No you're not! You're just not. So stop saying that you are.

You all know how I feel about bitches who are too big for their britches and inflate their potential because they are too ignorant of the challenge that they are undertaking to have an accurate sense of their abilities. In short, when they say, “I can do that!” I want to say, “Bitch, no you can’t!” This is a rant about one of those situations.

There is this woman that I know through work, but have never met. She lives in Chicago, but she is the assistant to one of my boss’s best buddies and closest business associates, who splits his time between Chicago and the Bay Area. So I have a lot of contact with her and people who know her. One day, I received an email that happened to mention “Hey, HotShit won the [insert name of a Middle Eastern capital city] Marathon today!”

This was my cue to start stalking.

I applaud the brave Middle Eastern women who are competing in
international sport without compromising their culture and faith.
But women’s sports in the Middle East are not as competitive as
women’s programs in the western world.

I found out that HotShit (not her real name) had run a 3:09:35 time to win the women’s division of the [insert name of a Middle Eastern capital city] Marathon. Of course I was impressed-jealous, so I kept researching and found that she had a marathon PR of 3:03 in Chicago (a notoriously fast course). One slow day I asked her what her slowest marathon time was. She said that in her first marathon she ran a 3:07, and she was “hooked!” I rolled my eyes, and my imaginary rivalry stalled there for a couple of months. Then, another person from her organization happened to mention, “She’s going to the Olympics in the marathon.” I could hardly contain my disdain. 

“No she’s not!” I insisted.

So here’s what we know about her:

• She is clearly very talented (top 1%), since she was able to run a sub-3:10 marathon in her first marathon. However, she has not shown the one-in-320-million talent it takes to be a contender for the best in the country.
• She has not shown a great improvement curve, as she has only improved her time by 7 minutes in subsequent marathons as she learns from her experience
• She has been an Olympian before, competing in alpine skiing. So she should be familiar with the concept of Olympic qualifying and selection
• She is a much faster marathoner than I will ever be (which I admire), but is far less experienced in endurance sports than I am (which I disdain only in people who shoot their mouth off when they have no idea what they’re talking about)

All of these women qualified for and ran in the Olympic trials
in 2012. Only 3 of them made the team.

First of all, the Olympic marathon team won’t be selected until Feb 13, 2016. So as for the next 360 days (as of this writing), no one is running in the Olympic marathon. Second, to get one of the 3 Olympic team berths, she will need to take top 3 in that trials marathon (unless no one runs the A standard time in that race; then only the winner gets to go). To even get to run in the Olympic trials race, she would need to run a 2:43 marathon, or a 1:15 half marathon.

So to recap: to even get a chance to try to qualify, she will need to take 20 minutes off of her marathon PR, or 15 minutes off of her half marathon PR in the next year.

This is my incredulous face.

Let’s assume she gets to the starting line of the Olympic trials. For the 2012 trials 227 women qualified, with 45 of them meeting the A standard (2:41 that year). She would have 2 ways to earn an Olympic slot that day:

1. She could beat 225 of her 227 competitors (in 2012 Kara Goucher achieved this with a 2:26:06).
2. Or if nobody else ran faster than the A standard of 2:37 (unlikely) then she could get in with a slower time, but would have to win outright. (If the winner of the marathon trials doesn’t achieve the A standard time, only one athlete - the winner - is sent to the Olympics).

Now that you understand all of this, let me remind you that her marathon PR is 3:03. That would have earned her 169th place in the 2014 Boston Marathon alone.

Color me incredulous.

The other day, her boss (my boss’s good friend) came bursting into our office in his running clothes, sweaty, and yelling over the music in his headphones. We made small talk with him, offered him water, and asked him the usual questions about his run. Soon enough I said, “Yeah, but Mr. Millionaire,” (not his real name) “can you run faster than HotShit?”

“She’s going to the Olympics, you know,” he said.

What? For [Middle Eastern country that does not encourage women’s sports]? Cuz she sho’ as shit ain’t running for this country, I wanted to say, but didn’t. It was his conviction that annoyed me. Like it was fait accompli.

I realize that my being so offended by this is incredibly petty. However, I am someone who has worked very, very hard to improve my running times. I have taken 35 minutes off of my best marathon time in a year, and it took a lot more work than she is doing.

I also think it is important to know that even with talent (which I do not have), nothing is given to you. Even the best marathoners in the world lose races. It is extremely arrogant for someone to shoot their mouth of saying that they are going to do something when they have not put up any times that even put them in the same galaxy as their supposed goal. There is nothing more insufferable than entitlement from those who were born with greater advantages than years of hard work have gotten you, and they still feel like they are owed more success without putting in the work.

And why would you set yourself (and your friends) up for that kind of humiliation in a high-profile race like that unless you were sure of success? In 2016, people all over the country are going to tune in to watch the Olympic marathon, and all of her friends and acquaintances and going to look for her. And she won’t be there. Meanwhile, all of Mr. Millionnaire’s friends are going to tune in and say, “Hey, Mr. Millionnaire, which one’s your assistant?” And he’s going to have to say, “Yeah, she didn’t even qualify for the trials…”