I'm teaching a class on ancient graffiti and someday when this plague is over, I want to visit some of the places we have discussed.
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"Pompeii" by Mark Vuaran is licensed under CC BY 2.0 |
"Grumpy old man" by Spamily is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
I wish I loved the Human Race;
I wish I loved its silly face;
I wish I liked the way it walks;
I wish I liked the way it talks;
And when I'm introduced to one
I wish I thought What Jolly Fun!
~ Walter Alexander Raleigh, reprinted in the Zoo of the New, ed. Nick Laird and Don Paterson (London, 2017), p. 425.
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:
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.
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| Finished! |
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| Finished!! |
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.
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.
In late October, Shelley Oppel Wood published an essay in Runners' World called 'Stop Calling 2020 a Marathon'. As she points out, the more you think about the parallel, the more it breaks down:
We’ve all heard 2020—a grueling, endless year—described as a marathon. But that only sounds right if you’ve never run one.
This year has indeed felt like the longest of slogs, an endurance test notable mostly for its many varieties of exhaustion and pain. Pandemic and quarantines. Poisonous politics. Violence and rage. And on the West Coast, where I live in Oregon, real fires that fueled the societal ones. But that’s where the parallels end.
With a real marathon, runners know what we’re signing up for. We have months to get in shape. We can find training plans to follow, or even hire a coach. We are mostly in control of the situation, right up to race day—of the miles we log, the dinner we eat the night before, the number of gels we cram in our pockets at the start line.Unlike a real marathon, we weren’t ready in the slightest for what 2020 has brought.
For me, as someone who has run two marathons and was most of the way through training for a third before it was called off due to Covid, the most apt comparison is not the marathon itself, but to a very specific part of it.
Mile 23.
A marathon is 26.2 miles long, and for a slightly-above-average runner like me, the longest run you ever do in training is about 20 miles. Why? A marathon is hard, physically and mentally, and while you do a structured programme of runs to prepare to do it, you arrive on the start knowing that will be the first time you will try to run the full 26.2 miles.
I felt great for the first sixteen miles my first 26.2-miler, the 2018 Yorkshire Marathon. I was doing it! I was running a marathon! And then the rain got into its stride and I realised I had ten more miles to go, and by the time I hit mile 20, I was simultaneously bored and sore and incredulous--I had to keep going for 6 more miles? For real? (A note on being bored: the Yorkshire marathon course is mostly out in the countryside around York--you hit the Minster and the amazing high-fiving vicar within the first 5-10k, and then you are just plodding down flat country roads in rural Yorkshire. Which would be beautiful on a sunny day, but is less so in the rain.) By the time I got to Mile 23, I had reached a state of fatalism: I would be running down Yorkshire roads in the rain for the rest of time, and that was that.
Eventually, mile 23 turned into mile 24, and then seeing the mile 25
sign and hearing people start to yell about the nearness of the finish
line, I rediscovered some spring to my step, and realised that this was
going to end. I was going to make it. I finished in a time of 4:50:19.
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| The sun came out in the evening, long after the race was over. The nerve! |
My second marathon, Manchester 2019, was a bit different. For one thing, Manchester is a big-city marathon (about 16,000 runners versus the around 5,000 who run Yorkshire), and a substantial portion of the course runs through various boroughs of the city. For another, I started doing speedwork in my training, which helped me get faster and stronger. And finally, I knew that Mile 23 was coming.
And yet. Mile 23 still felt like it was in the middle of nowhere--physically, emotionally, geographically--and also like it was never going to end. A welcome note of absurdity in the endlessness of Mile 23 came when I passed a guy wearing a white rhino costume.
And despite my firm belief that I would be running down the back roads of Manchester for ever and ever, Mile 23 did give way to Mile 24, and then Mile 25. If there was a Mile 25 sign, I missed it, which did have a moment of sending me back to endless-running-land; the race organisers chose to replace it with an enormous television screen showing runners finishing the race, which felt like it was taunting me. But then I looked down at my watch and realised that I had a chance of beating what I thought was my sister's best marathon time, 4:19, and legged it to the finish line, for a 4:18:38 marathon.
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| Finished! |
As I've had friends celebrate the tremendous good news of promising vaccines, the end of the second UK lockdown, and even the possibility of a return to normal life, I've been alternately bored and sore and incredulous. We're at Mile 23, I shriek silently, we'll be running this thing forever. And for some people--those affected by unemployment, by domestic and racialized violence, by long Covid, by grief and loss--2020 has no end.
Unlike a marathon, those of us lucky enough to be still on our feet did not train for 2020, but I know I am not alone at Mile 23. May we all reach Mile 24, and Mile 25, and sprint towards the finish line as it comes into view.
