Distributed participation (Running Viral Day 6)

This is the sixth day since Boris Johnson told everyone to self-isolate. It is only the second day after he shut down the pubs. Today, the forest was jam-packed with people.

Running with my beautiful red Leki poles, I completed a predict-a-time 10k run today following a predefined course I had mapped out on Garmin beforehand.  My predicted time was 1 hours and 6 minutes but I finished 10.35 km in 1 hour and 9 minutes instead.  It was pretty close I guess.

The drawing I produced is shown above, and I called it "The trees are eating people" for no particular reason other than it didn't really end up looking much like what I had intended: a bird and an oak leaf.  But that's the beauty of being able to name a route you've made: you can call it whatever you want.

This week, including the first six of the CoronaVirus lockdown, I covered over 82 miles at pretty much bang on 10 min/mile pace.  I'm happy with this, and a runner friend has assured me that high mileage at a managed pace can help ensure continued fitness and PB smashing once the races resume.

Today's even was interesting from an academic perspective, insofar as the whole predict-a-time thing can be seen as an example of 'distributed participation' with a-synchronous tallying of results over a defined distance, without defining either the route or starting times.  I would say it's an interesting experiment in mass participation and rule-following / transgression. By the latter, I mean all those people who decided to run together anyway.

I'm feeling more morally ambiguous about this today than I was before (see day 5 for my 'rant'). I mean, what's going on in the grocery stores (while still very civil) is probably more of a threat than a few people gathering out in the forest.

Here's a compilation of tracks for week 1:

UPHILL FLOW (Day 5 Running Viral)

Running Viral Day 5 (Uphill Flow)

I did two runs today on a beautiful spring day, just a day past equinox as it turns out. "Equinoxious" refers to my reaction in the forest at seeing MANY groups of people, not all of them families, walking together in close proximity.

I would be dishonest if I didn't say the thought hadn't crossed my own mind: what if a group of runners just showed up tomorrow and ran, and just happened to run the same route at the same time?  Problem is: 1. we'd get caught because many of us use Strava and 2. it's morally wrong at this point to do anything in a group on non-genetically-related (non-family) groupings.

So yes, I had judgemental thoughts as I ran past a group of seven middle-aged women conducting their fitbit weekend walk/social.  I do understand how important it is to continue to be vigilant about mental health, and for many that means doing walks or runs together in the great outdoors. What I don't understand is how people can justify it to themselves.

Maybe its just because we're one day in.  However, what I saw in the forest (the mayhem, in my mind) only bolsters my belief in natural spaces as haven for now nefarious activities, precisely because they are free from surveillance, from cameras, and from social media especially if you don't post.  

I mean I guess if you went for a naked run together you'd have a lot less chance of getting caught. But, 1. naked running is CRAZY and 2. see point above about it being morally repugnant to do large group (5 or more) activities in a time of CoronaVirus

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Now that I've gotten the moralising out of my system, today was a brilliant SOLO run day, and I completed two runs.  The first was a hill session. I did 5 reps of Surrey Hill in Swinley Forest, with my Leki carbon-fibre poles.  Like yesterday, the 10min/mile pace gave a beautiful flow and runner's high.

I had been reading Emilie Forsberg's book before I went out, and she talked about doing hill reps and a thing she calls 'Uphill Flow'. I definitely got this: a sense of flow and ease when going uphill.  

My second run was a Perec-style attempt to exhaust a space in Bracknell, and today I focused on Easthampstead Church, also doing some scribbles across an open space, and a few round/spiral bits, finishing with a champagne bottle around Mill Park.  

This week sees me having run over 70 miles so far and tomorrow is the big Predict-a-time 10k BFRs run, which I'm really looking forward to. I just have to figure out what kind of creative loop I'll do.  

A forest for the eyes (Day 4 running viral)

Running Viral Day 4

It was quiet out in the forest today, especially once you get far from Bracknell, but not too close to Bagshot. There's this sweet spot just far enough in that you don't see anyone else.  It's bliss. The weather was cool today, and it was actually sunny, such that in the sunshine you felt warm. 

The forest is, obviously, a place apart, a not-quite-wild space that is much more wild than a city park. There are areas that feel like pristine wilderness, and other areas that feel like industrial factories for wood-extraction.  

We can wander among all of it at will in Bracknell Forest, and my wandering takes the form of a low intensity run lately, training now for Race to the Stones 4-5 July 2020.  But what am I observing today about humanity that I hadn't seen before?

There are a lot of dogs, and a lot of families, and I think one thing the forest offers is a place away from other eyes, from television, from watching, from being watched.  I could think of a dystopian scenario in which the forest had eyes so that we could be under 24/7 surveillance but as far as I know there's no CCTV in Bracknell Forest. 

What about a dystopian fantasy where the forest comes alive and trees start eating people? Sentient plants has been done before. You could do much worse in these times than read Wyndham's Day of the Triffids or The Midwich Cuckoos.  

Overall I see people acting very rationally, in the sense that they are doing what they need to do to take care of themselves.  Gazes are occasionally, in glimpses, aggressive, a kind of 'keep back' glare that erupts now and then.  I've seen spats on the motorways, but then I've so those before too.

