Toward the end of February, as what is now a crisis of uncertain but still-growing magnitude was still at worst an abstraction for most of us in these gloriously United States (remember these races?), I was doing a twilight 30-minute run and thinking about some ancient interview with a runner-on-the-street type in the wake of the Boston Marathon, probably on WBZ out of Boston in the 1990s. I don't know why my memory apparatus seized on this nugget, but in it, the ebullient, endorphin-powered subject was going on about how running is different from other sports because the pros line up with the rabble and so everyone is literally racing them, sort of. This is a common and longstanding observation, pre-dating the "second running boom" of the early 1990s characterized in large part by the emergence of intentional walk breaks in marathons.
This here patch of a newly nebulous world
This here patch of a newly nebulous world
This here patch of a newly nebulous world
Toward the end of February, as what is now a crisis of uncertain but still-growing magnitude was still at worst an abstraction for most of us in these gloriously United States (remember these races?), I was doing a twilight 30-minute run and thinking about some ancient interview with a runner-on-the-street type in the wake of the Boston Marathon, probably on WBZ out of Boston in the 1990s. I don't know why my memory apparatus seized on this nugget, but in it, the ebullient, endorphin-powered subject was going on about how running is different from other sports because the pros line up with the rabble and so everyone is literally racing them, sort of. This is a common and longstanding observation, pre-dating the "second running boom" of the early 1990s characterized in large part by the emergence of intentional walk breaks in marathons.