Why I love letsrun

Let's Run is like a back alley, hole-in-the-wall gastropub in a questionable part of town. You might have to step over a smoldering garbage pile or two. But if you stay the course, every so often someone will open a door and hand you something super tasty and good, that you know damn well you can't get in proper side of town.

I first came here to find out if the plane takes off and have been here ever since.

I like LRC a lot...like many have said, distance runners are a quirky, smart, oddball lot and putting them in a room with anonymity results in some pretty good conversation. Sure there's a lot of idiocy and trolling and nasty stuff, but not so much that it overwhelms the good stuff. A lot of us are smart but socially awkward and that comes out here.

What other site has people of all ages, from 14 to 99? Seriously. LRC's magic sauce might be as much related to age diversity as it is to the oddball nature of distance runners.

And in another way...speech is so policed these days that most people have no place to be a little rough around the edges and try stuff out. LRC is that place.

You want to see social obscenity in need of a fix ? Go to any major city and check out the homeless situation. After that, getting on a soapbox about LR is just shallow and dumb. Snowflakes.

I work in political science. I live in a place where even the elites only give a crap about things marathon and under. I’m also permanently afraid of writing too little (bless up to Mark Twain).

Since starting the in-depth thread on my own training, I’ve started conversations with people from other continents about how in-depth and long term planning can look for running.

If I wanted to just yell out into the ether and try to fight against my own mortality, I’d start a blog and get the non-running friends I have to read it. I say the words “weekly mileage” around them and their faces go blank. Where else am I supposed to go? I don’t like the toxicity that can happen (myself included), but the brojos have left themselves in a bit of a crux.

By selectively/partially moderating the boards, LRC has effectively said that they allow the content that is up to stay up.

There’s hate speech and rape defense that I can navigate to now that’s up on the boards.

I don’t have anywhere else to go, but I also don’t know if LRC is ever going to steer the ship away from what is a very plain and very fixable issue. Given their previous acceptance of stuff like this, I don’t see any reason to really be hopeful.

I love the discourse and climate of expertise. I don’t love the fact that LRC pretty plainly is just “okay” with this stuff staying up, no matter how far back or how recent. Not sure what to do, but this is the only site that can and does operate like this (besides /fit/ but I left that life behind a long time ago).

I like the multiple view points given on this site. Go to a Fox News message board and it’s all conservatives. Go to Facebook and it’s all liberals. There’s no discourse because they’re only messaging to people that agree with them. Here it’s a mixed bagged and makes you think.

The thing I don’t appreciate about this site the insults. You can disagree and you can have crazy ideas. But insulting one another is juvenile. It shows that you lack logical ability when you resort to insults.

Besides that this is quite an entertaining and thought provoking place.

I don't buy for a second that R was online in the middle of the night, picked up on this, and replied. If R wanted to state this, fine, but don't pretend it was someone else and you happen to agree.

I started this thread. I have never met anyone on here in person, certainly not the Brojos. Our backgrounds are different - I grew up a military brat and went to a horrible (now incredibly awesome) DII school. I actually am neutral on them - the boards are fun and they seem like reasonable guys but I’m certainly no lackey and don’t typically love east coast ivy types. Re: censorship and racism etc. I just skip those threads, but unless it’s getting into dangerous or skeezy areas, let em’ say crazy stuff. You might be the crazy one after all. Also if you don’t let someone have a chance to articulate, they can’t know just how crazy these ideas are. At least have the conversations.

GettingFasterDude wrote:

Let's Run is like a back alley, hole-in-the-wall gastropub in a questionable part of town. You might have to step over a smoldering garbage pile or two. But if you stay the course, every so often someone will open a door and hand you something super tasty and good, that you know damn well you can't get in proper side of town.

Also, it's one of those things people do on the down low, even in "proper" running and track clubs. People won't say it or talk about it, but I bet a lot of runners will at least browse, even if they aren't registered or post. It's like a "Pssst! Don't tell anyone but go on LRC!"

