Performative running (running viral day 25)

There's a heightened sense of self-awareness and reflection to my running these days. In part because I'm being quite constrained as to where I go, which requires planning, but also because I'm sometimes transgressing the established rules of order in the lengths to which I'll go to both complete my drawing and maintain social isolation while out and about. For example, I was running down the median of a major four-lane divided A-road (highway) with traffic rushing past, and one of the vehicles that went past was a police car. I felt like I was doing something wrong and, technically, I probably was. At the same time there was all kinds of foot traffic on the pavements (sidewalks) that because of where I was, was well away from me.

Even just walking around is becoming something of a performance. We perform distance now, some even look away, avert their gazes and, by proxy, their breath-trajectories.  Actually, it's worse to be behind someone in motion because as they breathe, that breath trails back and swirls around mixing into the air that the person behind is inhaling.

But besides this, and like writing itself, running is a performance, and the act of producing a GPS drawing, or of participating in what I like to call a 'distributed participation' running event like a predict-a-time distance run, or a landmark-selfie project, or any other kind of event that can be run not at the same time, but re-synchronised using an app like Strava, is a performance.

Running has always been 'performative', to use the academic word that is not quite equivalent to the idea of performance.  Performative is quite closely related to the bodily (as opposed to the inscribed) aspect of the bundle of physical, cognitive, social, and technological apparatuses that form an assemblage for the production of this thing we call 'running.'  It's not just you and your watch, with the satellites watching you. It is that and much more: it is the unfolding of the event that is called the run, and the historical development that leads towards each and every instantiation of the run; and then the combination thereof across time, culture, and the evolution of the technologies (as activities of cultures situated in particular places) that arise therefrom.

This is what makes my analysis dialectical: the critical spatiotemporal unfolding that makes its way through, and that feeds upon, various contradictions, paradoxes, and their eventual (evental) resolution in the performance of the run itself.  Which, for today, is a 'string of beads' (see the opening figure above).