The Most Insufferable Strava Caption You've Ever Read
wanna hear about my run??!?
I often wonder what it is about running, pounding my feet on sidewalk pavement1 for 2, 3, 4 hours at a time that is so necessary for me. It hurts. It’s exhausting. I’m not even fast. I’ve broken my femur and my ankle, and cried like a baby massaging out shin splints and IT band syndrome. I’ve lost toenails and chafed until I bled. Plus, the pilates girls on Instagram said it’s ruining my metabolism.
I step away sometimes. Such breaks were once forcibly imposed upon me (a fractured hip will do that), punishment by restriction for misusing my body. These days, armed with a little more maturity and respect for my body, I tend to write something like “maybe running isn’t for me anymore” in my journal every few months, and go to yoga for a while.
But I always come back. Even when I’ve lost fitness, my body falls back into running’s rhythm like coming home on a school holiday—a little jet-lag doesn’t change the fact that I’m home.
Insatiably introspective, I’ve run a few experiments on myself in attempt to discern the roots of my affinity for distance running. I was afraid perhaps I only ran out of enslavement to the pedometer on my Garmin, addicted to Strava kudos on long runs from my stupid crushes.2 But the results are in: even when my watch is broken, when I’ve deleted Strava from my phone, and no one around me knows how long a marathon is, I still run. When I have no race to train for, no running club to hold me accountable, I still run.
People always ask me about runner’s high, and I feel like a fraud because I don’t have an answer. No, it doesn’t feel like smoking a joint, or hypnotherapy, or the fourth glass of Prosecco at a dinner party. I don’t feel like a celestial ball of light bouncing through a wildflower meadow. But it feels good? they ask. N-not necessarily, I reply. But you like it? they ask. Oh yes, I say breathlessly. I offer a feeble laugh, sheepish at my inability to express myself with nonchalance. I receive a pursed-lip smile in return, their raised eyebrows acknowledging how odd it is of me to try and gatekeep the most basic sport. We part ways in our misunderstanding—and yikes, that was not my best work.
In her piece comparing running to hypnosis, Lydia Keating suggests that the “repetition of sameness [in distance running] is a mechanism of radical change.” Like Lydia, I find running to be a sort of hypnosis, an out of body experience. It’s a welcome condition, to leave the body and its myriad of imperfections behind for a little. At some point amid hours of feet pounding pavement, when my skin is raw and wind-burnt, covered in crystallized salt, the earthly, physical pain begins to dissipate. And at some point, incessant worries about grad school and every awkward conversation I’ve ever had (see above), dissolve into the sound of 2010’s pop songs I pretend not to know every word to. Perhaps this is runners’ high—the ability to escape the flaws I pick apart in the mirror, the cruel games my mind can play.
When eventually I come back into my imperfect body and rushing mind, I’m a little different. I am less attached to their whims. It’s a secret I’ve been let in on: that there is something much more powerful than what I see when I brush my teeth before work, running through my to-do list and wishing away pimples. My sore legs and pink cheeks remind me how little I understand about how the universe works, and how wonderful that is.
Today I ran 23 kilometers. I didn’t have a watch (lost the charger), and I’m not training for anything. I didn’t have a distance or time goal. I only craved this dissociative hypnosis, this corporeal reminder of my smallness in the matrix as I ate Jelly Babies3, listening to Zara Larsson and the Chainsmokers. My $10 Amazon sunglasses broke, just like my mother said they would, so I borrowed my little cousin’s kid-sized unicorn sunglasses. Guys in $300 Oakleys complimented me. I thought about writing this piece. I determined that, because I never bought a $100 Salomon running vest like everyone seems to have, I owe myself 15 almond milk iced flat whites. My Jelly Babies were delicious and I pitied the girl choking down a banana-flavor Gu. I could have gone forever, but I had to get to my last freebie yoga class at 4:45 in Chelsea. I spent £10 on a mediocre smoothie and got another compliment on the sunglasses. I love living on Earth. I love mediocre smoothies and having legs that go and go and go even if they don’t have a thigh gap; I love wearing unicorn sunglasses just because I can.