It's like the scenario where Coach Joe Blow tells his runners not to go "on social media" (code for LRC) after dinner, the night before a big meet, but everyone at the hotel is holed up in his or her room, looking at the familiar yellow, blue and gray website.

no when people say /fit/ they're talking about that board on 4chan. it's one of the "blue boards" where the most edgy stuff 4chan is known for is kept at a level not too different from what you see here

I love the diversity of posts and commenters on Let's Run. I also love that the boards piss off liberals. You can judge something as much by its enemies as by its friends. Hang tough, mods.

I like when there's a good thread about women's running and nobody sexist shows up to ruin it for those of us who actually like the sport. I dislike not even being able to scroll through the thread titles to find the good stuff without reading a bunch of right-wing BS, and not-so-thinly veiled sexist or racist remarks.

Kobbs Hessler wrote:

I love the diversity of posts and commenters on Let's Run. I also love that the boards piss off liberals. You can judge something as much by its enemies as by its friends. Hang tough, mods.

"Owning the libs" is such a childish reason to like something. And the second half of your comment makes it clear that the first half is a lie. If you love "pissing off liberals" (who I assume you're identifying only by views they object to), you don't actually like the "diversity" of people who comment here. You like that most of the people are like you, and you get to watch them mock or be prejudiced against people who aren't because there's safety in numbers.

not a brojo! wrote:

I started this thread. I have never met anyone on here in person, certainly not the Brojos. Our backgrounds are different - I grew up a military brat and went to a horrible (now incredibly awesome) DII school. I actually am neutral on them - the boards are fun and they seem like reasonable guys but I’m certainly no lackey and don’t typically love east coast ivy types. Re: censorship and racism etc. I just skip those threads, but unless it’s getting into dangerous or skeezy areas, let em’ say crazy stuff. You might be the crazy one after all. Also if you don’t let someone have a chance to articulate, they can’t know just how crazy these ideas are. At least have the conversations.

Have you considered that having to scroll past sexist, racist crap to get to non-awful threads might be a different experience for people who are part of the groups being disparaged?

THIS. There's also the whole "only the boys could hear you/each other" thing. The difference between LetsRun and the all-white suburban cross country teams these dudes wish they were still on is that LetsRun isn't a white-suburban-teenage-boy-only space. Of course, that's part of why many of the people who are sexist/racist on here enjoy it so much - they know the targets of their bigotry might see it, and will be piled on by other sheltered forevertweens if they push back.

I've received genuinely good training advice on these boards, and I've enjoyed engaging with people on running geek things during the Olympics and on the anti-doping stuff.

The best thing about LRC as a site, is that it's the only site out there that really cares about elite running. Every other site basically ignores or dismisses East African runners in a single line in a report, so the write-up of a marathon will be "Emily Sisson stormed home in a time of 2:23 as the FIRST American, and 7th overall. This was an amazing performance that that signals a resurgence of American marathoning! Sisson closed like a hurricane as she entered the last mile, passing four of her crumbling rivals to cross the line. The race was won by Peres Jepchirchir in 2:17."

Elite running is a global sport and LRC recognises that. You could contrast the LRC Tokyo podcasts with the Cities Torch Talk podcast. Chris Chavez and his crew more or less ignored everyone who wasn't an American. It was embarrassing. They didn't even learn the names of many of the top runners from other countries. Compare to LRC, and Rojo was chasing down people breaking national records for every country he could. In a global sport, the performances of Americans only matter in relation to other athletes around the world - it's not the NFL.

So that's the good about LRC. The bad: people say stuff on here that isn't just unfiltered chat among friends. Some of the comments about women and POC would never make it out of their mouths in face-to-face conversation. The Jordan Hasay thread following her Boston run would be recognised as cyber bullying in other walks of life. The boards could easily be moderated a lot better but I suspect the Brojo's won't do this because their primary traffic is college age white boys from privileged backgrounds. Given that, the volume of misogyny and racism on the Baird's just reflects it's audience

Well said. The daily grind was made easier my entire career by great teammates.

It's amazing the difference even now in how hard it is to complete runs by myself vs running with a friend or with the team I am now coaching. I will always have the utmost respect for anyone who made it to a high level while training alone, complete psycho stuff in my mind.