It’s been said that as you approach the end of something you think about the beginning. I have found that to be true! More and more, toward the conclusion of my time at the Bulwark, I found myself returning to the start and what it was like: the Berman office, the WordPress, Charlie, the Pandemic, the Thursday night livestreams, the early triumphs and unavoidable fuck-ups (a little like learning to dance and stepping on your partner’s toes), figuring it out as we went. It was fraught and tenuous. It was only supposed to be a six-week thing while we all got back on our feet following the shuttering of the Weekly Standard. But I believed in JVL and Bill, I believed in Adam, Jim, and Ben. Hell, I’d follow Mona into war. There were no promises at the start, we, or I, at least, were in it for the love of the game (and the crushing weight of student loan debt).

There was something cool about it at the beginning. It was different and new and I got to make it shiny. We were pirates, dissidents, rebels with a cause. It took a lot of personal and professional risk1 to bring it into being and to get it to solidify into something real. Things change, slowly, then all at once.

And change they do! As a subscriber to the Churchill school of thought that “to improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often,” I hope a lot more changes for them.

One manifestation of this philosophical bent is that I love time loop movies. The concept of repetition in general, really, is an area of personal interest. Samsara, tessellations, anniversaries, echoes, fractals, doppelgangers, mirrors, metronomes, déjà vu, bivalves, diacope, habits, rituals, all that good stuff. I cry every time I watch Groundhog Day. But the most fun take on trope, by far, is Andy Samberg’s 2020 “Palm Springs.”2

To spoil it, Samberg’s character Nyles, while attending a wedding in the desert, stumbles into a cave with a mysterious portal that traps him in a time loop. Two more guests from the wedding unwittingly join him in journeying through the cave portal, hijinks ensue. One of the other trapped guests is played by JK Simmons, who delivers a poignant soliloquy after making peace with their circumstance:

In many ways, the Bulwark was my Irvine3. I knew its rhythms and routines. It gave me a clear sense of aligned purpose. I could have stayed forever. Wanted to, in fact. It would have been really cool to design plaques or mementos, another watch, at 10 years. But nothing gold can stay.

As a swan song, I illustrated the masthead and drew each of my colleagues.

I had never used Procreate before, but was a simple process. I brought all the source photos into separate files and traced them layer by layer, outlining features, filling with washes of color, minimal detail work for the sake of time. I was surprised to find that despite having taken almost all of the source photos myself and having worked with many of them for a good decade, that I had not truly looked at their faces, that I did not really know them. I was struck by the odd intimacy of it, physically tracing them revealed not just their present visage but through the reduction to line each face was distilled to their essential form as if untouched by time and I was suddenly able to conjure what they must have looked like in youth. I felt like I was pantomiming Raymond Carver’s ‘Cathedrals’ short story, somehow simultaneously both the unhappy narrator and the blind man. “My eyes were still closed. I was in my house. I knew that. But I didn’t feel like I was inside anything.” I felt a swell of tenderness with each portrait, for each person, an overwhelming sense of gratitude and camaraderie that we had all made something together and that there was something meaningful in documenting it and making it a little more beautiful. I am less sure of that now, and harbor a quiet reflexive self-disgust at my collapse into sentimentality. Carver’s narrator walks away from the story with a new understanding and profound sense of connection. When I was done with the illustrations and after I presented them to the team, I was left with the opposite feelings, slightly disoriented and estranged.

When we launched the Bulwark, I was 25. I’m now 33. During those 8 years I escaped from an abusive relationship, changed my voter registration, adopted a dog, ran several ultramarathons (and the Boston marathon!), quit the bleach and grew my hair out, moved back in with my grandparents, published 20 poems, photographed more than 100 weddings and engagements, fell in love, eloped and got married, had to put down the dog, moved a couple more times, and went back to grad school. In my last year at the Bulwark I had multiple miscarriages. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about Thoreau and the cost of anything being the amount of life you exchange for it.

In Palm Springs, they get out of the time loop by sacrificing a goat. A little on the nose, biblically speaking. Then they blow themselves up at the threshold of altered time. It takes what it takes.

I made a few final contributions before leaving. The JVL has a posse stickers were a fitting end. The original Andre the Giant designs that inspired the stickers were created by a RISD student. I am also a RISD student! Look at that repetition, look at God. I wanted to make mic flags for all the show hosts but ran out of time and was only able to get one for Tim produced. Cookies for the office.

I used to not particularly like the ending of Palm Springs. We see Nyles and Sarah, the other character who was trapped in the loop, floating in a stranger’s pool, sipping beers, laughing. It seemed like a less funny version of the end scene in Finding Nemo where we see the fish from the dentist’s office tank finally made it to the ocean, bobbing in plastic baggies saying “Now what?” But that really is exactly what it’s like. I started a new job and very much feel like I am floating in a stranger’s pool while vaguely intoxicated by delight in the limbo of adjustment.

xo- Hannah

When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world. ― John Muir

The problems started almost immediately. The logistics seemed snake-bit. Once we arrived in Chamonix, my husband turned to me and asked why we hadn’t just flown into Geneva, an hour’s car ride away, instead of the 19-hour multi-leg plane-train-automobile trek we had made from JFK to Paris to Marseille to the mountains1. We had reasoned it made sense to travel with the rest of the team from the finish line to the start line so we could get a sense of the course. In theory, this sounded like a good idea. In practice, we were all half-asleep with jet lag and started the drive so late it was too dark to see much of anything on the course. We arrived in Chamonix in the dead of night, almost exactly 24 hours before we would congregate for the start of a 290-mile race with over 6,000 ft of elevation.

With our one day under Mont Blanc, we went to the safety briefing, the grocery, the UTMB start line, and a few good restaurants. We were more naive than we should have been. The returning Feral Angels were still riding the high of having won the women’s field at LALV. Our team was very fast, and we knew we would be racing competitively. We were on the same page going in: Dogfight to the finish. But, in the fray of things, the plan for getting out of Chamonix was left for the morning as a game-time decision. This proved to be treacherous. We got lost almost immediately, sending some of our strongest legs up masochistic inclines for nothing. We fought to get back on track, regained our footing in the midst of the pack, then pushed through the day trying to make up ground on the frontrunners.

The fighting and snide comments started almost immediately as well. “Do you even know how to navigate?” One of our runners asked me after finishing a grueling trail segment in the pitch black that I had sent him on after taking the map to get us back on track2. Gabe, our driver, was a saint, and on the receiving end of most of the blowback from our combined exhaustion, nerves, and growing distrust of each other. Rory, our team's multi-media producer, held it down and tried his best to keep us on track as emotions flared. We were unfair to each other.

The sun came up and went down and we ran. It was more difficult than expected. The alpine air was thin and cold, and burned our lungs, or mine at least3. Any time we started to find a rhythm as a team, it seemed like we would get lost again. The guide to the course was frustrating, sending runners through confusing sections of terrain in the dark that required professional technical ability. “If I’m on my hands and knees having to climb, I don’t think you can call that running,” said another of our runners after a trail section that luckily we reached after we had regained contact with the rest of the teams, so they didn’t have to navigate it alone. I honestly don’t think even if we had made a concerted effort to go over the maps more carefully beforehand if it would have made any difference given how the dark changes things.

We ran and slept in shifts, with three of us in the back row seats of the van while the pod running rotated out from the front row. When moods were high, it felt like being kids at summer camp, getting away with something. We were explorers, flying on our feet. But as night fell and energy lagged, it began to feel tight and suffocating. It didn’t help that as we approached halfway, reports started to pour in on the WhatsApp group that the French police were onto us and stopping teams they caught on the road (one of our runners was eventually stopped and questioned but released without incident). This set everyone on edge and became a constant source of anxiety, humming in the background like radio static.

