The Road (running viral day 16)

16 days in I ran to Warfield (Jeallott's Park), and found myself on a number of roads that in busier times would be either very unpleasant or impossible to run on.  These are the roads with no sidewalks, and with only soft shoulders upon which to run when traffic is passing by.

Today I just went straight down the middle of the road, for the most part.  Close to half of today's run was either on Rambler's Routes or trails, but to get there the connecting roads are those narrow country paved lanes.

I will find other ways to get there when the traffic gets heavy again.  What this time is allowing me to do is to explore in a more free way, and to make connections more creatively.  It's quite a time to be alive when you can experience a kind of science fictional outcome in real time.

I'm thinking a bit here of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, but of course things are not nearly that bad.  We have food, and the current lack of armed bandits on the roads is quite nice.  I can relate to a recent story about how wildlife is making a comeback, how animals are poking their heads out again now that things have quietened down.

I feel like I'm poking my own head out of my hole and having a look around. The silence at times is stunning.

Hatred of runners (running viral day 15)

The above image is my updated map which now includes today's run (Monk's Alley, 11.5 miles) and one that was mistakenly left off yesterday's cumulative map (Gorrick Wood aka Cosy Catastrophe).  The total after today is at least 150 miles, and it is day 15.

The subject I wanted to get off my chest today is related to hearing extremely anecdotal reports that runners are being shunned on the streets. This is being done in two ways. The first is the reactions of other pedestrians on the sidewalks, who will make exaggerated efforts to avoid us, the perception being that we are breathing heavily and are therefore putting others at more risk.

The second is that there is now the idea out there that you should only run for one hour maximum.  In the Guardian this morning it was reported that the one hour rule (which is arbitrary and erroneous) has been imposed in some places by the police, and that such impositions are now being addressed by newly drafted guidelines designed to counter potential heavy-handedness by the police.

In response to the heavy breathing charge, I would counter that it is mostly new runners, of which there are very many now that it is one of our only means of getting outside (that or walking), who are doing the heavy breathing.

Someone who has run a lot prior to the lockdown will have an elevated VO2 max level and will therefore be an efficient oxygen-utiliser, from which it follows that their breathing will actually be quite controlled and moderate. 

But even so, the charge against new runners should not be allowed to stand. Is it really heavy breathing that is spreading CoronaVirus? Perhaps it is a lack of government testing, and an inability to leverage mobile technologies to the extent that China, Taiwan, and Singapore are able to do so, that is the real problem. 

We shouldn't take out frustrations at our own shortcomings on those who are in fact strengthening the response to the virus by taking care of themselves, running on their own, getting stronger and therefore more able to resist the illness (and to free up ventilators) on an individual level.

The police heavy-handedness allegation (if true) is more troubling, and could again be seen as an authoritarian over-reaction to perceived shortcomings.  Again, this could be related to failure of the powers that be to (through technology) implement surveillance of the population, and thus (had we the means and the will) to be able to target areas in which KNOWN (through maps of precise points of transmission obtained through mobile phones for example) contact of infected individuals has occurred.

We simply don't have this knowledge, and we don't have competent testing either, but society wants to get the curve go down, and they look to the police.  The police then try to find ways to curb excessive behaviour and they implement arbitrary rules in lieu of actual evidence-based action.

It is an understandable reaction based both on fear (pedestrians) and on ignorance and/or the futility of using the limited set of tools at the West's disposal.  I would counter that individuals need to internalise the technologies of the self, to discipline themselves and in doing so to strengthen, from the bottom up, the societal response.

We do have some technology, and we know for example that governments will use the Investigatory Powers Act to harvest metadata and create some of the maps needed to produce a targeted response. They will keep this activity secret for fear of upsetting civil liberties activists.  This response is doomed to seem authoritarian and secretive.

Individuals have technologies like their mobile phones and their Garmin watches. I can track my resting heart rate and from that gain a slight jump on potential infection by noting when my heart rate becomes elevated.  By self-tracking our own health statistics I would say runners are ahead of the curve and are an asset in times like these.

140 miles of madness (days 13 and 14 running viral)

Today I'm not running. But I did run yesterday and I haven't posted that yet.  I've included it in this cumulative traces map that includes over 140 miles of running over the first 14 days:

I've run Owlsmoor twice but otherwise there are only a few repetitions, mostly to do with getting to the start and end points of my near-daily viral runs.

Saturday was a bit of a crisis day for me and I was feeling a bit depressed. But it did result in one of my more creative efforts (if I do say so myself: see day 12).

What I realised through my crisis is that 1. having a bit of a downer day need not stop one from running (nor from posting) and that 2. it's good to get those down days out of the way and out of your system because they're going to happen.

Now my post from last time was a kind of free-association list related to the various 'oddly motivated' methods that I'm trying out, and it included references going back to the 1850s; cinematic and science fictional references; literary mentions; and completely subjective terminology that I'd just made up.

I'm quite happy with my little list (say hello to my little friend, the list!), but I'm sorry if my (<3) readers felt a bit short changed.

