are frequently funny and well written. This garbage, keyboard-diarrhea on iRunFar and other blogs is as boring as hell. At least make it barrel-scraping funny like the stuff on LetsRun. I mean, c'mon.
6 comments:
It's a good rant. Sucks about the dog.
Awesome stuff! I'm with you, it's pretty weird sometimes. And lame, the ultra trolls have a long way to go before they approach the letsrun peeps.
Yeah, the dog was a horrible sight. The sound of it's breathing was even worse. I briefly considered putting it out of it's misery with a big stone, but A) that's pretty intense and B) if it could make it another 3 hours, the sun would go down and it'd have a chance to live.
I certainly am not qualified to prattle on about any sweeping changes in the ultrarunning community, but iRunFar's comments section has begun to really get me down. Really personal attacks. But yes, the ultra trolls will seriously have to step up their game if they want to approach LetsRun levels of ridiculousness.
Maybe the best thing I've read/seen on the Internet since Adam Carrolla's now infamous rant on the Occupy Wallstreet movement (see link below). Priceless. Thanks for saying what many of us think but haven't found the right works to express.
Wyatt
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJD8pZiRIzs
I can't believe i just got compared to an adam corolla rant, haha! i'm glad you liked the post, I actually had it sitting in my draft box for over a week. I really felt conflicted about posting it, but if a rant sits as a draft that long and i still feel tempted to post it...then why not just post it? thanks again, wyatt.
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