Message to Kara Goucher and the rest of the running community

LetsRunner52 wrote:

I’ve been around these boards for a long time. I have seen firsthand the disgust with NOP’s practices, demeanor towards other athletes, demeanor towards the sport, as well as the confusion of being an American and wanting to root for America’s best athletes. In general, this community’s set of ideals, which for most of includes a no-gray-area pursuit of training hard and smart to be the best athlete possible, is at odds with what we have seen from NOP. Be it the asthma diagnosis, the hypothyroidism, the “cooling hats”, the state-of-the-art sneakers… I could go on, but these are things that go against the idea that if we are going to win it’s because we are training harder and smarter than anyone else in the world. Anything that goes against that idea undermines the notion that our undying passion for hitting the asphalt day in and day out, relying on pure drive and progress and grit, relying on being students of the sport from some of the greatest minds on the planet (many of which frequent these boards)…. That those things are worth something and that there is value in our pursuit.

For many, it doesn’t just undermine it though. It utterly destroys it. For professional athletes who have lived their life with virtue and struggled to maintain personal confidence in their pursuit, through injury, failure, broken dreams, you name it… for them it is utterly destroyed and their entire pursuit is made to be nothing because they compete against a group of people who are trying to get ahead in the forms of science, research, money spent, cherry picked athletes, and pitting American against American in the name of the Almighty Dollar. That basic connection that all runners have through understanding one another’s struggle and pursuit and values is cut right down the middle. That joy of training with your team, struggling together through workouts, sharing in victories and sharing in defeats, and all of those values we developed in high school, college, and beyond are made to be worthless. Without being united in our values, there can be no uniting of “American Distance Running” or any sharing in the joy of victory.

Where we once we connected and invested in this community, even during through the most underwhelming times in American distance running history, we now are completely disconnected from the failures and successes of these “American Elite” because they have chosen to go another path that contradicts everything we ever learned about sport and what it means to us. This doesn’t mean we can’t be connected again… far from it. I think that at a basic level NOP is practicing an extension of our value systems that we just have chosen not to accept. They are still out there working as hard as any of the world’s best, if not harder in some areas, and I think we all recognize that. What we struggle with is we see all of these ways they try to get ahead, and the “bar of virtue” gets moved up and down with the latest technology which they seem to be in total control over.

They say things like “A lot of athletes struggle with hypothyroidism, so we’re going to treat that.” So what is an athlete supposed to do other than take a pill and hope they run faster? Or they say “keeping the body cool during a marathon will increase your performance X%.” So now athletes have to wear ice packs or risk losing to someone else who does? And herein lies the “Grey Area”. These “Zero-Day Exploits.” For those not fluent in hacker terminology, these are vulnerabilities that can be exploited in a computer system that have never been exploited in the past, and thus have no protection or rule to handle them. When a scientist looks at hundreds of athlete’s data, spending years and millions of dollars of research to find an “exploit” that has not been discovered before, as we have with hypothyroidism, we are taking this sport which was formed on grit, passion, and hard work and we turn it into a series of process that can be exploited for the gain of the exploiter.

Now, onto the original topic of the thread. Why, after all of this, could anyone possibly be frustrated with Kara Goucher and her undying passion for taking this beast head on? It’s complicated but I think there is an answer, and that answer can be found again in the basic tenants of American distance running and what exactly this Grey area does to the sport. Also, it comes down to what separates the Grey area from the realm of outright cheating.

The Grey area can be distinguished from cheating in a few key ways. Someone who takes drugs, blood dopes, uses steroids, or any other illegal practice has one goal. That is, to take their body and improve it beyond what it is naturally capable of performing. To take it a step further, it is to take it and improve it beyond what any human body is capable of performing. The notion, for example, that someone with asthma should never be able to compete with someone who does not have asthma opens up our sport to a type of general scrutiny that precludes just about any person from being able to compete with a person who is not subject to these naturally occurring imperfections. It turns our sport into a breeding game, where whoever was born with the best genes, all other things being constant, will end up being the best.

This is in obvious contradiction the aforementioned virtues that we all share. What is the point of hitting the pavement day after day, working ourselves to the bone mentally and physically, if something we were born with, that is easily treatable with modern medicine, prevents us from ever being able to compete? Not only that, but as a culture, it would mean that we have no business competing against other cultures who seem to have a genetic leg up, a la Kenyans and Ethiopians. The moment we accept that it is not worth it to compete against people who are predisposed to being better than us is the same moment that the sweetness of victory and the purpose of our sport is torn to shreds. However, that also means certain measures need to be taken to broaden the playing field enough that we can fill the pool with people who have a passion to achieve that goal virtuously even though they physically may have something preventing them.

