Thirteen years ago, September 16, 2013, I wrote a blogpost, DUMBING DOWN, SLOWING DOWN, prompted by two stories that seemed unrelated: former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor warning that fewer than a third of American eighth-graders could identify what the Declaration of Independence actually declared, and Competitor Group quietly dropping elite athletes from its Rock ’n’ Roll marathon series. I argued then that both pointed to the same cultural shift — a country that had stopped keeping score, in the classroom and on the course, at roughly the same time.

This morning, the New York Times delivered the sequel.

An MIT report on AI in higher education found students turning to chatbots “at the first hint of struggle,” creating what researchers called the “illusion of learning.” A separate study of more than 26,000 Chinese secondary-school students was even sharper: students who used AI to help with their homework saw their homework scores rise, but their scores on exams taken without AI assistance fell about twenty percent.

Not every decline shares a common cause. Some of the marathon slowdown is simple arithmetic: participation has widened dramatically since the first running boom. A larger, more democratic field will always produce slower averages than a small group of self-selected early adopters. That’s not decline; that’s inclusion, and a good thing.

But underneath the arithmetic, something else changed. In the first boom, top Americans were also top in the world. Frank Shorter, Bill Rodgers, Joan Benoit Samuelson and Alberto Salazar weren’t distant figures; they were proof of what was attainable, and attainability fueled the chase for speed across the spectrum. Heroes matter.

But financial pressure on runners was lighter, too. For instance, my last semester’s tuition at Washington University in St. Louis was $1,250 in 1973. Today, tuition alone is more than $35,000 a semester. From a purely economic standpoint, there was more freedom to find out how fast we could run simply for the sake of finding out.

Today the calculus is different. People arrive at running already carrying more pressure than they can easily manage — from work, from school, from you name it. Life itself is a squeeze. Have you tracked the housing costs? People are not seeking another pressure cooker; they want a decompression chamber.

In this economic environment, the finish line becomes the goal, not the clock.

“The finish line becomes the goal, not the clock.”

That isn’t a moral failing; it’s a rational response to a harder daily grind. But it does mean the engine — the hunger to see how fast you personally can go — isn’t pinning the tachometer at the redline like it did in 1978.

This is where the AI story rhymes with the running story.

I just returned from my 60th high school reunion. At St. Louis University High, a Jesuit prep school, the rigor was unmistakable. We all talked about it last Saturday night as we reminisced: diagramming sentences, Latin studies to sharpen our English, showing your work in math, learning to use a slide rule.

All of that ground-level processing created friction — the friction that builds comprehension.

It’s no different than training into oxygen debt to expand your anaerobic capacity in the hunt to notch your next PB. In each case, the rigor was the point.

Remove the friction and you can still produce an essay, still cross a finish line, still appear to have accomplished the thing. But as the MIT researcher put it, “You basically didn’t engage any of the memory networks that would actually help you remember.”

Tests aren’t the point; they’re the gauge.

I’ve kept a daily journal since 1982 — 287 volumes and counting. When people ask how I can still summon splits and finishing times from decades ago — Steve Jones’s 1:01:42 half-marathon split at Chicago in 1985, for instance — the answer is simple: I wrote it down myself, by hand, at the time.

The act of writing built a pathway to the fact that reading someone else’s media guide never could.

Two roads to a fact beat one.

The initial generation of the fact is what makes it retrievable under pressure, on air, in real time, the exact quality an AI-assisted student and a media-guide broadcaster both skip.

Thirteen years later, the danger was never that we became slower or dumber by some single-cause mechanism. The danger is a culture quietly deciding, convenience by convenience, app by app, that the hard part was the obstacle rather than the mechanism that produced lasting success.

Keeping score was eliminated because someone might lose. Now, forget cursive — that’s long been abandoned — simply drafting your own sentences can be bypassed because you might struggle searching for the right word.

We didn’t get slower and dumber by accident. We removed the difficulty inherent in training and learning, forgetting that friction and rigor were the furnace where the strength was being forged.

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