The driver of a car stopped me mid-run yesterday close to the Mill Pond McDonald's and asked me where all the shops were. I pointed vaguely and said you could only get there by walking (Wildridings Shops), which technically isn't true: it's just what I do.

Our gazes give a lot away, but we can also refine them by taking time to let things sink in. The hearing too gives way in a new found silence to contemplation. I see jumbo jets lazily turning in the sky because they have so much room to move now, and there's barely any sound of traffic, just the occasional Ambulance siren. 

Running Viral Day 3: Perec, Thoreau, and Rimbaud

This is my evolving map of Wildridings and I was struck yesterday, during Day 3 of my "tentative d’epuisement d’un lieu bracknellien" that the effect of the CoronaVirus on my running is a slowing of pace (because I have nothing to train for) and that slowing is also affecting my gaze.

I am able, also because my trajectory is twisty-turny due to the 'exhaustive'/comprehensive nature of the undertaking, to take in more visual data as I run past. I feel like I'm becoming a new Thoreau of the neighbourhood, able to document minutiae of the life around me in ever increasing detail.

Part of what is happening too is I'm becoming slightly deranged, as should be quite apparent from the various outlines I'm producing through my runs. If my spatial trajectory exhibits no rhyme nor reason, my sight is going in the opposite direction, becoming refined and filtered.

I'm noticing things nearby I had never noticed before, mostly buildings. Around Easthampstead Church is a residuum of various old buildings that have somehow survived the ravages of time, which feels like an ironic turn of phrase given that three days confinement is enough to turn me into a very oddly motivated individual indeed: channelling Perec, Thoreau, and Rimbaud all in the space of one run.

There are some beautiful old houses in this neighbourhood, "Wildridings", so named (again ironically I feel) for where they used to take the Queen after she couldn't ride anymore.  I imagine, in ye olde dayes, some attendant pushing Her Royal Majesty around in a wheelbarrow for kicks. 

And as I bimble around the boundary, as I have been tending to do before heading inwards to map, I am mentally cataloguing walkways upon which I've not yet tread.  The church itself is enticing, because I know that soon I'll map its cemetary and famous headstones. 

A note on method: The map follows roads and footpaths within the urban boundary, but I'm interspersing the urban with some forest runs for contrast.  Additionally, playing fields and open spaces are being filled in, spontaneously, with zigzag or cross-hatch patterns. 

It feels, today, even quieter out there. Today's run (each day I'm writing about the previous day's run) should see me into the forest again, hopefully, but I think it will be a short one.  A lot of people are heading to the forest as a natural place to self-isolate, alone or with family members.

And a whole lot of dogs. If there were a time to plan the dog-revolution, this would be it.

Running Viral Day 2, "Owlsmoor"

Running Viral Day 2

Yesterday I wrote on twitter, "Today, as an ultra-experiment in movement-through-landscape, I ran with my Salomon trail shoes in my Kalenji trail bag, and with Leki carbon-fibre poles. I switched shoes when entering the forest, and folded up the poles when leaving it." Here is the track I made during that experiment.



I've also been contemplating, quite seriously, Finn's new definition of ultra-running, posited on a recent podcast, an interview with Beth Pascall. In it, Finn says that to call the sport 'ultra-running' doesn't do justice to an essential aspect, that of movement. He then say we should really call ultra-running "ultra-moving-through-landscape" to take into account the other (often non- or para-running) aspects of what it means to successfully 
complete an 'ultra' race.


I was joking yesterday that given the above statement (again quoting from twitter), ""ultra-movement-through-landscape" comes from @adharanand latest podcast. To be fair, he should probably change the title of his book to "The Rise of the Ultra-Movers-Through-Landscape," a statement that got a 'like' from Finn himself!

In all seriousness, though, yesterday was Day 2 according to my own procedures (I'm writing this in Day 3 of my Running Viral experiment), and I added another layer to my Tentative d’epuisement d’un lieu bracknellien that forms the core methodology of Running Viral.

In short, I went running for three hours yesterday in Bracknell Forest, re-tracing an old club run from a couple of months ago, in which I had run with a group down to Owlsmoor. Instead of finishing the course (a pre-defined track that you follow using your Garmin watch), I deviated just before exiting the forest, and added on five miles following the Forest Five race route.

This made for the hybrid Strava track that you see as the first image of this post. The Leki poles I used checked out brilliantly, and I love running with poles. Running in my Salomon trail running shoes for that long (just the forest component) was possibly the biggest challenge, as the shoes tight fit meant extra foot soreness after 20+ km.

Today I will continue my attempt to exhaust the space of Bracknell by running through it, with a 10km recovery run.

"Darth Vader?" (Day 1)

Running Viral, Day 1

I don't know how long this will take, it might take months, just like the virus.

 Yesterday was the first day of what I'm calling my "Tentative d’epuisement d’un lieu bracknellien" in which I inadvertently drew "Darth Vader?" as a friend referred to it. I hadn't recognised the shape myself until he pointed it out.

