Anonymous Thoughts on Trail Running

This floated across my radar this morning – thank Zach! – and I’ve been trying to decide if it’s worth commenting on and linking to it.

The gist of ‘Trail Running Isn’t an Environmental Sport’ posted by Trailsnultrasnc is can be boiled down to the assertion that the sport of trail running is hypocritical as it pertains to its environmental stands.

Here are 4,000 words (not counting the notes) written generated to say “yes, but”.

Why am I adding more?

This blog is anonymous. Yes, there can be a reason to keep someone’s persona private and I am not asking for a social security identification but everyone has a bias and a frame of reference. Dropping an article of this magnitude and taking a swing at the entire world of our sport without any context is hard to take serious.

In the last paragraph the admission is made that this was penned with support of AI writing tools. And you know my general stance on AI so of course I gotta comment on that. When it comes to using AI writing tools maybe my general point is not that someone shouldn’t use them at all – although it feels a bit rich to comment on environmental concerns while using AI – but that AI just generates so so so so many words. AI doesn’t have a regard for the reader. Could the point of the article – which was important enough for the creator to generate – only be made in 4,000 words? It’s just asking a lot of the reader.

Is there an actual point to the article?

Maybe, probably. But just as I had been writing this the entire blog (all of Substack) went offline. So there, jokes on me.