This is where the worldwide governing body comes in. If you’re like me, that statement alone brings up a sense of anxiety and distrust that I associate with any governing body out there. If we are going to open up the doors to treating and fixing physical limitations so that the sport can be widely and fairly competed in, with virtue and with a sense of trust, then we also need to trust that the governing body in charge of that mission will properly perform its duty in refereeing the playing field in a public and fair manner.

So far, the agencies in charge of these decisions, the IOC, WADA, IAAF… they have not proved trustworthy. Not only that, but we’ve seen they have betrayed our trust not only in what is Grey area and what is virtuous, but what is outright cheating and what is not. A major example of this being the current controversy with Jamaican athletes from the 2008 Olympics. So if there is no trustworthy governing agency to determine what is fair and what is not, we are left with only trusting the sport in its truest form: No balancing of the scales in any way, shape, or form, even in the case of physical limitation. If balancing the scales through various treatment of physical ailments is going to be allowed, a trustworthy governing body is required to enforce that. If there is no trustworthy governing body to enforce it, then the bottom line is we cannot have it at all. This is a sad but true assessment of the current state of our sport.

This leaves NOP in a difficult situation. We are operating in an environment where it seems anyone with the right connection and enough money can get away with whatever they want. Nike clearly has these things, and is thus suspect of exploiting it to its fullest. This is not outright proof of them being guilty, because the reality is we do have governing bodies, albeit very poor ones, and all athletes are still subject to their rule and thus are free to operate within its parameters. However those of us who understand the current state of the sport can see that there is reason to be skeptical of anything and everything, and that it is the responsibility of athletes, coaches, groups, and sponsors, etc. to be as open as possible about their practices and let the public scrutinize them in order to build trust. If what they are doing is right, let us see and say it is right. If what they are doing is wrong, let us see and determine for ourselves that it is wrong.

This openness about a groups practices allows us as a sport, that is the fans and athletes and coaches, to determine if the intent of a practice is to allow athletes into the pool who want to contribute and compete with virtue, or if they are trying to exploit the system for their own gain (notoriety, money, fame, you name it). There is nothing wrong with fame or money, in fact those can also be noble pursuits. However, gaining it via exploitation is wrong and I think we can all agree on that.

So now my point. As we move our sport forward together, we must be critical, if not outright skeptical, of those trying to exploit the system. When there is something that give us reason to believe an entire group is operating on an exploitive level, which needs to be investigated and outed from within the organization itself, since there is no trustworthy organization to do it for us. So far, we have many athletes who are upset and critical of the practices of NOP, but no athlete who has come forward with proof of wrongdoing that has withstood the test of the running community. While there have been Grey areas that are now exposed, which are still controversial, there has been no outright proof of cheating or proof of mass exploitation that was previously unknown. Even the most heinous Grey area controversies, like the Cytomel and hyperthyroidism, were not secrets before Kara Gouchers revelations. And even after her lengthy statement, did not expose anything we didn’t already know. It was added fuel to the fire and a personal flavor we hadn’t seen.

Did we know athletes were getting inhalers for exercise-induced asthma? Yes. Did we know athletes were running up the stairs to get make the symptoms of this as apparent as possible? No. However this type of flavor and controversy does not server our community as a whole, and even serves to mislead it which many of us have seen and expressed outrage over. As someone who suffers a great deal from exercise-induced asthma for example, part of my diagnoses included running on a treadmill at an incline to trigger it. There are many cases of Kara Gouchers claims being sensationalized which seemed outright to be more self-serving than selfless whistleblowing.

So for now I’ll end with this: Kara Goucher, if you know something we don’t and you have proof, come forward and reveal it even if it means risking personal consequence (as many whistleblowers must suffer). Based on your continued discussion on the matter, and without any other evidence to the contrary, I see your involvement in this being for 1 of 2 reasons. Either you are only speaking out to add flavor and sensationalism to this important topic in our sport in return for personal fame and publicity, or you are a whistleblower who has information that the public needs to know about because the untrustworthy governing agencies have sat on your revelations long enough. If you have proof of systematic cheating, come forward. If you have been involved something you believe to be criminal and harmful to our sport and our community, come forward with that. However, the continued self-serving manner in which you have handled this situation with up until this point has gone on long enough, and is only harming our sport so long as it is carried on by you, one of our sports most prominent and public figures. This needs to end promptly, either with you revealing whatever it is you have been sitting on, or admitting that it is nothing more than a prideful pursuit.

