Letsrun Depresses Me

I have no interest in racism or gun nuttery, so I don't click those threads. If you have sexual hangups, YES you will get mad if you click the SFH thread. So stop! You are not a true runner if you have no self discipline.

Baaa waaa waaaa. If you are going to leave, seriously just leave. No pomp and circumstance, just freaking leave. Most thread topics are easily identifiable by the subject line. If its not running related and that's what you want, move on. You don't have to read it. If you don't like the tone of the first post, stop reading. Why read a thread when you are disgusted by what it says? Why are people so sensitive.

+1

outta here wrote:

I've been watching and occasionally posting for years. Less and less about training appears on the boards.

The responses to the Hamilton threads have become something of a last straw.

Mommy playing Russian roulette with murder and disease by whoring with strangers; it's all a big joke or twisted female empowerment to the nihilistic, perverted Letsrun audience.

I am no better if I continue to visit this site.

Just letting the owners know that there is one freakish customer who is going to a differen store.

Ditto

outta here wrote:

I've been watching and occasionally posting for years. Less and less about training appears on the boards.

The responses to the Hamilton threads have become something of a last straw.

Mommy playing Russian roulette with murder and disease by whoring with strangers; it's all a big joke or twisted female empowerment to the nihilistic, perverted Letsrun audience.

I am no better if I continue to visit this site.

Just letting the owners know that there is one freakish customer who is going to a differen store.

I enjoy the threads when old dogs give advice to the young folks having trouble with their formative years. Besides that, I get nothing from this site. Might join you.

Also, this forum to do some very simple things to clean up it, like required registration, a division of running-related and non-running related at the simplest level, it's gotten ridiculous.

I enjoy the threads when old dogs give advice to the young folks having trouble with their formative years. Besides that, I get nothing from this site. Might join you.

Also, this forum to do some very simple things to clean up it, like required registration, a division of running-related and non-running related at the simplest level, it's gotten ridiculous.

I enjoy reading stories about old timers. I love hearing from Malmo, even though he has insulted me directly.

I enjoy the training advice and race discussions.

I miss the hotness threads.

I hate the doping accusations from anonymous cowards.

As far as SFH- what do you expect? She was a freaking call girl for Christ's sake. Imagine if one of the Williams sisters admitted to that?

The misogyny and hatred expressed on this site toward females and others who belong to the non-white, male demographic is endemic to this society. Anyone who is not depressed and, frankly, horrified by LR and American culture is either deranged or ignorant or both.

Don't you guys think a lot of the racist and other hateful remarks expressed on this site are trolling?

txRUNNERgirl wrote:

...the SFH thread hit a nerve because it is singling out an individual. An individual who I used to admire and feel bad and sorry for. She obviously has issues which she has admitted to, yet people are justifying her behavior, encouraging it and saying disgusting, degrading things about her and women in general.

Wait, I'm really confused. It seems like you think she did something wrong, but then you "feel bad for her." Did you feel bad for Tiger Woods? Or how about Arnold Schwarzenegger when he was cheating? Did you feel bad for Eliot Spitzer, or did you feel bad for his wife? I mean, in general, when a married man goes out and bangs 100's of women do you usually defend them and "feel sorry for them", OR....OR.... do you usually have something negative to say about them?

While married and with a 7 y.o. daughter, she was accepting $ so many strangers could jack off on her face, so... if people are saying "disgusting, degrading things about her", maybe it's because she was ENGAGING IN DISGUSTING, DEGRADING BEHAVIOR???

See, this is the worst quality of women (not all, but quite a few): they want it all, and want double standards in so many areas.

I am sorry your hero became a prostitute, but....that's what happened. Feel bad for her husband and kid that she decided on a such a stupid course of action.

/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Xwj7Xf8cUM

- We Gotta Get Out of Here, Ian Hunter

possible theme song for those leaving Letsrun.com

You seem to confuse forgiveness for advocacy. Of course I think she did wrong. She hurt her family, friends and herself. That doesn't give me the right to say disgusting, degrading things about her.

As for Tiger, Arnold, etc., despite what you assume, I feel bad for them as well. I feel bad for anyone who has to lie, cheat and so on to fill a void in their life. That doesn't mean I think it's okay. It means I see them as human beings. No one deserves to be treated like a piece of trash.