We thought we knew what we were signing up for. Almost all of us had some kind of ultra-running or ultra-relay experience. And five of the eight of us had just raced the Southbound 400 together, which had been hard, but the team had had a reasonably good time and solid camaraderie. This wasn’t our first rodeo. But TSP is a different animal.

With a race like TSP, there are constant warnings and reiterations of the fact that the weakest point on any team comes down to each individual runner. In our pre-race meetings, long before we got to France, we reminded each other and ourselves that it would get tough and hard, and to be gracious to each other when that point came. But this was the first time that point really made itself known, to me at least. Of the multiple ultras I’ve done, this is the only one where communication fundamentally broke down to the point that the team dynamics were shot to hell, and we were hurting more than helping each other. You don’t know how you’ll react until you get there. I did not react well, and I’ll own that4. You never know what someone else might be going through and what a race can bring to the surface.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the relationship between speed and intensity—how a car going 25mph getting in an accident, not usually a biggie, but a car going 100mph getting in an accident? Different story. Any issue, no matter how small, is going to be magnified when under pressure for 500km. The harder and faster you’re going, the more it will hurt if things go awry. If there is one thing the Speed Project can guarantee, it is that things will go awry. It’s still worth it. No coal, no diamonds.

Ultimately, we made it to Marseille safely. As a team, we even added the SECRETS side-quest, an extra eight-mile summit excursion with 1,600 ft of elevation, at the last minute when we could have just headed for the finish. It was the most beautiful race I’ve ever run, even if it was the most difficult, or maybe because it was the most difficult. I do think it’s a testament to the character of our team that even with everything that went wrong, we pulled together at the end to get to the finish line. I’m pretty sure we all ended up running over 50 miles each.

For a while, I felt sick with guilt and shame over this race. That I had failed morally as a human being for not being better in the face of adversity. I fixated on it and what I could have done differently. I didn’t want to write about it because it felt like airing dirty laundry (and who would want to admit they failed?).

But then I listened to the MakeRunning podcast recapping other teams’ TSP experiences. I was blown away by Matt Wiersum’s interview, hearing that even the best and most seasoned teams fall prey to the exact same dynamic challenges we had faced. To her credit, this was the most intense and fastest team our captain, Nikki, had recruited and pulled together yet (she went on to bring together an even stronger team for LALV SECRETS ’25 that was absolutely killer; she is an incredibly savvy organizer and leader when it comes to bringing people together). It was awe-inspiring to see how hard these runners could go. OF COURSE, everyone is going to be high-strung and run a little hot in the thick of competition.

Learning that we were not the only team to deal with this type of fallout and dysfunction was an immense relief. That’s not to excuse the problems, but it softened the edges a bit. It felt like a failure, but it wasn’t fatal. Or anomalous to the project as a whole. The most important gear you can bring is gratitude and relentless positivity—pretty much nothing else matters if you can stay aligned on those fronts5.

Having a year of perspective and a few more long-distance solo races under my belt helps as well. Some races ask questions, and some races answer. I do think it’s true you learn more from your defeats than your victories. I wish I had gotten back to running sooner rather than dwelling in the sense of defeat following Chamonix. Running alone can be redemptive, but doing so in community is even better.

I had originally planned to try and redeem this race by taking it on solo, and it was among the many applications I sent out into the universe last spring. I ended up getting into grad school, which I start next week, so the timing didn’t quite work out, unfortunately. But as always, it was better next year.

Links!

If you are in LA, run with Nikki! Check out her class at the Nike Running Studio in Santa Monica. She’ll make you a faster runner and a better person.

Watch Rory’s film of our time in France:

“In 2024 the electrolyte drink market was valued around $38 billion.” According to the NYT, which asks if you even need them to begin with.

Several people also sent me the NYT reporting on runners being more likely to have colon cancer, to which I turn to Alex Hutichinson to make sense of it all: “At this point, it’s simply not possible to say with any confidence whether the new results signal a genuine danger, whether they’re a statistical fluke, or whether there’s another explanation.”

H/t to for this one: A female Scottish ultra runner finished a 100-mile race so far ahead of the next competitor that she was home before he arrived at the finish line.

Untitled Thought Project

Are You Still Distracted?

This is the second part of notes from a lecture I gave the day before election day 2024 at Washington University in St. Louis. (The first part is here.) There are technically third and fourth parts of these notes, but I’m not going to post everything because some of it points toward a different talk or essay…

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a year ago · 20 likes · Catherine Lacey

Vik's Busy Corner

What Does Post Wellness Look Like?

For the first time in ten years, I started asking myself: should I get really into sports? Part of me is looking for attention — imagine pulling off a Chalamet-esque versatile culture aficionado? What a sick party trick. But mostly, like many others, I’m loosing the sense of belonging and curiosity I once found in wellness. What was once treated as a qu…

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10 months ago · 12 likes · 3 comments · Viktoriia Vasileva

The 2025 Barkley Marathons ended with no finishers. After a historic race last year with five finishers and the first woman to ever complete all five loops of the course, it came as no surprise, that this year, race founder and director Gary Cantrell, popularly known as Lazurus “Laz” Lake, and his successor Carl Laniak, endeavored to sharpen the teeth of the course and give it even more bite. Of the 40 runners who started the race, only 10 completed the first lap.

“This is old-school Barkley,” Keith Dunn, the race’s unofficial-official stenographer, reported on social media as runners returned from the first loop and dropped from the race. Only John Kelly, Barkley legend and three-time finisher, completed the “Fun Run” —three full loops of the course within the allotted time. “To say the course won this year is an understatement,” Laz writes in his after-action report.

This year was a return to form for the race: it is often called a crucible and the very definition of Type 3 fun. I could go on without end about the mystique and gnarled majesty of the Barkleys, but for now, I want to focus on Laz, the mastermind behind it all. He’s not just the founder of Barkleys, he also invented and pioneered the increasingly popular Backyard Ultra format. And then there is a third course he has charted, a personal jewel in his own Triple Crown1 ultradistance events: LAZCON.

At 69 years old, around this time last year, Laz set out to walk across America from Delaware to San Francisco.

Laz’s biographer and ultrarunning reporter, Jared Beasley, live-tweeted the experience and I saw his updates right as they were leaving Washington D.C.. I reached out and asked if I could tag along and photograph them. They agreed, and soon enough I was driving out to find them on the W&OD Trail in northern Virginia.

When I first meet Laz, he is flanked by Jared and Michael “Gagz” Gagliardi, an ultrarunner from Philadelphia. I give each of them a friendship bracelet2, and in return, Laz gives me an encyclopedic explanation of fall lines. We start down the trail, and Jared peels off to run a few errands and handle the multitude of logistical needs that naturally arise when one sets out to walk 3000 miles.

Laz, Gagz, and I head west, a motley trio. Laz is a generous conversationalist and has a certain weathered verve as he walks us through the entire geologic history of the Piedmont and Coastal Plain. Sometime after my lesson in sediment, he jokes about my cameras and how people react to them when they’re on race courses. He mimes the absurd facial expressions some runners ape, he throws his hands back and sticks out his tongue clown-like. These types bother him. He finds them silly and undignified. His sense of humor is unmatched, but he takes running and racing seriously.

While walking with Laz, I could not stop thinking of the historical images of great artists working late in life—Monet in his garden, Henry Matisse painting the ceiling while he lay in bed, David Hockney producing endless digital illustrations on his iPad. As we go along, he stops every so often to lean his hands on his knees to lengthen out his spine. From his gait and facial expressions, it’s evident he is in a fair bit of pain. He is matter-of-fact about the pace and there is some unease about falling behind schedule, but he nevertheless summons an optimistic spirit and pushes on.