LetsRunner52 wrote:

I’ve been around these boards for a long time. I have seen firsthand the disgust with NOP’s practices, demeanor towards other athletes, demeanor towards the sport, as well as the confusion of being an American and wanting to root for America’s best athletes. In general, this community’s set of ideals, which for most of includes a no-gray-area pursuit of training hard and smart to be the best athlete possible, is at odds with what we have seen from NOP. Be it the asthma diagnosis, the hypothyroidism, the “cooling hats”, the state-of-the-art sneakers… I could go on, but these are things that go against the idea that if we are going to win it’s because we are training harder and smarter than anyone else in the world. Anything that goes against that idea undermines the notion that our undying passion for hitting the asphalt day in and day out, relying on pure drive and progress and grit, relying on being students of the sport from some of the greatest minds on the planet (many of which frequent these boards)…. That those things are worth something and that there is value in our pursuit.

For many, it doesn’t just undermine it though. It utterly destroys it. For professional athletes who have lived their life with virtue and struggled to maintain personal confidence in their pursuit, through injury, failure, broken dreams, you name it… for them it is utterly destroyed and their entire pursuit is made to be nothing because they compete against a group of people who are trying to get ahead in the forms of science, research, money spent, cherry picked athletes, and pitting American against American in the name of the Almighty Dollar. That basic connection that all runners have through understanding one another’s struggle and pursuit and values is cut right down the middle. That joy of training with your team, struggling together through workouts, sharing in victories and sharing in defeats, and all of those values we developed in high school, college, and beyond are made to be worthless. Without being united in our values, there can be no uniting of “American Distance Running” or any sharing in the joy of victory.

Where we once we connected and invested in this community, even during through the most underwhelming times in American distance running history, we now are completely disconnected from the failures and successes of these “American Elite” because they have chosen to go another path that contradicts everything we ever learned about sport and what it means to us. This doesn’t mean we can’t be connected again… far from it. I think that at a basic level NOP is practicing an extension of our value systems that we just have chosen not to accept. They are still out there working as hard as any of the world’s best, if not harder in some areas, and I think we all recognize that. What we struggle with is we see all of these ways they try to get ahead, and the “bar of virtue” gets moved up and down with the latest technology which they seem to be in total control over.

They say things like “A lot of athletes struggle with hypothyroidism, so we’re going to treat that.” So what is an athlete supposed to do other than take a pill and hope they run faster? Or they say “keeping the body cool during a marathon will increase your performance X%.” So now athletes have to wear ice packs or risk losing to someone else who does? And herein lies the “Grey Area”. These “Zero-Day Exploits.” For those not fluent in hacker terminology, these are vulnerabilities that can be exploited in a computer system that have never been exploited in the past, and thus have no protection or rule to handle them. When a scientist looks at hundreds of athlete’s data, spending years and millions of dollars of research to find an “exploit” that has not been discovered before, as we have with hypothyroidism, we are taking this sport which was formed on grit, passion, and hard work and we turn it into a series of process that can be exploited for the gain of the exploiter.

Now, onto the original topic of the thread. Why, after all of this, could anyone possibly be frustrated with Kara Goucher and her undying passion for taking this beast head on? It’s complicated but I think there is an answer, and that answer can be found again in the basic tenants of American distance running and what exactly this Grey area does to the sport. Also, it comes down to what separates the Grey area from the realm of outright cheating.

The Grey area can be distinguished from cheating in a few key ways. Someone who takes drugs, blood dopes, uses steroids, or any other illegal practice has one goal. That is, to take their body and improve it beyond what it is naturally capable of performing. To take it a step further, it is to take it and improve it beyond what any human body is capable of performing. The notion, for example, that someone with asthma should never be able to compete with someone who does not have asthma opens up our sport to a type of general scrutiny that precludes just about any person from being able to compete with a person who is not subject to these naturally occurring imperfections. It turns our sport into a breeding game, where whoever was born with the best genes, all other things being constant, will end up being the best.

This is in obvious contradiction the aforementioned virtues that we all share. What is the point of hitting the pavement day after day, working ourselves to the bone mentally and physically, if something we were born with, that is easily treatable with modern medicine, prevents us from ever being able to compete? Not only that, but as a culture, it would mean that we have no business competing against other cultures who seem to have a genetic leg up, a la Kenyans and Ethiopians. The moment we accept that it is not worth it to compete against people who are predisposed to being better than us is the same moment that the sweetness of victory and the purpose of our sport is torn to shreds. However, that also means certain measures need to be taken to broaden the playing field enough that we can fill the pool with people who have a passion to achieve that goal virtuously even though they physically may have something preventing them.