I quit running, do crossfit, and I bring my rock hard abs here exclusively for the juicy stuff!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Same wrote:

I'm not defending SFH, who is an embarrassment, but it's truly disturbing that so many letsrunners find the story so entertaining,

Several thoughts about this thread.

Before I make a few important points, I can't believe people are mad that so many 'letsrunners' find this story entertaining. I love how letsrunners and this site get blamed for something that is a national phenomenon.

Here's a stat I came up with for next week's Week That Was. Galen Rupp's silver medal generated 266 words in the NY Times. Suzy Favor Hamilton's got an 1176 words story the day it happened.

Don't blame letsrun simply because this is the most popular elite running site in the world. Blame society.

A second general point is, I think the forums here are WAY more civil than the comment sections of your local newspaper. Check those out and compare them to here. No comparison.

Now a few more points specific to this topic.

1) As I told txrunnersgirl in an email, if you are upset by sex talk in the SFH thread, there is an easy solution for you. Don't click on it. It's like being shocked that there is bad language at an R rated movie.

At first, I thought that thread was one of the better big threads in LRC history. Then after all of the useful stuff has really come out - it does what happens with any 'old' topics - it ends up being a battle between extremists on both sides.

In this case it's sexually liberated people versus sexually conservative people (other times it's anti-israel, pro israel, anti-gun pro gun).etc.

2) In terms of their being less training talk than when the site started, I would say that's probably true for the following reasons. When this site started a big reason was because we wanted to spread the Arthur Lydiard high mileage training the John Kellogg loved as it had largely been forgotten. The 1980s and 90s had ruined American distance running. Now everyone knows that running a lot is good for elite performances and you aren't a wacko for doing it. The training threads have largely been talked about so people will talk about other things. When I was in college, I'd cut article out of the paper that talked about how elites trained. Now, as the operator of this website, I rarely bother to read an athlete's blog as I figure there is a poor chance I'll learn anything knew.

So the stuff is out there in huge numbers. And the site is growing by huge numbers so there are more people. There are only so many fartlek, tempo talks people can have and with more people, other topics are going to pop up.

I'm thinking off offering a way to look at running only info for people. But again, i just don't get why people who don't like certain threads just don't ignore the ones they don't like.

The 'search' function is very good.

I will say that certain topics are like what the SFH thread has become - a battle between extremists. Race, the middle east, religion, and gun control are things 10% of the population on both sides are going to be irate about.

3) The person who says we take "Report Post" Seriously is correct. We delete thousands of posts and have really started to rely on that. I've thought about hiring someone to read every post but since we are approaching 5 million I'm not sure if that's possible.

I sent the email because when you report posts, it says "Hit the submit button below if you want us to review the post. If you feel this is urgent or want a reply, email us at

letsrun@letsrun.com

about the post."

Sorry if I thought it was urgent to report nude photographs and pornographic links. Perhaps you should post your "R" rating somewhere on the website.

I wasn't blaming you for what others post, but I also don't think it's okay to tell us to ignore what bothers us.

I'm not upset by "sex talk," but this has gone well beyond that.

txRUNNERgirl wrote:

I'm not upset by "sex talk," but this has gone well beyond that.

Then ignore the thread?

Hey rojoI appreciate the considered response. That said, I think it's a little dismissive of some very real complaints that people have taken the time to articulate.

I doubt anyone comes to letsrun to read about prostitution. And I doubt that people are "mad that so many letsrunners find the story entreating". I certainly don't care what other people "find entertaining". I do care about what I find on a website I visit frequently. You read over this thread and THAT'S what you came away with? Seriously?

How many news sites carried this story about SFH with anywhere near the focus of lrc? None that I know of. Yet, on the home page, LRC has Twenty Three (and counting) linked articles about it, as well as 2 linked posts linked on "on the boards", 2 Quotes of the Day on the issue, etc. Plus a linked video. "entertaining"? That's closer to obsession, imo.

Sure, sex sells. Not a word of the Bekele 5000m wr, and 23 articles on SFH on the home page? Dude .. that's outta control.

I doubt anyone here was suggested the story shouldn't have some place on the site .. but it seems to be almost central to the site's news page right now. This article/story really ISN'T that popular outside running circles. Yet LRC have almost made it bigger than the Lance story recently.

