Oh, trolls. How I missed you.
From NYGIANTS:
You are NOT an athlete. What have you done to say you are an athlete? So you can run 9 miles. Congrats. Your marathon time is beyond slow. An athlete is someone who has agility, endurance, strength. Frankly, you don’t have much of those qualities. An athlete is someone who competes in a sport. Frankly, you aren’t close to being competition.
Please stop claiming you are an athlete. At most, you are a hobbyjogger. There is nothing wrong with that. I’m glad you are staying relatively fit (compared to the nation at least), but that doesn’t make you an athlete.
NYGIANTS knows all about me, y’all. I can run 9 (12, actually, as of last weekend) miles, but I have no endurance. I’m training for a marathon, but I don’t compete in a sport. NYGIANTS is even magical enough to divine that I have no agility whatsoever. I wonder how he drew that conclusion, since I didn’t mention agility.
Then we heard from “A real athlete”:
I’m sorry, but you are not an athlete. If you want to tell people that you are so that you feel better about yourself, go ahead, but you’re not fooling anyone…
Ooh, burn. I am *so* busted.
I expect to hear more of this after I appear on a live chat for Huffington Post tomorrow at 2 Eastern time. Details as i get them. We’ll be discussing the criticism of Leisel Jones for her weight. Because if there’s anything that’s going to work against you in the water, it’s buoyancy.
I am always SUPER IMPRESSED at the people who know all about my fitness, strength, endurance, flexibility, etc. via only the Internet. Which website do I need to go on to also acquire these fantabulous divination skillz?
http://www.fantabulousinternetasskicking.com?
http://www.magicalcommenterperception.com?
http://www.develop-ur-psychic.com?
The suggestions are infinite.
I fight, viking-style, in a medieval sense. Twice a week, usually six hours a week or so. I guess I’m not an athlete?
I also can tell you that NYGIANTS thinks he is a football fan, but he is not a real fan. Real fans do fanlike things like use team names as internet handles and NYGIANTS does not. He also fancies himself a blog commenter, but blog commenters leave comments on blogs.
People who run long distances and do other athletic things are athletes.
I am having an Inigo Montoya moment…
athlete – noun
a person trained or gifted in exercises or contests involving physical agility, stamina, or strength; a participant in a sport, exercise, or game requiring physical skill.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/athlete?s=t
In your face, NYGIANTS!
What y’all need is an application that will turn the moderation queue into a game of Space Invaders. So much more entertaining – just blow the suckers out of the sky!
I remember when google made a game where you had to defend your search results from the 0s in google. Fun times.
When you take his handle into consideration (and his comments, of course) I’d guess this guy is one of those people who spends football season parked on his couch in front of his TV with a case of Pabst, hollering at the players, referees, and coaches on the screen. After all, they know nothing about the game (even though they’re professionals). It’s what NYGIANTS thinks that really counts. That’s all that matters–in his pathetic world.
It’s easy for him to feel better about being a loser when he tears down other people. And sadly, there’s no shortage of these types.
Sports didn’t exist in the the Middle Ages. If you were a real athlete (not to mention a real American), you’d be fighting the REAL way: mixed martial arts like Chuck Norris. Not enacting some slavish rendition of an outdated Norwegian (hint: Norway is NOT America) fighting style. Real athletes are extremely muscular, agile, patriotic, have good hand/eye coordination, and appear on television. None of these apply to you.
What about jousting!?! How can you forget jousting?
Jousting’s not a sport. Jousting is an act between two or men using protection as they try to poke each other off their horses.
Actually, fun fact – in the antebellum South they sometimes did jousting. It was part of the southern chivalry of the day.
I just want to say that this description of jousting makes it sound deliciously like gay porn, which I completely approve of.
On the one hand, it is kind of a semantic question as to what kind of performance is required to be an “athlete”. Competitive level? Better than 90% of the general population? (Can Eddie Izzard be considered an “athlete” after his running adventure?)
On the other hand, you are certainly more of an athlete than I am
(On the gripping hand, that is sadly enough not saying very much).
When I went to a writer’s workshop, I was told “a writer is someone who writes.” I found that very empowering, just as I find your posts about being an athlete empowering.
I have only a modicum of athletic talent. Funny thing is, many people assume I am an athlete. I’m often asked if I am a dancer or a runner, because I am a very slender person with natural muscle tone. The truth is that I lost a lot of weight through a series of illnesses, and I’m trying to recover my health. A few months ago, I could barely stay awake for more than a few hours at a time and was winded when walking quickly to catch the bus.
Now I can…run for 8 minutes! I am proud of myself for this achievement and am training for a 5K.
I am in my early 20s and my body fits the conventional (erroneous) notion of fitness, but I have never been able to run 2 miles, let alone 9. There definitely needs to be more education about what health really looks like.
To me, you are an athlete. And because I will never approach Olympic level, I often find regular people who strap on running shoes and keep at it, despite an intimidating fitness culture, to be the most inspiring.