It’s not ideal to parachute in like this. It’s not the full picture, just a sliver of a moment. Still, I was grateful for the chance to meet Laz, Gagz, and Jared, even briefly. Gagz was preparing to run the 6 Days in the Dome. A 72-hour race he would go on to complete over 180 miles around the track after cutting holes in his shoes for his swollen toes. Jared was finishing his manuscript which is now available for pre-order. Laz went on to make it 1,700 miles of his trans-continental journey. Braving the summer heat, he tore across Oklahoma to the town of Foyil, headed to where his parents are buried. He ended his walk across America once he reached their graves.

“As above, so below”

The evening after I left the gang, with the mountains ahead waiting for them, I spent some time reading Ted Chiang’s short story Tower of Babylon. “We live on the road to heaven; all the work we do is to extend it further,” Chiang writes. In many ways, this sentiment captures the core of what Laz is so good at: charting courses toward enlightenment. An endeavor that is easily misunderstood but should be revered. Sometimes what feels like the bottom is the top, and vice versa.

Dog Ears, a few folded-down corners of the internet

Jared wrote up the experience of crewing LAZCON for the Guardian and included some of my photographs, which you can read here: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2024/apr/27/lazarus-lake-walks-across-america-lazcon

I didn’t share this experience at the time because I wanted to be sure to include the pre-order link to Jared’s book WHICH YOU SHOULD ALL ORDER!! https://bookshop.org/a/8176/9798990795839

If you’re unfamiliar with the Barkley Marathons please check out this documentary on last year’s race and Jasmin Paris, featuring interviews with many of the women who have attempted the race in the past:

After the history-making performances at the Barkley Marathons last year Finn Melanson interviewed Jasmin Paris, the first woman to ever finish the full five-loops, as well as veterans Jared Campbell and Joe McConaughy on The Singletrack Podcast. Melanson has also interviewed Barkley legend John Kelly in the past. Listening to these episodes of firsthand accounts of such a singular grueling race there is a lot of overlapping character and personality traits among the runners drawn to participate.

A profile emerges that might not define all or even most ultrarunners but offers a certain pattern and insight: they are disciplined, their demeanor is even and steady, they are all dialed into both their personal environments and the Environment to high degree.

It is this last point that I found the most interesting while binging their post-race interviews: They were coming off the high of having achieved momentous and historic successes and yet both Jasmin and Jared seemed the most animated in their conversations when discussing their sustainability efforts.

“I’m a believer in making gear last as long as it can,” Jasmin repeatedly told Finn in their interview. The first thing they discussed was how abnormal her kit was for a high-profile runner. She borrowed her friend’s pack and wore the same pair of shoes she had run every time she’d raced at Barkley even though they needed to be patched.

“It’s useful to have shoes that have good grip and that are comfortable … but definitely doesn’t need to be new … if it works it works.” She said after explaining how she had repaired the shoes following a guide by the Green Runners, an organization she feels strongly about promoting and advocating for. The Green Runners aim is to inform and empower runners to make greener decisions. They have a four-pillar strategy:

How you move (travel to races); How you kit up (trying to repair and reuse); How you fuel (thinking about planet-friendly diet and plant-based meals); How you speak out (advocating for better practices, etc.)

On that last point, she noted the work the Green Runners are doing in the trail running community and how they are holding race organizers accountable. She cited the UTMB Dacia controversy, in which the Ultra-Trail du Mont Blanc was pressured to reconsider having a car manufactured as the title sponsor for the race.

One exception Jasmin mentioned is the Hardrock as a race she would consider coming back to the US for—so she hasn’t totally ruled out international travel, it would just have to be special.

“To the extent that you can come up with your own projects nearby, I think that’s good style—is maybe how I would describe it if you’re able to adventure locally” – Jared, who comes from an engineering and race director background, told Finn.

So much of my life, whether I was a climber or a runner, the most shaping things I’ve ever done started with some report I read or picture I saw that drew me across the country or across the world and that changed who I am as a person. So I don’t think people, for environmental reasons, should deny themselves being inspired and enjoying life. Because I think a lot of goodness comes when you travel, when you see people, when you meet different cultures, when you’re running with ten people from all over the world, I think there’s a lot of goodness that can come out of that. We’re in this time when we need to be smart about things and the impact we have on things.

And it’s not just in how he approaches racing and trail running, he approaches life with the boy-scout mindset of how to leave things better than you found them. I really encourage you to listen to their full interview (linked below!) since I can’t do it justice summarizing just how inspiring it is to hear someone passionate about net-zero, net-positive living.

This level of conscientiousness isn’t unique to the highest performers in the ultra-running space—it is a trait shared by most runners I know and meet. At the finish line in Vegas for TSP Nils coordinates donations of extra food, water, bike helmets and more to the local shelter Shine A Light Foundation. They don’t advertise this aspect of all the teams coming together at the end of the race—everyone’s focus gravitates to the pool party, sleep, and celebration. But there is something moving about the shared mindfulness and generosity of all the runners and crew members making the effort to reduce waste and connect with the community.

In everyday life, the idea of living “sustainably” is daunting. Lifestyle influencers capable of committing to years of zero-waste and monk-like spending habits are intimidating in their austerity. And how much can one person on this side of the world really do while China gets more than half its energy from coal? Not to mention the problem of the longevity of the materials used to make running gear.

Companies like Adidas, with its Parley for the Oceans collaboration, and ON Running, with its recycled shoe subscription service Cyclon, have tried to offset the climate impact of running gear. But as California continues to burn and the waters become less and less habitable to aquatic life, it’s easy to slip into a fatalistic mindset and doubt how much of an impact small changes can really make.

But listening to Jasmin Paris offered almost a bridge or entry ramp to making sustainable lifestyle choices that are themselves sustainable. Wearing clothes and shoes past the point of exhaustion, and making small behavioral consumption decisions and changes do add up.

This year I want to be more mindful and better about my footprint. Last year, of the six races I competed in, four of them required long flights and complicated carbon-heavy logistics. I was conservative in how many pairs of shoes I bought (in part thanks to Under Armor providing shoes for our TSP team), but this year I want to cut back even more on my consumption and impulsive gear acquisition.1 Inspired by Jasmin Paris and personally making the Green Runners pledges, while building an aspirational race schedule this year I’m limiting my location search radius to the east coast with a preference for local races. My one caveat or exception to this would be the same as Jasmin’s: leaving the door open for one or two personally significant races and finding ways to offset the travel for them.

But I’m spoiled and lucky to live near the nation’s capital, so I don’t have to go far to find cool or exciting race options. DC is home to the iconic Cherry Blossom Ten-Miler, the Marine Corps Marathon, the Army Ten-Miler, countless half-marathons and many charity 5k races. If you include the other states in the metro-accessible area, there are even more. Baltimore’s Runfest is one of my favorite annual events and organizations like DCRoadRunners put out a heroic schedule of locally run races.

But so far, the only race I’m actually registered for this year is only about a month away: the DC Rock ‘n’ Roll half marathon, a race I once swore I would never run again.

Here is a CliffsNotes version of my Rock ‘n’ Roll DC half marathon experience last year: Not fun! Did not enjoy! Do not particularly want to run it again! But my sister is running it again and I succumbed to her pressuring me to join her. It also has the virtue of convenience.

