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It's interesting that we seem to equivocate between "lifting", "not being fat", "aesthetics", "the gym"/"gym bros", fighting sports and fighting ability, strength, and "being in shape" in this thread and discussions of this nature generally, as if they were all more or less equivalent, while endurance gets ignored, briefly passed over as "oh yeah, you gotta do some cardio too", or downright dismissed as a PMC affectation. At least some online endurance spaces are pretty normie left bluepilled (TrainerRoad forums spring to mind), though LetsRun is regularly accused of being problematic. Meanwhile, you yourself are a fairly performance-oriented endurance guy IIRC (I don't know if you own a power meter, but I wouldn't be surprised), there was at least a brief period in the 70s-80s when marathons and triathlons filled pretty much the same subcultural niche that Crossfit (and its knockoffs) and BJJ do now, and long-duration endurance is notoriously a limiting factor in most of the higher-speed parts of the US military. I don't really have a point or even a question here, it's just an observation.
See also: https://www.unz.com/isteve/right-versus-left-movie-stars/
(Edit, that came to me while out running: also, participation in endurance sport is exceptionally white-coded, and indeed competition at the highest levels is dominated by whites outside of running at marathon distance and below.).
Cycling is seethingly, maddeningly blue-coded, to the point where major events provide "scholarships" to anyone who's not a white male and demand the latter pay more than asked.
On one hand, yeah, fair. On the other hand, I guessed before I clicked that it was a gravel event doing this.
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Only for indoor training. I stand by Zwift as the killer app for indoor cross-training and having a good trainer makes "hills" feel pretty comparable in-game to being outside. I'm not a competitive cyclist though, so outdoor rides are almost always just fun with friends. But yeah, I'm generally fairly serious about running performance, at least within the confines of being a too old never-was that's not willing to change my diet meaningfully.
It is interesting that these sports don't code right-wing the way that bodybuilding and fighting do. It might just be idiosyncratic, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is a hormonal element - living increases testosterone and endurance sports taken to extremes actually suppress it (although my impression is that it takes quite a bit of high-effort volume for that to be an issue). There are some striking similarities between the cultures of running/cycling and powerlifting/bodybuilding though even if the politics don't jump off the page:
The guys in these sports are just absolute nerds. Bro-nerds, but nerds nonetheless. If you want an earful about physiology, just ask a bodybuilder or a runner.
Highly welcoming of newcomers. The fastest guy at the track and the biggest guy at the gym go out of their way to make newbies that show interest feel welcome, to try to make sure that they know it's a journey for everyone, and that no one's looking down on them as they get started.
These are places where you can find something of a männerbund. Guys work hard together, encourage each other, drive people forward when they're feeling lazy, celebrate successes together, and commiserate in failures and injuries.
Some of this is just that sports are generally excellent, but I wouldn't say the same things are as true in basketball or golf. There's something about the sports where everything is stripped away other than pure physicality and the numbers simply don't lie that's a little bit different.
I was going to mention this as another example of sloppy equivocation but it seemed like it was straying a little far afield. I'm reasonably familiar with the relevant literature, and it seems like we're awfully ready in conversations of this sort to ignore other androgens, androgen receptor status, the differences between acute and chronic effects, what actually counts as a clinically significant effect size, etc. etc. This might be a reasonable analytical approach if you zoom out far enough (pretty obviously in the case of men vs women, for example) but that's surely too coarse a level of resolution to distinguish between "lift 2x, run 5x" and "lift 4x, run 2x" within the same individual.
There's definitely a performance engineering mindset out there in Line Go Up activities, and I appreciate it. But I also see a kind of religion mindset, where as a trainee you do the thing because it's virtuous, a form of worship, and as a coach or advisor you tell people what they should want and what the virtuous thing to do is and baldly assert that one thing or another is true without empirical evidence or sometimes even without a priori logical argumentation--pretty far removed from methodically figuring out how to get from a well-defined A to a well-defined B and rebuilding Neurath's boat. Rippetoe is an obvious case in point, and I say that as someone who pretty much got into lifting thanks to Starting Strength (in fairness, he got a lot worse after 2017 or so). Older heads make it sound like the HIT types of the early 2000s were like this as well. Alan Couzens is an example from the endurance world (and I actually agree with quite a bit of his advice.).
True, though probably 99% of my training has been solitary so it doesn't seem terribly salient to me.
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Do you mean anything longer than a marathon is dominated by whites?
There are no gold medals or large prize pots so Kenyan's don't bother competing in them. Basically realtively affluent whites make up running categories no one else cares about.
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Yeah. Also cycling, rowing, XC skiing, triathlon, and I'm pretty sure swimming.
These all are more expensive than shorter distance running, and snow is also not found in African countries. Longer than marathon running is very rare and pays less, so probably we don't see East Africans dominating it.
Eh, maybe, maybe not. "Kenyans would dominate Western States if they showed up" is a perennial LetsRun flame post. Every 15-20 years someone tries to build a pro cycling team in East Africa with lots of sponsorship money and it never amounts to much. Rowing, swimming, flatter cycling events, and by extension of the latter two triathlon, and possibly xc skiing as well all favor somewhat burlier body types than the typical East African runner.
Swimming favours long torsos. That means cold adapted people. Also tall.
Black people tend to have longer limbs and shorter torsos, so they have a reach advantage in a lot of sports.
The mechanical device probably eliminates the reach advantage in cycling and rowing.
I wonder if you could adjust the gearing and crank length to field a Kenyan team.
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It is a running joke in British sports policy that we can only win Olympic medals in sports where you compete sitting down (rowing, canoeing, sailing, equestrianism and cycling). This isn't entirely fair - the modern UK is diverse enough that sometimes a Caribbean immigrant like Linford Christie wins a sprinting event or an East African immigrant like Mo Farah wins a long distance race. It also looks like we have been picking up medals in swimming since Rio.
You guys had an absolute murderer's row of middle-distance runners in the '80s. Seb Coe remains one of the all-time greats from any country. That little burst of greats really illustrates the impact that a group of elite competitors can have on each other.
I find it pretty interesting that those middle distances are still generally pretty favorable for white runners. East Africans dominate true long distance and West Africans dominate sprinting, but if we're going a mile, it's a mishmash. Jakob Ingebrigtsen has what is likely the fastest clean mile (or at least post-EPO mile) ever run, and won the 2020 gold. The mile is a stubbornly diverse distance!
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Thank God for Andy Murray, I guess.
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