Whoa, whoa, Chuck Norris never did MMA! He just invented his own martial art (I shit you not). Just combined a bunch of stuff and said it was Chun Kuk Do. I am not making this up.
And MMA is full of fat practitioners. Google Roy Nelson – one of the best in the sport and fat and proud.
Downplaying the martial arts skill of Chuck Norris? Heresy!
Seriously: He had a very successful career in karate. (Not MMA)
Norris had an insanely impressive martial arts career – and I don’t think anybody would dispute that part (lest they get their ass kicked). I admire his karate career (as a karate practitioner myself). I do find it weird, though, the whole “create a martial art” thing. Chun Kuk Do is very, very heavily borrowed from Korean Martial Arts, so I’ve sort of always wondered why not just pursue the Korean Arts, as opposed to repackaging it for a Western audience.
YES! Me too. US folks spend so much time policing others’ identities, from the big-ticket national stage stuff—”Obama shouldn’t identify as Black because he’s technically biracial; also he’s not a REAL American, nor is he REALLY a Christian”—to smaller scale stuff like whether or not a person is allowed to identify as an athlete, or a dancer, or a writer, or a musician, or a yogini, or what have you.
Part of the latter thing comes from our obsession with What People Do For A Living, I think: unless a person is dancing or painting (etc.) full-time and getting paid for it, we shy away from taking on or allowing others to take on those labels—but that doesn’t really explain the policing aspect. Haters gonna hate, I guess…
At any rate, for clarity: zuzu is an athlete. Reader is a writer. I am a musician. And NYGIANTS is an asshat. Yay!
Speaking of body image, I recommend this video about a fat girl who’s been called fat on the internet and answers by… Well, have a look, it’s worth it.
http://www.upworthy.com/internet-calls-fat-girl-fat-and-her-response-is-perfect?g=2&c=ufb1
@Drahill: I have always thought of that school as “the stuff Chuck Norris learned”. As you say it is mostly Korean martial arts but with influences from other martial arts he studied.
The capacity for human stupidity, especially willful/intentional stupidity never ceases to amaze me. I’ve spent a good deal of my life in the opposite boat. I was/am that mom everyone hates who does no working out, eats whatever she wants, and drops all of her pregnancy weight in 3 months or less after giving birth. Litterally, with zero effort on my part, I was in my pre-pregnancy clothes (at most) 2.5 months after delivery. Granted, I was between 19 and 22 when each of my kids was born, but even other moms my age lamented to me about weight loss.
At 5’5″ tall and anywhere between 112 pounds (a very unhealthy low for me) and 150ish, people always assumed and still do assume that I must be in great health. Afterall, I’ve never been more than a bit pudgy. The reality is that my unhealthy eating habits, massive caffeine consumption, cigarette smoking, etc. have me barely able to climb the stairs in my house without feeling like I’m going to pass out. I’m about a size 6 right now and *look* healthy. If someone looked at my medical record, they’d see that my blood pressure stays on the low end of “normal” even for someone younger than I am. My weight and blood pressure sound good to most people including doctors. However, it has caused my heartrate to run on the high end of normal.
The result is that, with even light physical activity (Say, walking from the sofa to the bathroom.), my heartrate jumps to the 120-130 range and has even gotten as high 169 when I was calm, relaxed, lying down, and receiving iv fluids. If I stood up too fast to walk to the bathroom, I may (and have several times) pass out. Faceplants on ceramic tile hurt like hell! I’ve had to go to the ER multiple times because either my heartrate was too high and/or irregular or because I couldn’t stand up at all without passing out.
Long story longer, while I may look healthy, I’m on the path to dying at a very young age. You, on the other hand, could run laps around me and have a far higher chance of a long healthy life than I probably ever will. Why? Because you ARE an athlete and I’m on the opposite end of the spectrum. Anyone with even a hint of knowledge on the subject would know that your weight versus mine doesn’t tell you a thing about your health versus mine.
Zuzu, I’ve been following you for years. You my friend, are an athlete. :)
I do appreciate the additional information. Though in all fairness, I think misrepresenting Chuck Norris’s martial arts background was a relatively small injustice compared to some of the other inaccurate statements and improbable assumptions contained at my comment @9.
Ha ha ha! They are being ridiculous. As a college athlete, you are in better shape than me (I’ve definitely never run 9 miles in one go.) Keep it up, and I look forward to hearing how the marathon goes!
Also, chalk one up to “Things I never knew about Chuck Norris.”
I would love to be “unathletic” enough to be able to run 12 miles.
I recently started a new exercise regimen, and it’s kicking my ass. Yesterday, while in a conditioning class, I thought about your post and it helped me get through it–I thought to myself, “Someday I’m going to be able to run 9 miles, too.”
Also: Douchebag NYGIANTS obviously has some insecurities…
How dare you try to claim that you can DO THINGS? Geeze. Who do you think you are? Some kind of genius? A wizard? A dude on the internet?