Deep in the vault of drafts that shall never see the light of day is an entirely too honest screed I wrote immediately after about my issues with how the race is organized. But my perennial New Years resolution is to be More Positive. This is generally a failed endeavor but I’m trying.2 If you are looking for a half marathon in DC my recommendation would be literally any other race unless your younger sister bullies you into it—go for the one hosted by local running store Pacers, instead of the one put on by the corporate tourism company owned by a private equity conglomerate.

Links!

Listen to Jasmin’s interview on the Singletrack podcast here:

Listen to Jared’s interview on the Singletrack podcast here:

Join me in signing up for the Green Runners and making a few pledges to be more environmentally conscious while running this year!

If you’re in New York NYRR has a team for climate!

While we’re talking about running local, over the weekend one of the greatest feats of hyper-local racing occurred in Tempe:

https://www.threads.net/@andrew.vs.running/post/DFiGvkqpWzi?xmt=AQGzjaBDQQepV_sWBKukNWYNUO8er-rIJiO2sxE3rzkVxQ

This probably deserves its own post, but many have pointed out that niche Strava segments like this battle may be the future of racing…

And lastly, if you feel compelled to consume, do so for a good cause! Check out the latest from :

Running Sucks

What's in a t-shirt

Last month, a stranger approached me in a bar in LA. It’s always worrying, isn’t it? What do they want? Is this a friend or foe? Luckily, I’d just been on a run, and the stranger was wearing polyester shorts in December. I knew he was one of us…

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a year ago · 22 likes · 3 comments · Raziq Rauf

See you out there, until next week, run on cool cats 🏃‍♀️💕🫡

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Anniversaries are weird. They make me think of Janus, the mythological god of beginnings, gateways, transitions, and duality, depicted as a head with two faces looking backward and forward. January is named for Janus and many have noted this January in particular seems to be dragging on longer than most. During this particularly bleak midwinter, I have started running again after a long period of injuries both physical and spiritual in nature.

This month marks three years since I started training for my first Speed Project race. Since then I have run LALV twice, CHX once, and one non-TSP ultra-relay, the Southbound 400. I will probably never1 run another relay.

Throughout history, in literature, the Bible, and mythology, the act of looking back is often met with severe consequences—Lot’s wife, Orpheus and Eurydice, political nostalgia, etc. And yet, at the same time, we have to keep history in mind and learn from the failures of the past if we want to avoid repeating missteps.

But to briefly look back in remembrance, one of my regrets from last year, and the great failure of my life, was Jagger. I left a lot of work unfinished and unpublished last year amid getting married (a second time) and being stricken with grief over the death of my dog. Of all the running partners I’ve had Jagger was the one I logged the most miles with. I am still in mourning.

The loss of Jagger was a loss of identity on top of the raw loss of companionship. Jagger oriented my world. His needs and routine organized my life. Running suddenly felt hollow and empty. I had lost my shadow. All the routes around my house were now haunted—a heat map of grief. Sorrow steals more than we can prepare for.

As Coach Bennett says, “This is about running, this is not about running.”

In the days before Trump’s re-election, as Jagger’s life came to an end and the veil between worlds wore thin, I thought a lot about Nietchze’s concept of eternal returns and Plato’s Great Year. The stoics believe the universe is destroyed and reborn, again and again. Empires only last 250 years. We are trapped in the mouth of an Ouroboros serpent as it bites down on its own tail.

The alignment of these events seemed catastrophic and absurd. The sheer magnitude of loss and disruption on every level of life. We’re really doing this again America? Apparently.

Despite everything, running helps, even if it took a while to find my way back to it. Movement really is medicine. Going forward my goal with this newsletter is to share what comes up along the way while training again.

I’m finally ready to start running again, I hope you’ll join me.

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Links

The ultimate anniversary poem by Anne Carson in The Glass Essay:

Rory documented both the Hard2Kill team’s Southbound400 journey and the Feral Angel’s race across France, you can relive the magic of those experiences on his YouTube channel:

For more on the decision to turn off paid subscriptions and move to the pledge model in the meantime:

Out Over My Skis

Why I'm Not Going Paid on Substack

When I started this Substack nearly two years ago, soon after retiring from a competitive corporate life, my only thought was to indulge my love of writing. Freed from the confines of writing in the company’s interests, of aligning my thoughts with corporate goals and choosing my words with an eye to SEO (search engine optimization) and branding, I coul…

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3 years ago · 1470 likes · 482 comments · Tom Pendergast

Until next week 🫡 run on you crazy diamonds

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Our RV arrived just before 7am well ahead of our runners on the course still making their way out of Los Angeles. It was not yet crowded, but a DJ was already set up playing music from under a black tent in the parking lot. As an extra little incentive to be fast out of the city Nils had arranged for the first 100 sandwiches ordered at Kwik Market to be free.

A lot of things were different this year for The Speed Project. The meet-and-greet for teams, normally held at Hinanos bar by Venice Beach, was instead held at a gallery space with a cookout, DJ, and documentary screening. The old limo Nils and his HQ drove through the desert tracking runners was retired and replaced by a sleek all-black sprinter van. The mandatory safety meeting was held broken out in small groups instead of as a collective, where it was revealed this year’s race almost didn’t happen because of how much more popular and media-saturated the race had become. There were even new starting lines—a route from Salt Lake City was raced by at least one team in secret until it was revealed at the pool party, and they received special engraved keys along with their poker chips.

As much as the course from LA to LV itself has changed over the years as teams find faster and more efficient ways across the desert, three essential elements remain the same: the finish line in Vegas, the disco in Adelanto, and Kwik Market & Deli’s hospitality.

After getting off the RV and our team made our way through the Kwik Market parking lot, I recognized someone wearing an iridescent golf visor. “I think that’s Alexi Pappas?” I said to Sasha while staring at the Olympian mingling outside the Kwik Market doorway. “Let’s go make friends,” I said, dragging Sasha over to meet her. As I awkwardly introduced Sasha and myself to the 10km Greek national record holder, Sasha’s husband Evan brought over a round of matcha shots to help break the ice. Little did we know Pappas was hosting the Speed Project’s hourly Instagram live video and would be doing an update soon.

The Speed Project’s media crew assembled around us, setting up a makeshift newscaster station made of cardboard boxes covered in “NO RULES” bumper stickers and “NO SPECTATORS” spray-painted tags. I was eager for Sasha to share her story since it was her first time at the race and because she had just announced a major career move, so I stepped aside to take some behind-the-scenes shots. “I will ask you one thing,” Alexi says a few minutes into their interview, “Have you been to Vegas?”

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 “Spirits up, splits down”

It’s easy to go fast on the first day. You have the adrenaline and you’re fully fueled and you’re hopefully well rested. Then there’s the energy of the other teams at the start line. Teams’ lead runners take off at 4am sharp, buoyed by the communal call-and-response cheer of “RUN, MOTHERFUCKER, RUN!” led by Jarick, a veteran Speed Project MC. It is electric. Despite the field growing to 77 teams, the gathering is still contained within a tight radius, easily parting to make way for traffic, never blocking the road. The race still feels like an underground secret. It is pitch dark except for the neon Santa Monica Pier sign and the glow of countless open phone screens recording the sea of runners. The crowd scatters instantly after the runners depart. There are no spectators.

As the sun rose, morale was exceptionally high—our team’s collective splits were significantly faster than anticipated. Nikki even set a PR on her first 5k leg.

Part of the strategy in getting out of the city is for the RV to go before the runners to a designated checkpoint and wait as a separate support car shuttles the runners between relay hand-off points. This pattern of advancing the RV with a following satellite car also helps later in the race when implementing the second stage of our strategy: breaking the six runners into two teams of three for shifts of 30 or so miles to allow for the group not running to have a longer recovery period. In practice that looks like going from a 1-2-3-4-5-6 runner formation to 1-2-3-1-2-3 / 4-5-6-4-5-6 with one group rotating in the support car while the other three eat and sleep in the RV.