The problem obviously is not simply subject matter, but content. How many posts are there here where people are called idiots, morons, sworn at, etc, etc? And what are LRC doing about that? Very little, from what I see. If you can't reign in the "extremists" from going crazy on the threads, why not ask what causes this? I see plenty of sites, and I mean plenty, where this kind of diatribe doesn't even begin. Why is it so prevalent on lrc? I don't go to a photography site and see people post this kind of stuff? I don't go to a backpacking site and see people daily start countless inflammatory and derisive posts. Because the people who run those sites make a very real effort to foster reasonable discussion and completely disallow the kind of nonsense routinely posted here on LRC. It's not tolerated. And because those sites require logged in registered accounts to make a post.

and on to this

Because it's not simply about certain threads. It's the entire tone of the boards; it's beyond reasonable, imo. If I were coaching, say, a high school track team, I'd never recommend they come to this site for info - simply because of how disgraceful so much of the conversation is. There's a great thread on Carlos Lopes right now, and it's already filled with trash and abusive nonsense. And I don't think it's reasonable, at all, to try to separate the tone of those posts, the incessant, childish trolling and nonsense on the boards, from the threads like the referenced SFH ones. These are not separate points, imo.

Further, and probably most importantly, you've completely ignored the comments here that complain about sexism, racism, and the prevalence of other derogatory commentary - and for THAT, rojo, you should be ashamed.

The tone of much of the talk on the boards here is awful - rather than deny it, and place the responsibility on others to 'don't read it', why not take a genuine step to address it?

I seriously doubt anyone here is too upset about a little digression; the post about playing guitar is hardly going to offend anyone, I expect, and those kinds of posts certainly stimulate a sense of community. Not all posts need to be directly related to 200m splits and tempo runs, and I doubt anyone would suggest (or is suggesting) otherwise. But read over so many of the threads that crop up now, and so many of the posts inside many of those threads, and ask yourself why that kind of thing is so prevalent on this site.

There are something like 15 people on this thread alone who've all expressed dismay at how rotten many of the posts here lean; to simply throw it back at them by saying 'report the posts' and 'don't click the link' doesn't really seem to convey much of a sense of concern, to me. I agree the 'report this post' function is helpful; and you guys do seem to eventually get around to deleting a lot of stuff. But it often takes quite a while. And allowing it, so frequently, cultivates more of the same. And it escalates, and becomes worse and worse and worse.

Why not simply have registration required? Even wordpress blogs can manage that, relatively easily. Posters who violate TOS can be banned, and you'd find, imo, a very different culture on the site arise very quickly.

It's a shame that a site with such a wealth of great information (though horribly outdated design), and so many wonderful contributions seems to be headed in the direction this one is going.

RE the "don't click" arguments...Right now, "What People Are Talking About on LetsRun", 1, 2, 3, and even 9 (in disguise) are about Suzy Favor Hamilton, and number 8 is this thread, which was arguably triggered by Suzy Favor Hamilton. It's a hot topic, the main page ought to reflect that.I saw a ticker on a news site which mentioned SFH, that night I checked letsrun right away, the top link had the article from TSG which I read. So right there letsrun did me a service. The letsrun thread already had 7 pages of comments, I read the first 4 pages. Naturally many of the comments were offensive, some were funny, a few had genuine insight. I stopped reading when the rate of new ideas in the comments slowed to a trickle. I haven't clicked on any of the other threads. Life is too short.It's true there are moderated running sites which obviously have less or no offensive content. Letsrun is more like the wild west, with all the associated pluses and minuses: heroism and hooliganism, general shortage of women with the resulting fixation on them (some good but mostly bad), tolerance of "individualism" as well as intolerance of race, religion, etc. I get the feeling rojo and wejo like their website on the rough side.

Rowan Atkinson said:

The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended.

--on the BBC, 14 Dec 2004

Correction: Make that 1, 2, 3, 6, and 9, plus this thread at 8.

What annoys me as much as the SFH thing is all the crossfit/lifting and Nazi/Jew trolling. Its not funny anymore. It might have been funny the first couple times, not the next 20,000. That and letsrun should switch to vbulletin to create an actual community.