Running the Length of the Subway

Over the past year, I have come to enjoy virtual racing. Not everyone is a fan. I've heard a lot of hosts and guests on running podcasts bemoaning the absence of 'real races' and dismissing virtual races as a totally inadequate substitute. To which I grumble:

1. Each their own! Starting a large, urban race with thousands of other people is a unique and special experience. It is completely different from running a solo time trial around your neighbourhood. If you want one and only have access to the other, of course you're going to be disappointed.
   
2. Even if it just doesn't do it for you, virtual racing is a meaningful way for lots of other people to find joy in movement.

The last race I ran in person was the Run Your Heart Out 10k, on 23 February 2020, where I was ecstatic to run a chip time of 49:24, setting a personal best in the distance. I was training for the 2020 Manchester Marathon, and regarded this as promising sign that I might be able to break 4 hours on the marathon. The event guide came out just a few days later, and I made arrangement for my father, who was going to be in the UK to see me run, to stay with me in Manchester. On 10th March, participants were assured that the marathon was still planned to take place on 5 April. Three days later, the event was postponed until the autumn, and a new date was quickly announced: 11 October 2020. In July, this too was cancelled, and the marathon was rescheduled for 11 April 2021. This too was pushed back, to 10 October 2021, which is where things stand now.

When I started running virtual races, it was to motivate myself to stay in shape for the marathon, whenever it would take place. In the initial flush of cancellations and postponements, I bought and read several running books, intending to devise a training programme that would keep me improving until I could chase my best times again. Without doing any distance-specific training, I used my first virtual races as time trials to check that I was maintaining my fitness. As the uncertainty started to wear on me, I started to use virtual races as motivational tools to run distances longer than a 10k. In the absence of structured training, I've found distance challenges a valuable way to motivate myself to keep running.

My favourite virtual races have been the two Subway Challenges hosted by NYCRuns. In the first challenge, which took place over the summer of 2020, I ran 245 miles in just over nine weeks.

Finished!

 Logging my mileage was so satisfying and motivating that when a second subway challenge was announced to start in September 2020, I happily signed up. My goal was to complete the challenge of running 691 miles, the length of the New York City subway system, in 26 weeks. Last week was the 26th week and I'm pleased to say I made it, and completed the challenge on the 21rst of March.

Finished!!

Unlike previous virtual races, I struggled with my motivation to finish this one. Part of it was boredom--running in the same places at the same slow paces was getting old, while at the same time I couldn't make myself start, let alone stick, to any sort of structured training. When my goal was just to cover distance, there seemed to be no point in trying to do specific workouts or push my pace.

With the second subway challenge completed, I find myself at loose ends. Theoretically, I'm signed up for the following races:

• 31 May - Vitality London 10k
• 27 June - Run for All Lincoln 10k
• 1 August - Run for All York 10k
• 5 September - Run for all Leeds 10k
• 11 October - Manchester Marathon
• 12 December - Honolulu Marathon

When I signed up for these races in the long ago days of late 2019 and early 2020, my goal was to improve my 10k in order to get speedier and stronger overall. Having spent a year working on neither speed nor strength but just on getting out the door, I'm trying to prepare myself for the fact that I won't beat my 2020 10k time right away. Furthermore, whether I run these races at all depends on the state of the pandemic and vaccine rollout. In order to minimise my risk of catching or transmitting coronavirus, I'm planning to return to in-person racing only when I am fully vaccinated. In the meantime, distance running challenges have been a fun way to run towards that day.

Songs for One Year

During the first lockdown, I started listening to the blues. Thanks to the Bitter Southerner podcast episode 'Is the Blues Dead?' I discovered the music of Jontavious Willis and listened to his album Spectacular Class on repeat. A year later, the song 'The World is In A Tangle' still lifts my spirits. I hope it makes you smile too.

 

I listened to a lot of podcasts in the first weeks of lockdown--one that still stands out to me now is the 1619 Project podcast, especially the episode The Birth of American Music, about the role of Black music and musicians in America and the world at large. What I heard led me to subscribe to the Music Maker Relief Foundation's mailing list, and because of their newsletter, I began listening to the music of Mississippi John Hurt. I'll always remember playing his recording of  'You Got to Walk that Lonesome Valley' over and over again in those early days of the pandemic.

It gave me hope and still does. What songs have meant the most to you over the past year? I'd love to hear what you've been listening to.

Was Travel a Privilege in Late Antiquity?

It feels like forever since I've traveled--overseas flights and walking holidays seem like a distant memory. I'm used to thinking of travel as a luxury which requires a certain minimum of money and leisure; but a privilege which can also scale according to circumstances to be basic or luxurious. In other words, in the modern perspective, travel is something that people of a certain basic level of social and financial capital actively seek out. Unconsciously, I've been applying this standard to my thinking about late antique letter carriers--I'm currently in the process of writing an article about their journeys across borders in late antiquity. While the bearer of a letter or gift usually traveled at the behest of someone else, my study of their journeys has hitherto rested on my unexamined assumptions about the nature of travel, namely that it is (and was) something people enjoy and seek out where they can.