Probably the biggest shift I advocated for this year after running it in 2022 was to drop down to mile-repeats using the pod formation sooner to break up the climbs through Soledad Canyon in the heat of the day rather than holding to 5ks the first 24 hours. As a result, we ended up only doing one full rotation of all six runners from the start line doing full 5ks before leaving Hollywood. This allowed us to keep up at a higher gear of speed for longer even as we started to feel the incline through Soledad Canyon. Each team of 3 runners went for 30-mile stretches (10 miles each) giving the other 3 runners a solid 4-hour break to recover.

We steadily chipped away at the distance mile by mile. Things were going smoothly; we had made it through the first 115 miles and some change. Each runner had logged about 18 miles and fatigue was only just beginning to creep in as a factor.

The more immediately concerning factor was the dust. As we drove toward the Adelanto beach party the road went from potholed and cracked pavement to sand and silt. The visibility was low due to the dust in the air. After spending a short break out under the Joshua trees and disco ball, Darlene and I coughed up yellow mucus and sounded like chain smokers. Fears of the desert lung fungus and pneumonia from last time flashed through my mind. As we waited for the other three runners to arrive and hand off to us, we dampened bandanas and tied them to cover our noses and mouths. It was also getting colder—the wind was picking up.

The sun was setting as we left down the dirt road toward Barstow. It was beautiful. One of my regrets of the trip is leaving my film camera on the RV while we were in the support car for this first stretch out of Adelanto—the phone shots just don’t do it justice. We also passed the Lululemon team during this segment, which was a particularly sweet triumph.

There was a miscommunication about the distance the last pod had run before the beach party. To make up for it, our group of three had an extra 5 miles added to our next segment so they could have equal rest. We decided to change it up and do a distance pyramid: 1 mile, 1.2 miles, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5, and back down so mentally we would end up having a similar number of times we were handing off as before. The low-angled sun painted everything gold and we blared Taylor Swift from the support car.

This plan and the mile repeats generally worked spectacularly until it didn’t. While we had gone over the route execution plan on several calls and the pre-race briefing, we didn’t nail down how exactly we were going to tackle the night.

The real game is the unsupported overnight sections.

To be sure, we were ready for the dark, we had lights and vests and reflective gear. Our crew was comprised of our friend Becca and four of the runners’ significant others, Evan, Bojan, Rodrigo, and Alec. Several of the guys had already been jumping in to pace during portions where the shoulder of the road was suspect and they were set to go with us in pairs through the night. The problem was the segments range from 4 miles to 9 miles and “unsupported” means they go through terrain the RV and car can’t handle. So, the runners have to go alone in the dark, over trails with high risk of injury, through the areas with the most rabid dog activity, for long lengths of time. And we hadn’t figured out who would be responsible for which of the segments with the way we had broken down the pod rotation.

Part of that was by design. It’s good to have flexibility during the night since people respond to sleep deprivation differently and it can be a little hairy. You don’t know what you don’t know, and everyone has different strengths. We also worked it out to have runners trade off on a bike for a few of the longer unsupported segments. But this did not fully resolve the situation and tasks ahead of us. When we ran it in 2022, two of the unsupported segments led to runners getting lost costing hours towards the finish time and causing undue extra fatigue. I did not do a good job of keeping at bay the fear that we would repeat the mistakes that led to those issues.

When we reconnected with the RV around mile 145, we discovered another miscommunication: the grey water had not been dumped at the designated point on the route. This had, ahem, downstream consequences. If you’ve ever spent time in an RV you probably don’t need to be reminded of how quickly it can start to smell. If you are unfamiliar with this particular aspect of motorhomes and the glories of an American-made tank plumbing system, it probably does not take much imagination – rotten eggs, warm garbage, rancid decay—all made worse by a screen of chemicals often deployed in an attempt to hide the stench. 12+ hours deep with a rotation of six people shedding sweaty clothes and damp sneakers had already turned returning to the RV cabin into an olfactory assault, never mind the state of the bathroom.

By this point, it was also freezing. A storm front was moving in and none of us were fully prepared for how much colder it got. I had a sinking feeling going over the maps and realizing that the bulk of the unsupported segments would come after the next shift and we would need to figure out quickly who was running what. During this time Sasha had the misfortune of being the one to discover the grey water was regurgitating back up through the plumbing into the shower. Naturally, this was nausea-inducing, and she was already shivering from the cold.

I don’t think I’ve ever felt more guilt in my life than this moment—here was someone I had begged to join our team with promises of romantic views of star-filled skies and the austere majesty of the desert, now wading through literal shit. Darlene was also still coughing, worse now with congestion and sounding like death itself. This was undoubtedly one of the lower moments of the race. It was 2 am when the morning feels ages away. 200 miles still to go. “We’re just pushing for sunrise. We just need to make it to sunrise.” Sasha’s husband Evan, our crew captain, said to us again and again like a mantra.

Despite this unpleasant interlude, the unsupported segments were not as formidable as anticipated. I had brought a colored LED light wand thinking it would be cool to try and take some bisexual lighting portrait photos with it. Alas, that didn’t happen, but the light did end up serving a more functional purpose. We zip-tied it to the front of the bike for the segments where runners switched off, and it not only looked sick but was a huge help safety-wise.

The longest unsupported segment was just before sunrise. By some stroke of luck, if there is such a thing as ultra-magic, akin to trail-magic or trail angels, Lucy Scholz showed up at our RV right as we were in the midst of our bathroom fiasco and were trying to sort out divvying up the unsupported segments. Lucy broke the record for both the male and female solo run in 2023. She also happened to play lacrosse at UVA (go Hoos!) with Sasha so the two had been in contact. The odds that her relay team was within distance of ours during our moment of greatest need while on a 300+ mile course felt like a miracle.

Looking at the maps we asked her about the 9-mile trail segment that lay ahead of us. In the guide, part of the route is marked as uncertain terrain with conflicting instructions on how to follow the trail– don’t follow google maps, bear left but go straight, etc. It’s not hard to see how someone could get lost in the dark. Because of the route Lucy took for her Speed Project efforts, she did not have to cross this section and didn’t have first-hand insight but was still able to assuage our (ok, probably just my) fears.

Darlene had taken on what I considered to be the hardest segment I ran last time—the 4.5 miles of sand on the other side of the barbed wire fence. Rodrigo had gone with her for safety. I was on deck for the 9-miler. I volunteered for it mostly because I was terrified of the thought of anyone else getting lost or injured on the uneven terrain. This was probably foolish of me, and strategically, we would have been better off if I had not been an idiot martyr and instead let Lindsay run it since she is stronger at longer distances and could have gone significantly faster than my tired ass. But it worked out well because she was able to take the last unsupported 6-mile leg and absolutely smoked it. Teamwork is actually so beautiful!!!

Really, I owe a huge debt to Tanner for getting me through that segment. We walked the hills which was embarrassing but necessary, Know Thyself, etc. You can see in the map above the dark blue parts are where we walked and stopped to take pictures of the sunrise which happened right as we crested a major climb before the sharp downward pitch toward Death Valley. It was now 6:30 am. This is the one other moment in the race I regretted not having a real camera.

