Oily-Legged Bro Rant: Race with Your Legs

Race with your Legs

Race With Your Legs, Not Your Follower Count

Been a while since I heard from the Oily-Legged Bro. He’s been winding this rant up for a while and spat it out on an email list as road reason started. It’s for the social network self quantifiers, those on Strava, lifestreaming their racing.

Now that it’s officially RACING SEASON – the retarded and ever popular social media is fired up. While most know my deeply personal (and vehement hatred) of said “thing” it is a fact of life as of now. As weird as it sounds social media will have created its own demise, just an observation – and prediction – in the nano-short attention spans firmly in place now, the ON DEMAND access to LOOK AT WHAT I’M DOING AND SAYING RIGHT NOW, will slowly die as people become increasing bored with the longer versions of life. Twitter is the next on the list as even short “snippets” are becoming – BORING – yet, I digress… So all I will ask is this – PLEASE – a million times over RACE WITH YOUR LEGS – NOT YOUR MOUTH (or KEYBOARD). Posting “thoughts” or “what happened” right after a race has proven time and time again a VERY BAD IDEA.

Back in the “olden days” we raced, hung out with ourselves after, talked about it, then went home. We didn’t run to the car and start telling the entire world via social media how YOU saw the race (which I might add is always the topic of much debate). I’ve done MANY races and when I hear about the race from someone, I would have NEVER believed I was in the same race. I’ve actually listened to how the finish “played out” when I was IN IT, and they were sitting at the back – with 70 people between us! So it’s just better to SAY things in person rather than WRITE them.

Also, back in the day, we ranked ourselves on the results sheet of a race, not a social network. I placed 73rd at CX Worlds and that was very self quantifying.

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