Outside: Naming, Shaming and Blaming

Frank Meza’s Death and the Running Internet Mob 
Martin Fritz Huber/Outside Online, Jul 9, 2019

Anyone seeking guidance on how to be a decent person in our chaotic and violent world could do worse than consult John Stuart Mill’s famous essay, On Liberty, from 1859. One of the most influential ideas that Mill unpacks is the notion that—to generalize horribly—an individual’s freedom should only be curtailed when it begins to impinge on the freedom of another. It’s a concept that sounds great in theory but, of course, things get a little murky when we have to figure out where that nebulous boundary lies.

Take, for example, the seemingly benign case of the course-cutting amateur runner. On the one hand, if I’m participating in a race and someone else cheats, it’s really not my problem—unless the cheater somehow directly interferes with my progress. On the other hand, as I’m sure many will be quick to point out, if someone cuts the course and finishes ahead of me, it does impact me in the sense that I will be one spot further down in the results. If the cheating runner deprives me of a podium finish, or even prize money, the offense becomes more acute...

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Outside: Democratizing Sport

Meet The People Making Running More Inclusive
The sport still has a long way to go, but these leaders are pushing for more diversity
Martin Fritz Huber/Outside, May 19 2017

In the lead-up to last summer’s Olympics in Rio, mega-event critic and Olympic historian Jules Boykoff had a suggestion for reducing the cost of future Games while bringing a greater number of countries into the five-ring fold. In a nutshell: more runners, fewer horses. “People from around the world can run and you don’t need tons of equipment like, say, dressage,” Boykoff said at the time. “So a real positive thing the Olympics can do is to try to bring in more sports that more people can play—in other words, democratize sports.”

It’s easy to see where he’s coming from. After all, running doesn’t pose the obvious economic or geographic barriers that make more extravagant forms of recreation—like skiing, golf, or, indeed, horseback riding—the purview of the privileged few. But even as recent years have seen record numbers of road race participants in the United States, work still needs to be done to broaden the reach of the sport—particularly by challenging market and media-driven ideas about what a typical runner looks like.

These individuals are on the front lines of that fight.

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