You can also see from the heat map where the trail turned from solid ground to sand. I do not do well on sand. This was not like sand at the beach packed down by water and firm, it was loose and slippery, impossible to gain purchase on. Despite all the grip and nimble design of my trail shoes, I was hopelessly struggling. Sand absorbs energy. It feels nice on your joints because there’s no return shock from the impact, but unfortunately, that return shock is also part of what helps propel you forward when you run. (This has been Sad Physics with Hannah. Thank you for subscribing!)

Evan was right though that the sunrise was a boost. I was vaguely worried about having anything in the tank for Death Valley but was in too much pain trying to put one foot in front of the other through the sand to spend too much energy on anxiety. Finishing this segment would bring my total personal mileage up to 45 miles or 72km. As you can see by the lovely heat map I might as well have been crawling by the end of it. Then to add even more injury to injury, it turned out that the end of the segment was a full mile from where the car and RV were able to park so we had to walk over more sand after handing off mid-trail. But now we were fully walking so the sweat on our skin was drying while our clothes remained damp and cold. I was frozen by the time we got back to the RV, so cold my hands had gone completely white from Raynaud’s Syndrome.

I collapsed in the RV, shivering, a cold, sweaty pulp of a person. Tanner was telling the others of our victory, that we had dug deep working through the pain cave. He had heroically emerged, but I had still not come out of it. It felt like the sand still had me by the ankles.

The epic high of the sunrise did not last long as bleak cloud cover rolled in casting a gray pallor over everything. With great effort, I peeled off my wet sports bra and climbed into dry clothes. I zipped into the Normatec boots to see if they might restore some muscle responsiveness before we went back down to mile repeats through Death Valley.

If the overnight stretches are the Game, then Death Valley and the Spanish Highway are the Show.

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 “Only way out is through.”

What I mean by “the show” is that you can fuck around the first 24 hours, but you will find out in the next 24 hours. And find out we did. Death Valley is, personally, what I came back for. It’s gorgeous. The valley unspools ahead of you, the road a dark ribbon bleached by the sun. The scene is framed by the mountain ridge in the distance. The beauty is its own reward.

I would like to say I was eager to get back out there after the overnight segments. But I am not sure which was less willing, the body or the spirit. But I took recovery seriously, I chugged a Coca-Cola and had Cup-o-Noodles—a god-tier combo of nutrition. The sugar and sodium worked like a promise or a curse. My head cleared with the caffeine and gradually, my legs came back online after repeatedly hammering away at them with a Theragun. We were now under 100 miles away from Vegas. Rain was falling hard on the valley ahead. We were running straight into the storm.

At the rest stop, before heading into Death Valley, we rotated the two groups having Nikki swap with Sasha. I was a little jealous Sasha was going to run with Lindsay and Isa. I hadn’t really gotten to connect with either of them, and felt that as a loss. Reflecting on it, one thing we could have done differently would be to rejigger the pod formation back to the full six-person rotation overnight so we all could have more face time with each other in the RV together as a team. It could have helped morale and eliminated some of the comms issues. But hindsight is 20/20, we executed as best we could have in the moment.

I was not prepared for how emotional it was getting to run again with Nikki and Darlene. Two years after the three of us had originally faced it together through blood, tears, and injuries, I was overcome with gratitude to be reunited with them. It is impossible not to feel inspired running with Nikki—her energy never wavers. She seems to summon everyone’s better angels, feral though they may be. Darlene was a force of nature. Her cough clearly developing into a deep lung infection, she pushed on relentlessly. I wanted to run harder for them than I ever have for myself.

We ran through the rain. Traffic blasted by us at kill-speed, one hydroplane away from catastrophe. We alternated running on opposite sides of the road trying to gauge which was safer. Parts of the road were flooded, and the shoulder was stretches of loose wet gravel frequently falling off into mud. Nevertheless, it is mostly downhill and fast. After getting through the first night, being able to pick up free speed you feel invincible for a little while.

We had toyed around with the idea of trying to go the Powerline route when we first assembled the team and quickly decided against it. Ultimately, we all agreed we wanted the full experience. Powerline shaves off 30+ miles but comes with a lot of risk and is generally not advised unless you really know what you’re doing. It also turned out that this was NOT the year to try it if you weren’t insanely fast and well past the shortcut point before the rain rolled in. While we were hitting our stride through Death Valley, messages from crews along Powerline road, now stuck in the mud needing assistance started to roll into the Whatsapp chat accompanied by videos of snow falling.

Then, at mile 283, the feeling of invincibility abruptly ended. I don’t know what it is about having 60 miles left that feels insurmountable, but it is where I started to really struggle mentally last time too. It’s only 10 miles each. And yet. There’s a good chance this was just the caffeine wearing off. The climb over Blue Diamond loomed ahead.

The sun was going down again as we started up Rt 160. As we rounded the mountain, we were treated to a spectacular sunset. Sky aflame, there was a rainbow over the snow tipped mountains at the horizon. Soaking wet and trying to dry off in the RV we plotted out how to break up the remaining miles.

Pain rippled through me sweet and familiar, without origin or end.

As we made the final ascent, I realized that the gradation, the incline, was similar to the training route Nikki and I had done for one long and arduous training run back in DC months ago. I clung to a small swell of confidence that came from appreciating that I had, in fact, trained for this moment even if I was moving slower than I wanted. I could do this; we were going to finish this.

There are elements of this story I have omitted—the body horror of losing toenails midrace, the man in a white sheet stalking runners through the night, and what exactly makes running through Baker in the dark so unnerving—some lore you have to be there for. And, also, because my grandmother is going to read this and I’m pushing my luck with the f-bombs already without her fretting over more danger specifics.

As we hit the city limits, all the runners and crew changed into matching shirts, and anticipation grew. Nikki, Darlene, and I had the last segment. We ran the last four miles trading off, linking up for the final mile, and were joined by the rest of the team for the last half mile. The Vegas Sphere was in the distance projecting an image of the moon. We had made it. Everyone evenly tackled between 50-60 miles each and most of the crew members joined for double-digit miles as well. 

We were sprayed with champagne, sharing tears and joy under the marquee lights at 4 am Sunday morning. It would take a day or two for the results to be finalized before we knew for certain we were the first all-female OG-style team to make it to Vegas. The Feral Angels arrived at the finish line 48 hours and 22 minutes after setting off from Los Angeles.

A word of thanks

Running a race with no rules or organized support is all fun and games until you get down to the actual logistics. Our team owes all its accomplishments and successes to our captain, Nikki, who juggled an insane number of timelines, bookings, contracts, rentals, and reservations. She could walk through gardens forever with all the flowers she deserves. Close runner-up is our crew captain Evan who kept us all sane through a number of dark-night-of-the-soul moments. He and Bojan both ran alongside me for different segments of the race as well, and I couldn’t have done it without them. Becca and Alec drove through the nights and got the RV and support car to Vegas, both in one piece, which can’t be said for a lot of teams. Isa traveled all the way from Guatemala and made our team infinitely faster and happier with a megawatt smile. Every runner and crew member on the team fully embodied the ethos of total participation that sets the Speed Project apart. It was an honor to race with them.

And thank YOU for reading! I have a bonus recap post for subscribers that details what happened after the race so keep an eye out for that!

Much to my great shame, I let the Haters win these last two months. Shortly after my last newsletter, now an embarrassing number of weeks ago, it got back to me that someone I considered a dear friend was mocking my running efforts at a party. Instead of laughing this off, I prickled in defense. I let my pilot light of insecurity and imposter syndrome erupt into open flame. Luckily, running is great for avoidance! And eventually, if you run far and hard enough your brain will dump a metric ton of hormones and chemicals into your sad-excuse-for-a-getaway-vehicle of a body and everything you’ve been trying to avoid will be released like greedy felons eager to pummel you with all the emotions and feelings you so carefully had tucked away until you cry it all out.

