"This doesn't mean that black people are never runners, of course not!" Of course not.
When I've attended track meets at the University of Mississippi, where I teach, I'm always struck by a particular differential. It's not just the the sprinters, male and female, are 90% African American, while the distance runners, male and female, are 90% non-African American (mostly white, but also occasionally Latinx & Asian). (And I should note: I'm talking about big meets with lots of SEC and HBCU schools, so what I'm saying applies across the board, not just to UM.) It's that when you sit in the stands, in and among the friends and family who have traveled from across the South to cheer on those sprinters, you quickly realize that there's a culture of black sprinting, an aficionado culture, in which people kibbitz, comment, diss, and above all appreciate the heck out of what's going on. It's just a thing, as we say. But it's real. Of course there's an occasional white sprinter who shows some wheels--and who is commented on, too, as a part of the game. But sprinting in America, at least at the collegiate and post-collegiate level, is mostly a black thing.
As a fly on the wall in such settings, sitting in the stands and just listening, watching, and paying attention, it has never occurred to me to claim that white sprinters, always pointedly in the minority in such meets, have somehow been excluded. And of course the occasional superstar white sprinter like Jeremy Wariner get not just a lot of press, but, if I'm not wrong, some serious cred from his black peers. Call it the Big Mazungo effect. He's the exception that proves the rule about black sprinters ruling.
I've always assumed that the racial disparity in sprinting is a combination of biology (fast-twitch talent), culture (the aforementioned evolved participant/aficionado culture which foregrounds power, speed, and style), and economic incentives (the desire to maximize the talent one was gifted with and have developed in a way most likely to bring worldly success).
What, then, to make of the relative lack of African American--as opposed to African--participation in American distance running; in "jogging culture"? I'm certainly willing to believe that African American runners confront different racial gradients when running through varieties of American public space, and that some such runners feel the need to engage in varieties of protective coloration, as it were--Ivy League t-shirts and the like--in order to put anxious white folks at ease. I don't know whether visibly non-American black runners--from Kenya, say--feel the same need, and if there's a differential there, if Kenyan runners who train on American roads don't feel particularly vulnerable, that deserves to be known and made a part of this conversation. (I'd very much like to hear from those runners about their experiences on American roads.)
But it's quite a leap to go from invoking that experiential racial differential to arguing, as Petrzela does, that "Black people have....been excluded from the sport — one survey by Running USA found under 10 percent of frequent runners identify as African-American ." What sport are we talking about? We're certainly not talking about running, per se, if black sprinting culture is included. Since black people--Kenyans and Ethiopians, more often than not--often win American road races, especially bigger races where money is involved, it's hard to maintain that they're "excluded from the sport." When three Kenyan runners showed up at the Gum Tree 10K in Tupelo last year, including one master who was back to defend his title, I was ten feet back from the starting line. And I watched those small town Mississippians, bystanders and fans alike, as those runners were announced. Everybody cheered. I've never seen anything that looks or feels remotely like racism at those sort of events. Most people seem to feel that the race is lucky to be graced with some serious competitors who have driven in from Atlanta in order to throw down.
As for the mass of competitors: sure, mostly white. In last year's race I'd bet that no more than 10-15% of the runners were black, and that's in Mississippi, which is the blackest state in the union. But why should we assume that because the racing cohort is largely white, black runners have been excluded? Mightn't we grant just the slightest bit of agency to the black residents of Tupelo and the North Mississippi region and allow for the possibility that distance running might be less attractive to them for reasons that have nothing to do with exclusion? Perhaps it's simply not a "thing" within some black communities: a communally approved activity that brings praise and social recognition. Maybe it is stigmatized, in fact, as a "white folks' thing." Maybe only a chump would run lots of slow miles--unless, of course, he's a fighter in training, in which case it's totally cool and understandable.
People gravitate towards what brings them social recognition. Sprinting does that in many black communities. Here's one relevant link:
https://theundefeated.com/features/hbcu-athletes-ncaa-division-i-track-championships/Do white sprinters enjoy this sort of brotherhood? Do they feel excluded from it? Maybe they do. A more honest conversation about the putative whiteness of running would address that question.
As for Runner's World: yeah, the default option cover for many years has been a slim white woman, but I think that's changing, and change is good:
https://www.runnersworld.com/