Lately I've been reading Pekka Hämäläinen's Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power--which I enthusiastically recommend even though I'm currently two chapters from finishing it--and rethinking my assumptions about travel, thanks to the following comments on late seventeenth century diplomacy:

Sioux did not want to go east, neither as diplomats nor as traders. They wanted people to come to them. They wanted the French to bring iron to their villages and they wanted their allies to live with them. To be powerful in late seventeenth century North American meant having allies and kin. Distances were enormous and people lived far apart, which meant that access to resources--goods, humans, markets--was critical. So was a capacity not to move. Travel was dangerous and arduous--it took French traders three to four weeks to paddle downriver from western Lake Superior to Montreal and twice the time to paddle back--which meant that immobility connoted power: the weaker traveled to the more powerful, and markets were not so much opened up as brought in. (Hämäläinen, 38)

The conditions of seventeenth century North America also apply to the late Roman Mediterranean. Late antique correspondents might be separated by significant distances; access to human, economic, and material resources was essential but travel was potentially difficult, time-consuming, and dangerous. The letter carrier, therefore, was the less powerful link between two individuals who were powerful enough to choose immobility. If travel was a burden, not a privilege, then I need to reconsider what letter carriers' mobility really says about their status. 

(As a postscript to my recommendation: Lakota America has been reviewed glowingly by Parul Sehgal in the New York Times; I want to acknowledge and highlight Lakota responses to the book, such as the review by Dakota Winds on his blog The First Scout and the review by Delphine Red Shirt in the Lakota Times.)

A Poem for Teachers

Teaching is hard at the best of times. It can be hard for different people, for different reasons. As an introvert, I used to assume that more visibly outgoing people had it easier standing in front of a classroom but then I realised a) being visibly outgoing is an unreliable indicator of extroversion and b) teaching is just hard.

I've found online teaching to be, unexpectedly, a lot easier, at least for some aspects of my shyness. For one thing, I'm not visibly front and centre of the room in the same way. I know that some people love chatting with their students before and after class--online teaching is the first environment where I've found this easy and natural. In person I was never quite sure what to do or say, but in an online classroom I can send chats, or unmute and greet people by name. (I have a horrible memory for names, especially names I've learned aurally, so being able to see everyone's name all the time is the best). I probably overuse the smiley face emoji, but sometimes in an online classroom I actually do feel that smiley. 😄 I like tools such as whiteboards for sharing ideas and analysis, I like how the chat feature in the online classroom enhances communication; I'm even fond of the raised hand function. While teaching online can be incredibly difficult, there are aspects of it I've grown to enjoy.

But teaching during a pandemic has had its share of frustrations. As the poet Stephanie Burt says, we're all 'going to smolder inside sometimes'. One of my favourite things about Stephanie Burt's Callimachus translation (a translation that sits somewhere between Sean Heaney's Beowulf and Sonnet L’Abbé’s Sonnet’s Shakespeare in its adherence to the source text), is the way the ancient poet's language and imagery have been updated for a modern audience. This sometimes has some jarring moments but in poems like this one, it works perfectly:

Try to hold your horses,

rather than chasing them more than once

    around their own track. You'll just end up cracking your skull

on the first tight curve.

I don't read Greek, but if we use the Loeb translation as a comparison:

Hold back from their running the wild horses, and do not race a second time round the course, lest they should shatter your chariot on the turning-post, and you tumble forth headlong. (Callimachus, Musaeus. Aetia, Iambi, Hecale and Other Fragments. Hero and Leander. Edited and translated by C. A. Trypanis, T. Gelzer, Cedric H. Whitman. L (Cambridge, 1973), p. 129)

we can see just how well this works. I love the contrast between the literal translation and the literary one.

Here's hoping there's relatively little in the way of archaic frustrations in your classroom this week...

"fire" by celine nadeau is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Iamb 5, frag, 195

 

You've been my friend for a while. You know you can trust me.

    You know I consider education worthwhile.

And now that you're teaching middle school

    for who knows how long. I'd like to help you see in it

something more than divine punishment.

    You're going to smolder inside sometimes, I know.

We all have. It's an archaic frustration. But if the

    the fire inside you isn't a firestorm, won't

burn forests to charcoal, and needs to be put down,

    just tamp it down yourself. Try to hold your horses,

rather than chasing them more than once

    around their own track. You'll just end up cracking your skull

on the first tight curve. Some lesson that would be,

    and nothing new.

Don't laugh at me and I won't laugh at you.

~Stephanie Burt, After Callimachus (Princeton, 2020), p. 104.