In trying to remember where I discovered this poem, I think first of the Writer's Almanac. This was a short radio segment in which the American radio personality Garrison Keillor read a short poem and offered a brief overview 'on this day in history' centered on writers and literature. Keillor was accused of sexually harassing female coworkers 2017, and his shows disappeared from public radio. Further digging reveals that the Writer's Almanac featured numerous poems of Bishop's over the years, but never 'One Art', so I don't actually know where I first found it. High school, browsing one of the English classroom's Norton Anthologies, having finished my class reading? At university, somehow? I am not sure. It is a poem so much a part of me that I cannot remember when I did not know it. It has spoken to me at many different times in my life. As the UK enters its second lockdown, it seems worth revisiting once more.
The coming week is welcome week at my university, so everything is at sixes and sevens and so am I. Sending every good wish for the physical and mental health of anyone reading this who is also preparing to go back into the classroom or is already there. The UniCovid UK site is both terrifying and helpful reading, and that is all I want to say for now about coronavirus and universities.
Instead, I want to offer a piece of writing that I found helpful. In the May 2020 the Letters Page, one of my favourite periodicals, published a lockdown letter by the Canadian writer Aislinn Hunter. The following paragraphs profoundly spoke to me:
I worry about the usual things: my students, the economy, this awful and unsettling loneliness, the future. But I also worry about the potential for a gulf in understanding to take hold on the far side of this pandemic. It seems almost impossible to imagine what it’s like to wake up to the news that another, and then another, of your neighbours has died, to lose elder after elder in a community, to lose a family member who worked the front lines because that’s what they were trained to do. And I am a writer who spends significant amounts of time in the imagination… I’m someone who recently lost a husband of twenty-five years, though he died in my arms and it was only our world falling apart at the time, not everyone’s.
There’s a feeling you get sometimes walking through a city marked by tragedy – it’s a feeling I had standing in the cathedral in Coventry, in some of the German cities I travelled through last October, in Portbou in Northern Spain where my husband and I spent time after he’d gone though radiation and chemotherapy for his cancer. I worry those who have lost loved ones to Covid – who weren’t able to say good-bye, who live in villages and cities where relations and friends and neighbours were taken in large numbers – will end up standing on the other side of a veil from those who come out of this with a greater remove from the situation. I worry that we won’t be able to meet through language across the two sides of this divide. This is why I think stories and new forms of remembrance will become so important. To witness one event is no small matter but to witness something that sweeps over all of us in an uneven storm will require new forms of empathy; active listening.
Experiences across the pandemic have been so different. Members of senior leadership teams, programme leaders, catering staff, associate demonstrators, trainers at the university gym--even within groups of people who hold the same sort of job, let alone people who work for the same university but have different roles, there has been such an incredible variety of experiences. As the only non-European member of my team, having my entire family an ocean away, and following the coronavirus and other disasters in my home country, has been a different experience from everyone else's. Such differences have at times made me feel extremely alone. As Hunter says, even for someone whose work is literally exercising the imagination, the divide between communities which have been severely affected and communities which haven't is profound.
My own steps to acknowledge this divide have been small ones. Finding myself helplessly enraged whenever I received an email hoping that I had a nice or fun or relaxing summer ('I didn't, but I hope you did' doesn't feel very polite), I have tried to stop beginning emails with 'I hope this finds you well'. In normal times, this seems like an expression of good wishes--in pandemic times, I worry that this assumes the person I am addressing is fine, which is not a burden I want to put on them if they aren't. Instead I try to write things like, 'I hope this finds you and yours well and safe', or 'I hope you are hanging in there', or even 'How are you?' I've moved from closing my emails with 'sincerely' to 'take care'. Another small step that helps me is calling staying apart 'physical distancing' and not 'social distancing'. This reminds me that my social connections are taking some new forms for now, but they are still very much there.
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Colourful wildflowers growing at a local cemetery |
The sun is setting much earlier now, and I don't know what the next few months are going to be like. (Other than, of course, darker. November through February in the UK is a long dark teatime of the soul even in a good year.) One of the joys of taking regular walks through my neighbourhood has been paying attention to changes in the natural world--every few weeks I walk through a local cemetery to see what their wildflowers are doing lately.
It also helps to knit and watch a lot of science fiction & fantasy television. Which brings me to a cheerful place to end--I figured out my second sock.
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| Second sock success! |
Somehow, in a pattern which read:
Rounds 1, 3, 5, 6: knit
Rounds 2 & 4: Knit 2, Purl 2
I came up with:
Round 1: knit
Round 2: slip 1, purl 1
Part of what took me so long to work this out is I had utterly no memory of slipping stitches, let alone doing so for the entire leg of a sock.
Take care.
