Let's Run...Or Troll?

As I may or may not have communicated in my first post on this blog, I am a major track nerd. I started running in 7th grade and my interest in the sport has grown continually ever since to the point where I probably spend more time thinking about running than any other specific subject. Other high school, college, and professional teams and runners interest me, as do the training methods used by the best runners. The site that delivers all of this boring-to-99.9%-of-people information in the highest quantity, if not always quality, is LetsRun.com. Founded by twin brothers who were college runners and coaches back in the day, it features coverage of high-level track events and countless forums, mostly distance running-related in one way or another. I have never posted on any of them, but I have read through quite a few, and found some interesting qualities.

There is a sort of ugly yet impressive egalitarianism on the forums. People can post anonymously, as many do, or register a name, so on any given thread you know who some of the people are and not others--there is usually a mix. Surprisingly, anonymity does not seem to play a major role in regulating people's behavior; plenty of anonymous users post only serious, constructive messages and plenty of registered users regularly troll and engage in personal attacks. No one is above these attacks; LetsRun users frequently mock one of the site's founders for grammatical errors in his posts and question how he possibly could have gotten into Princeton, and blast Renato Canova, coach of some of the best runners in the world and a relatively frequent LetsRun poster, for his training methods and alleged use of performance enhancing drugs among his runners. I do not know that this phenomenon is a good thing, but it is certainly unusual in the sporting world; imagine if Gregg Popovich or Pep Guardiola got into fights with basketball or soccer fans online.

There is an awesome variety in quality of the threads, sometimes within a single one; you might have a professional runner, renowned former coach, and exercise physiologist bantering back and forth about the importance of periodization in training with some random person who ran cross country in high school calling them all idiots. The good and the bad are both there a lot, and it is impossible to only see one side--you just have to look. The collective knowledge of users can be impressive at times; in one recent instance; LetsRun users figured out that Mike Rossi, who earned fifteen minutes of fame for a letter he sent to his son's school when the school would not excuse his kid to watch his dad in the Boston Marathon, had cheated in order to qualify for the race. Today, the thread discussing his previous race history and lack of photographs of him during the race is over one thousand pages long and littered with trolls, yet its posters still figured out what no one else would have bothered to investigate.

Finally, LetsRun illustrates the vast scope of the internet. It focuses on what I must painfully concede is a rather unpopular topic, yet it features thousands of posts every day. I do not know any of the people whose posts I read, and I would not want to meet many of them based on their content, but it is still kind of cool to see this mass of people all so interested in a subject that so few people I know care about. Some threads are funny, some interesting, many leave me wondering why I just wasted five minutes reading this stupid site, but the number of people it takes to create such variety is impressive in itself. LetsRun illustrates the good, bad, and the ugly of the internet, and does so in a 21st century way: displaying all kinds of facts, analysis, and nasty vitriol on a subject most people could not care less about.