3. I realised that part of my task here is to attempt to exhaust not only the actual physical space of Bracknell, but also to exhaust the conceptual space of various methods related to being an Artist-as-Cartographer.  4. I realised it's also exhausting.

So what I did today was give myself a rest day (from running), and I did a workout instead, one the Shona Vertue Method Advanced workouts. Here's what I did:

15 Kettlebell Goblet Pause Squat x 3
10 Close Grip Push-up x 3
15 Bent Arm Reverse Kettlebell Lunge x 3
15 Lunge Stance Single Arm Row x 3

15 Kettlebell Single Leg Glute Bridge x 3
15 Side Lying Hip Raise x 3

15 Reverse Crunch x 3
15 Kettlebell Crunch x 3
15 Table Top Rocks x 3

20 Mountain Climbers (diagonal)
20 Bicycle Crunches

Roadside Picnic (running viral day 12)

Psychogeography
Psychojography
Oulipian spatial constraint
Systematic wandering
Flaneurie
Loitering-in-motion
GPS drawing
Perec
Debord
The Strugatskys
Dr Faustroll
Surrealist automatism
Dr John Snow
Shoeleather memeticism
Counter-mapping
Will Self

Trail running (running viral day 11)

Today's run didn't feel sluggish. It wasn't fast though. Any time I surged to below 9 min/mile I have to say it felt quite fast.  Overall this lockdown has made me take my time getting around the various courses and meanderings I'm constraining myself to make.

Today's run was a re-run of one I did last year on the 19th of May. That earlier run had been either my second or third with the Sunday/Lookout BFRs group, led by a native of Bracknell, a somewhat older runner with detailed knowledge of the interior of Swinley/Bracknell forest.

It is this 'local knowledge' aspect of the Sunday runs that attracted me. But with this said, there is an equal aspect of the local in the Monday night runs as well, the ones that stick for the most part to town and pavement. 

It is probably the fact that trail running is something special, and that my experiences in the forests here (as opposed to say, in Canada, or in Egham) have been instrumental in cementing my devotion to running on dirt, tracks, undulating paths, and the like.

Today's run was classic trail material, and it was only the second time I had completed this course.  My plan for the summer is to take a number of routes I've saved, especially those from the earlier days of just starting out with the BFRs, and re-run them until I can do them from memory.

I've already accomplished this with the 5km handicap and 5 mile Forest Five race routes. Once I've memorised all those great runs I've completed with the old timers over the last year, I'll have a pretty solid working memory of the forest as a whole.

That's a map worth putting in the miles for.

Moose? / secret infinity (day 10 running viral)

Today I unintentionally drew a moose (see below).

I mean, it's only the tenth day of my attempt to exhaust the space of Bracknell using a method of psycho-jography (I've just added this to my growing list of methods on whim). But it's just that it's whimsical, and it requires a faith in one's own creativity akin to turning off that negative voice that you get while writing.

It's that voice that says, "what I'm drawing/writing is no good, you might as well stop, just give up." I didn't, I just kept running. I wish I was as good at writing creatively as I am at running creatively though.

Anyway, I did not know I was drawing a moose until my run had loaded onto Strava. What I did set out to do was 1. enter phase 2 of my 'tentative d’epuisement d’un lieu bracknellien' (attempt to exhaust the space of Bracknell) and 2. draw a pair of circles. 

Actually if you look closely at the image, there's a secret infinity sign hidden in there too...

A cosy catastrophe (running viral day 9)

Day 9 took me to Ascot, on one of the nicest days of the year so far. Spring is launching into full flower and running is budding apace.  Again, I see so many runners out in these days of the Cosy Catastrophe.

Today I thought a bit about running and thinking. In order to make that easier, to let my mapping brain switch over to more fluid phenomenological, philosophical cogitation, I programmed my watch using Strava's heat map function to 'lock' my route onto the most used paths between here and Ascot.

With my route pre-determined, and my watch designed to run me through it step by step, I could think more easily.  I was observing too as I went, and noticed a lot of people, especially on Ascot's racecourse itself.

Now, as to thinking. When I'm running faster my mind tends to clear, and the only thought that might intrude will be a strong visual image of my finishing pace/emotion.  Slower, I can think thoughts more academic, blurry, and philosophical.

A lot of those thoughts revolve around hard problems I'm trying to solve at work, and right now that means "the role of the map and the cartographic appendix in speculative fictions, both diegetic, and paratextual."  And then I start thinking about how to break down the metadata of Dune,  the anthropology and remote sensing of Helliconia, and the like.

Actually, just as there is a link between Running and Philosophy, there is also a link between Science Fiction and Philosophy.  Both produce a kind of 'cognitive estrangement' that I've talked about before on this blog.

Now more than ever however this estrangement is literally true.  We are running, after all, in a time of CoronaVirus, a global pandemic the likes of which just a few weeks ago would have been in the realm to the strictly fictional. Think The Stand, The Wanderers, elements of The Handmaid's Tale, The Day of the Triffids, and other titles by John Wyndham.

It is a Cosy Catastrophe indeed. We are all comfortably jogging, drinking tea, gardening in our allotments, thinking we are exceptional to be weathering things so well.  Until we're not.