The French phrase comes from a Georges Perec book usually translated as An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris and I've simply replaced Paris with Bracknell. But I've also replaced a static sense of place with movement through space in the form of running.

Actually I'm borrowing the concept more from Jeremy Wood's gpsdrawing.com idea in which you try to experience or move through every road and/or walking path in the city. At Warwick University campus Wood actually tried to avoid walking paths, and drew all kinds of shapes in the fields and open spaces of campus.

Perec, Wood, and other artists working with spatial media like GPS and exhaustive spatalities of writing are nicely compiled in O'Rourke's book Walking and Mapping: Artists as Cartographers.

More important than all of the above theoretical/background material is, however, the emotions that accompanied Day 1 of my project of a complete run-mapping of the spaces of Bracknell.  Let's just say it felt like a bit of a manic phase (where the day before had been the depressive).

Generating momentum through this project will be a way of transcending the binaries of up/down emotional swinging that the CoronaVirus is installing in many of us.  Of keeping up with the consistency of getting outside to run, no matter what pace.

It felt really good yesterday to simply go out knowing only that I'd start to 'map' Wildridings.

So I did: I went out. First I ran around the object named "Wildridings", outlining it as best I could. This already entailed a transgression, because I had to run alongside larger roads with no pavement/sidewalk.

The main transgression, though, had to do with simply being out.  The only other people I saw, aside from the occasional brief glimpse of a car-driver, were dog-walkers. I overheard snippets of conversation from small gatherings on the sidewalk, all revolving around the topic of how deserted-feeling the streets were.

Other than modulating my emotions, then, the purpose of this mapping project is to document the 'word on the street' as much and as fleetingly as possible. I'm promoting ephemerality here as a metaphor for how I want this thing to go: quickly and without much fuss.

It's a tall order, and likely a bit unsustainable, but I'm playing the long game here.

Running viral

Running has gone viral in the time of coronavirus. Everyone is talking about how to stay positive and about how running is the perfect antidote to a currently pessimistic global situation. By 'everyone' I mean that echo chamber of positivity to which I've anchored myself in the form of following social media accounts dedicated to running. Mostly these are people, I find, who have already been dealing with different forms of isolation such as having partners who work far away for long periods of time; stay-at-home parents; work-at-home academics; older runners; and a vast array of 'oddly motivated' individuals.

I am just such an oddball, and that is why I started this blog. So, I'm treating the outbreak as an opportunity, as a test of my resolve to never stop loving being outside, preferably at a sub-9 min/mile pace.

Forsberg's Sky Running book finally go me going on documenting a set of running observations throughout the period of 'lockdown' here in Britain.  I want to do at least one running blog entry per day to document how I dealt with the day's challenges:

Day 1
This is actually the combination of the blur of days leading up to last night's (Monday night) club run.  On Sunday I actually felt pretty depressed, despite the fact that I had had a brilliant club run from Bracknell's Lookout, doing a 9 min/mile pace with six or so other 'senior' (40+) runners. These guys are really inspiring and I get the feeling that every single one of them has a lifetime commitment to various arts of running: some a bit more 'ironman'/triathlon-focused; others perhaps a bit more 'ultra'; or just plain committed everyday runners.  Whatever the type, we the group was tight, and we managed a brilliant sunny forest run with some excellent hills (especially downhills!), technical tricky/twisty bits, and a lot of cameraderie.  The most useful of which was a detailed discussion of how to tackle my upcoming (July) Race to the Stones ultra.

Now that was just the backdrop to last night's run around the streets of Bracknell again, mostly men, but here we included a female runner, and one or two slightly younger males. You will often get this in the 'faster' groups (we were doing 8:30min/mile last night), but rarely in the fastest: a mix of male/female runners that offers a different conversational dynamic. Let's just say it's sometimes a bit less ego-y, not to mention that the pace is tends to be more even.  It makes for a really enjoyable experience.

I wouldn't say last night was THE breakthrough, but it was a start. As alluded to above, something made me get up this morning and start the Forsberg book, and that really got me into a positive headspace.

So, the other thing that is happening is not only am I renewing my daily commitments to running during the time of the virus, but I am also renewing my commitment to reading about positive experiences of running.  If you want something that is almost relentlessly negative and pessimistic to offer a counter-challenge to what I am saying here then read Mark Rowlands "Running with the Pack":

Rowland's book is excellent, but it is a downer (I'll not pull my punches), and in that it represents its own kind of challenge: how to be realistic, for example, about the ravages of age.  But by examining my preconceived notions of ageing, installed by mostly older white guys like Rowlands and Noakes, I am also able to overcome them.

Just look at all the over 50s continuing to break their PBs!  I did this just the other day at Wokingham, and plan to do so again very soon!

Another thing I found positive was that in Boris Johnson's speech last night, his revised advice included him urging people to go out and exercise because it is good for your immune system.  From what I've heard (about Spain for example) this is quite a contrast to how other countries are handling this, with even solitary runners being told to go home.

Let's hope it never comes to this here in the UK.  Yes, if I get sick I'll self-isolate.  Otherwise, I'll see you on the streets or in the forest (don't be offended if I run past or just wave!)