So, I have been running.

Nevertheless! We’re back! Literally, I am back in LA and I am back to writing. Ugly tears and all. Today after a shakeout run, my team, the Feral Angels, will head to The Speed Project headquarters for a safety briefing and then load up the RV. The solo runners have been on the course since Monday and have shared some harrowing videos running through flooded streets. Tomorrow, we set out at 4am PT.

Unlike other races, TSP has no central website and resorts to email infrequently. Instead, each year Nils starts a Whatsapp groupchat that all participants join. This gives a lot of credence to the narrative line that we’re “just going for a run with friends,” that is genuinely what it feels like. This year in particular feels special. In the past, teams have been secretive and competitive when it came to mapping out which course to take. This year multiple teams have shared with the group gpx files, full Strava maps and segment breakdowns, color-coordinated spreadsheets, and more to help one another out, newbies and vets alike.

And last night, all the participants were invited to a house-party style pop-up with beers and kebabs on the grill, for a special screening of WE ARE ALL PROTAGONISTS, a documentary project by Tilly GW which you should check out:

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Gear talk and teasers

I have packed four pairs of shoes this year, up from three last go round. I logged just shy of 600 miles training specifically for this race, nearly doubling my time on feet compared to the 2022 race prep. The majority of those miles were in ASICS Superblasts, Nike Vaporflys, and thanks to Under Armor, I got to test out their UA Infinite Elite running shoes. In addition to those I have a pair of trail shoes, and it looks like they’ll get more play in the wet conditions on the course this year.

Over the course of training, I set a new half marathon PR, if this post gets one (1) like I’ll share the race recap that I am thinking about heavily editing because I was hungry when I wrote it and don’t think I was entirely fair to the race organizers as a result. I also traveled to Puerto Rico for the first time since living there through the 2020 lockdowns. If this post gets two (2) likes I’ll share what is now a time capsule of an essay (that was pitched to and rejected by no fewer than 24 publications when I first wrote it) of what it was like to quarantine and run on the island.  

Place your bets in the comments on if you think we’ll make it to Vegas in under 50 hours! There might be a surprise at the finish line…

Let the good times roll

The premise seems oxymoronic: an ultra-distance sprint. For post-collegiate runners, both professional and amateur alike, the racing landscape is comprised primarily of two worlds: road races1 focused on speed and trail races focused on distance and elevation. Your two main options when looking for a race to train for are:

1. A reasonable distance that is still pretty far and uncomfortable (5k, 10k, the half, and marathon), where you push your pace chasing your physical limits

or

2. An absurd distance that is near torture by the end (50km, 50 milers, 100km, and up), where you push your mind—chasing your mental limits and end up finding your physical limits along the way

In road race world, the winners are outfitted in state-of-the-art spandex and top-of-the-line gear, fueled by energy gels designed by scientists. In trail race world, there is a non-zero chance the winner will be wearing jorts and ate pancakes and burritos at the last aid station. In road race world, there isn’t a lot of margin for things to go wrong—any issue will have an immediate impact on your time and finish. In trail race world, there is room for the unexpected and setbacks can be worked through without completely derailing a race effort. The differences between, and stereotypes of, these two groups are rich fodder for parody videos that have kept me and the rest of the internet entertained (and distracted from actually writing this).

But there is a not-secret third thing! The ultra relay. The relay format allows for these two modes to meet. And ultimately, regardless of style, all runners are unified: they’re all after good times—pun unapologetically intended.

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The more I learn about ultra-running and take on other distance events, the cooler The Speed Project, in all its unwieldy glory, gets. The real selling point for any running relay race is the team aspect. Running is a solitary endeavor. Relays are an opportunity to enjoy real camaraderie by sharing a challenging experience with friends who hold common goals and values. Being in community has a multiplying effect, the highs and lows seem richer. There is an added layer of meaning that can be found in pursuing an objective or purpose with others who share a mutual trust and depend on each other. 

This holds true for more than just running, and it is not exclusive to the relay format—bigger races and events where you’re in a crowd can have a similarly profound and gratifying sense of being part of something bigger than yourself. Relays just have a certain competitive edge when it comes to accountability and companionship. If you have ever felt lonely while running I highly recommend checking them out for yourself.

There are a number of reputable distance relay races:

Blue Ridge Relay

River to River

Wild West Relay

Relay Iowa (which has dubbed itself “the world’s longest relay” at 339 miles)

Michigan Outback

Smokey Mountain Relay

and almost three dozen different Ragnar Relays to choose from if the spirit moves you.

The most well-known though is the “Mother of All Relays” The Providence Hood & Portland To Coast Relays, Hood-to-Coast (HTC). If TSP is Burning Man, HTC is Coachella. It’s shorter—under 200 miles—and you can have up to twice as many runners on your relay team than the OG-style Speed Project’s six. HTC also boasts major corporate sponsors and backers ranging from Pepsi to Alaska Airlines. Over 1,000 teams enter.

There is a big jump from HTC to TSP when it comes to the total mileage per runner. If you take advantage of a full 12-person team and do the full 196-mile route, each runner is only looking at around 16 or 17 miles for which they’re responsible. Versus TSP where six runners each bite off 50 miles or more, depending on the route you choose. HTC is inclusive, extremely popular, and has a large participant field that is recognized with standard medals instead of the belt buckles (or poker chips) hardcore distance runners like to collect. 

HTC is a well-run production. By design, TSP is barely controlled chaos. 

I don’t mean to belabor the point or single out HTC negatively (I think it looks fun!), but I think the comparison helps put The Speed Project a little more in perspective. TSP is a true combination of opposing modes of running and not just a well-formatted race that covers a lot of distance. It is what you make it.

And that’s to say nothing of the few who run it solo. 

Baby’s first 50k race recap!

To kick off the year and relaunch this newsletter, I decided to go full Florida woman and ran my first 50k down in Jacksonville last week. This was entirely on a lark. I typed in “hellcat” on a new phone and this race popped up as a suggested auto-fill url, so it seemed like a sign from God or the ghost in the machine or whatever. Plus the belt buckle looked sick. The F6F Hellcat fighter is not the origin of this newsletter’s name, but it has a storied legacy boasting a 19:1 kill ratio, earning it the nickname “Zero Killer” in the Pacific theater against the Japanese. (I have not done myself any favors SEO-wise since Dodge named one of their muscle cars after the WWII plane.)

Looking at this race on paper I made a lot of dumb assumptions. The course description is as follows:

Historic Lee Field in Green Cove Springs. Home of the US Navy's F6F Hellcat fighter of WWII fame. The course is a loop course around the perimeter of the old base…. The course is a combination of pavement and dirt roads. No roots or rocks. Runners will go thru scenic cypress swamps with an abundance of wild life to include gators, deer, bear. 

Based off this I figured I could get away with wearing road shoes instead of trail shoes, how bad could dirt roads be? It’s a military base, presumably those roads were good enough to support heavy vehicles right? Wrong! The key word I neglected to fully appreciate here is “swamps.” As Murphy’s Law would have it, the regular course was flooded from rain and had to be rerouted. The new route could not totally avoid sections where the dirt was still wet and, as a result, basically a pit of mud. 

Before the race, I eavesdropped on the race director laughing with one of the veteran runners about how, unavoidably, everyone’s shoes would be brown and caked with mud by the end of the day. And they were right! This turned out not to be that bad, though, despite how it might seem. My feet got completely soaked with sludge and muddy water seeping through the fine pink mesh of my shoe’s upper toe box. The fear of trench foot flashed through my mind on at least one occasion. But there was something funny about it and I felt a deep appreciation for the Navy SEAL mantra: “Embrace the suck.” 