This is where the worldwide governing body comes in. If you’re like me, that statement alone brings up a sense of anxiety and distrust that I associate with any governing body out there. If we are going to open up the doors to treating and fixing physical limitations so that the sport can be widely and fairly competed in, with virtue and with a sense of trust, then we also need to trust that the governing body in charge of that mission will properly perform its duty in refereeing the playing field in a public and fair manner.

So far, the agencies in charge of these decisions, the IOC, WADA, IAAF… they have not proved trustworthy. Not only that, but we’ve seen they have betrayed our trust not only in what is Grey area and what is virtuous, but what is outright cheating and what is not. A major example of this being the current controversy with Jamaican athletes from the 2008 Olympics. So if there is no trustworthy governing agency to determine what is fair and what is not, we are left with only trusting the sport in its truest form: No balancing of the scales in any way, shape, or form, even in the case of physical limitation. If balancing the scales through various treatment of physical ailments is going to be allowed, a trustworthy governing body is required to enforce that. If there is no trustworthy governing body to enforce it, then the bottom line is we cannot have it at all. This is a sad but true assessment of the current state of our sport.

This leaves NOP in a difficult situation. We are operating in an environment where it seems anyone with the right connection and enough money can get away with whatever they want. Nike clearly has these things, and is thus suspect of exploiting it to its fullest. This is not outright proof of them being guilty, because the reality is we do have governing bodies, albeit very poor ones, and all athletes are still subject to their rule and thus are free to operate within its parameters. However those of us who understand the current state of the sport can see that there is reason to be skeptical of anything and everything, and that it is the responsibility of athletes, coaches, groups, and sponsors, etc. to be as open as possible about their practices and let the public scrutinize them in order to build trust. If what they are doing is right, let us see and say it is right. If what they are doing is wrong, let us see and determine for ourselves that it is wrong.

This openness about a groups practices allows us as a sport, that is the fans and athletes and coaches, to determine if the intent of a practice is to allow athletes into the pool who want to contribute and compete with virtue, or if they are trying to exploit the system for their own gain (notoriety, money, fame, you name it). There is nothing wrong with fame or money, in fact those can also be noble pursuits. However, gaining it via exploitation is wrong and I think we can all agree on that.

So now my point. As we move our sport forward together, we must be critical, if not outright skeptical, of those trying to exploit the system. When there is something that give us reason to believe an entire group is operating on an exploitive level, which needs to be investigated and outed from within the organization itself, since there is no trustworthy organization to do it for us. So far, we have many athletes who are upset and critical of the practices of NOP, but no athlete who has come forward with proof of wrongdoing that has withstood the test of the running community. While there have been Grey areas that are now exposed, which are still controversial, there has been no outright proof of cheating or proof of mass exploitation that was previously unknown. Even the most heinous Grey area controversies, like the Cytomel and hyperthyroidism, were not secrets before Kara Gouchers revelations. And even after her lengthy statement, did not expose anything we didn’t already know. It was added fuel to the fire and a personal flavor we hadn’t seen.

Did we know athletes were getting inhalers for exercise-induced asthma? Yes. Did we know athletes were running up the stairs to get make the symptoms of this as apparent as possible? No. However this type of flavor and controversy does not server our community as a whole, and even serves to mislead it which many of us have seen and expressed outrage over. As someone who suffers a great deal from exercise-induced asthma for example, part of my diagnoses included running on a treadmill at an incline to trigger it. There are many cases of Kara Gouchers claims being sensationalized which seemed outright to be more self-serving than selfless whistleblowing.

So for now I’ll end with this: Kara Goucher, if you know something we don’t and you have proof, come forward and reveal it even if it means risking personal consequence (as many whistleblowers must suffer). Based on your continued discussion on the matter, and without any other evidence to the contrary, I see your involvement in this being for 1 of 2 reasons. Either you are only speaking out to add flavor and sensationalism to this important topic in our sport in return for personal fame and publicity, or you are a whistleblower who has information that the public needs to know about because the untrustworthy governing agencies have sat on your revelations long enough. If you have proof of systematic cheating, come forward. If you have been involved something you believe to be criminal and harmful to our sport and our community, come forward with that. However, the continued self-serving manner in which you have handled this situation with up until this point has gone on long enough, and is only harming our sport so long as it is carried on by you, one of our sports most prominent and public figures. This needs to end promptly, either with you revealing whatever it is you have been sitting on, or admitting that it is nothing more than a prideful pursuit.