Whatever it is, I hope you, too, have something in your life that makes you forget to check your phone, that reminds you how silly we are to worry about pimples and thigh gaps and Excel spreadsheets. That our little insecurities and to-do lists are specks of dust in the matrix of the universe4. How little control we have, and what a beautiful thing that is.
Lately:
I’m wrapping up my time in London after almost seven wonderful weeks here with my cousins. How time flies! I’m so lucky to have such loving family who let me be a part of their life here in Wimbledon this spring. <3 The weather hasn’t even been that bad. Next stop: New York!
Listening: My wonderful friends’ voice notes. Too much has been said against voice notes, and not enough in their defense. I love when you send me your most rambly tales of your trials and tribulations, when you pause for 45 seconds to find your keys, when you lose your train of thought and don’t remember what you were trying to say. I savor every minute of your 18-minute voice notes. I listen to them on walks and while I’m cooking and I miss you. I will chose a little window into your far-away life over an advertisement-ridden wellness podcast—every single time.
Also, having inexplicable Lorde cravings, possibly because of her Coachella appearance, or possibly because I am healing my inner child.
Eats:
& this is the the best wrap I have ever made (I wrote a recipe!).
Reads: (*important*)
Excerpt from the Ezra Klein show:
“The emergency is here.
The crisis is now. It is not six months away. It is not another Supreme Court ruling away from happening. It’s happening now.
Perhaps not to you, not yet. But to others. Real people. We know their names. We know their stories.
The president of the United States is disappearing5 people to a Salvadoran prison for terrorists. A prison known by its initials — CECOT. A prison built for disappearance. A prison where there is no education or remediation or recreation, because it is a prison that does not intend to release its inhabitants back out into the world. It is a prison where the only way out, in the words of El Salvador’s so-called justice minister, is a coffin.”
And on the same note: Please read this (it’s short!) for a refresher on democracy: “What does my detention by ICE say about America?” I linked the WP article, and below is a PDF, if that is easier to access. A letter from Mahmoud Khalil at his ICE detention center. These are the sorts of pieces our kids will write essays about for their history classes one day, so you might as well read it today and have something to say to them.
This essay by a college professor about what it’s like to teach us monsters is a rather uncomfortable—and poignant—read.
I’m also still reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead. I love her writing. I really liked this piece I want to do everything, so I do nothing, which may also resonate for you if you too are in your 20’s :-) .
Alrighty my dear friends. As always, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for listening to me talk about running (and every thing else). I love you sooo much! Send me a voice note ;-) I am so excited I get to see so many of you in real life next month!
Love, Ale <333333333
I am a Shove-On-Still-Tied-Shoes runner, not a Drive-To-Beautiful-Trailhead-At-Sunrise runner. Well also, I cant drive, lol.
Strava always offers fantastic content for the plot. Also, I wrote more about my thoughts on internet branding & consumption logs like Strava in my last newsletter ICYMI.
Elite British gummy candy
This concept is really fascinating to me because it’s at the core of most religions and ancient philosophies: The idea that we connect to God, whatever that means to you, when we are less attached to the impermanence of sensations in the physical world. In yoga, you say yogas chitta vritti nirodha, which means that we find Union when we quiet the fluctuations of the mind.
Seeing the term “disappear” used in this way gives me chills. Growing up, my mom used it exclusively when referring to her life under Noriega, Panama’s dictator in the 80’s—friends who’s parents were “disappeared.” I heard it in Dominican history classes in Santo Domingo in reference to Trujillo, read it in books set in Pinochet’s Chile.
simply magical, yet again! it's always so fun to find someone that when their writing drops, I too drop everything to read it. didn't realize that one could write so poignantly about running, but this was full of banger quotes and makes me want to tie my shoes and hit the trails :)
new lorde song this friday!