No, the worst part of the course was the unforeseen stretch of sand before entering the swamp section. I would have traded mud for the whole course, all 31 blessed miles if I could have avoided having to run on sand. The only thing I anticipated that turned out to be correct is how much easier it is to run a flat course—not dealing with any elevation change felt like a cheat code. Florida has its perks even if I didn’t see any alligators.

Overall, I was fairly pleased with the running part, even if it was a little slower than I had planned in my preceding mud-free dreams. Still getting my feet under me again (covid really sucks, illness is such a thief) and navigating some weight gain (happy relationship/beating bulimia tax). I came in 5th overall and was 2nd place female. It was a very small field, so this is a bit irrelevant, but still a fun little ego boost.

It was also a nice chance to test out nutrition, which ended up being a moot point because I spent way more time in the port-o-potties than I care to admit. For whatever reason—could not possibly have anything to do with eating utter garbage from gas stations and fast food joints on the drive down the previous day—my stomach refused to cooperate. I ended up not being able to eat much of any of the fuel I had packed. So there’s lots of room for improvement going forward!

We’re officially 10 weeks out from the desert, see you next week!

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Bonus Links! 

Redbull has a helpful guide to the benefits to each type of running for those trying to figure out which would be a better fit for their goals, lifestyle, and desires: https://www.redbull.com/us-en/short-distance-long-distance-running 

In June, 100 women came together to set a new 100x1 Mile Relay World Record:  

“In addition to a record-breaking time, the relay featured a diverse array of women and a 50-year age difference, with 63-year-old Nancy Simmons splitting a time of 6:05 as the oldest runner. Racers ranged from Olympic Trials qualifiers to those who had never raced a mile on the track before. Many of the runners were mothers, and the race also included pregnant and postpartum women. Sarah Swanger, who was five months pregnant at the time of the race, ran a 6:18 mile.”

https://www.runnersworld.com/news/a44093573/san-francisco-women-break-relay-world-record/ 

Happy Winter Solstice! In addition to gaining more sunlight, today marks 100 days until the start of the 2024 TSP 340-mile relay race from the Santa Monica pier through Death Valley to the Las Vegas marquee sign.

This year, I am running The Speed Project again, this time with an all-female team.

Some housekeeping! Originally, this newsletter was under the auspices of The Bulwark as a limited series, but going forward, it is independent! As a result, you may see the occasional paywall (no free feet blister pics). There will also be affiliate links to reading lists where, if you buy a book, I may receive a small commission. Support for this newsletter will go towards funding the many costs incurred while training and traveling to and from the desert.

While The Bulwark provided much-needed technical support with Substack (thank you Catherine!!!) and tremendous editorial assistance and guidance (JVL and Adam are the greatest editors of all time!!!), they did not pay for or reimburse expenses for any aspect of the trip or training. This year will again be self-funded, although our team has reached out to several brands for sponsorship opportunities.

I am still very much with The Bulwark all day, every day, after all, we have a country to save. This newsletter is extracurricular and will likely be produced on the weekends between long runs and hit inboxes hopefully early in the week.

If you find yourself receiving this because you signed up for The Bulwark’s free list and don’t wish to be subjected to my thoughts on running (and much more!) you can update your subscription preferences HERE.

If you do choose to stick around (please don’t leave me), you can look forward to this season’s scheduled programming! (Disclaimer: These are all working titles to pique interest in hopes you will stay and fall in love with me.) Starting off strong with What’s the Deal with Cold Plunging Anyway? and other recovery best practices! Do You Really Need to Spend $250 on Running Shoes? Celebrity Fitness Aesthetics: A Treatise on Singers, and Treadmills. Why You’re Only as Good as Your Stomach! Running in the Panopticon OR Running Under the Influence: Strava, Instagram, and Performance Data. If any of these topics are the least bit intriguing, I hope you will continue reading and running with me!

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In addition to those fun topics, I can’t wait to introduce you to this year’s team: the Feral Angels! Returning from team GRIT’s 2022 race are two teammates: Nikki is this year’s Team Captain, and her aunt Darlene, who was Crew Captain in charge of logistics in the desert handling the RV for GRIT and will be a runner this time! Joining us: Lindsey Argo from Baltimore, Sasha Hanway (her TikTok is below!) from Seattle, and Isa DeLeon from Guatemala. Give them all a follow!

@thelittleblondeyogiWould you do this?! #thespeedproject #running #run

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Our team had its unofficial kick-off meeting in November. Since then, I’ve logged a little over 100 training miles, broken my phone, gotten engaged, and written zero (0) poems.

The recommended training plan from TSP headquarters drops in January, and this newsletter will launch again in earnest in the new year. In the meantime, happy holidays! You can relive the magic of the original 2013 Speed Project race here:

Thanks for reading! Like and subscribe! Send to a friend! Be good to each other!

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1. What it’s all about

We made it out of the desert, but it seems the desert wasn’t done with us just yet. Four of the six members of our team have had to seek medical help for infections following the race. Two of the guys are dealing with respiratory issues from Valley fever and Nikki’s foot had some gnarly complications narrowly avoiding surgery. I currently have pneumonia—originally diagnosed as allergies until a chest x-ray said otherwise. I’ve been down for the count on antibiotics this week and hopefully can kick it before heading to Boston this weekend, but the race is going to look a lot different than I had planned.

I’m trying to think of this setback as a forced taper since I didn’t take too much of a break after The Speed Project. While cutting back on running I’ve had a lot of time to weigh one of the questions on the last post about the experience of running TSP: “What was the point of punishing yourself?”

Really the question can be shortened to “what was the point?” since the idea that running is punishment is a subjective presumption. But I want to address both, what was the point and if running is a form of punishment.

The point of racing is to see how fast you can go from one point to another. The point of running depends on the person. For some, cardio is viewed as a kind of torture—see the use of suicide drills in team sports as a penalty during practice mocked by cross-country runners and the tagline “our sport is your sport’s punishment.” I dislike this kind of attitude for a lot of reasons, first among them is all through high school and college my hands were torn up from rowing and the source of endless Ben-Hur jokes. This attitude also contributes to the shame-equation women face in diet culture—it is part of what’s behind the idea of using exercise as a form of atonement for eating.

But I think the distorted view and mentality of exercise in general as a form of punishment goes back to the breakdown between being goal-oriented versus values-oriented. If it’s just about the end result for you the day-to-day grind will eventually start to feel punishing like an obstacle to be overcome to reach the conclusion, a delay to the joy of whatever the goal is—winning, weight loss, whatever. Something you have to do rather than something you get to do. But if it’s about embarking on a lifestyle where movement is centered in your life every workout becomes an opportunity to delight in what the body can do.

In the first and second issues of this newsletter I laid out my reasons for volunteering to be on the team: to see how far I could go—an impulse to test my limits, but also looking at my New Year’s Resolutions and how I want to be. The race was a goal, yes, but I was happier in the middle of Death Valley with the sun beating down on my back, sprinting towards the RV than I was after we reached the Vegas sign.

Like all identity-building forms of exercise and habit, running can be an aid to self-determination in that it affirms the ability to manage yourself. Running was the point.

2. Strategery

In the last post, I focused mostly on what it was like to run TSP rather than the racing in and of itself. For all the teams, competing came down to relay format, the lengths of each segment, and recovery time. The teams that were most competitive dropped down to shorter segments almost immediately and did shifts trading off sets of three runners for set times so the other three could rest for longer. Our team stuck with 5ks and longer the whole first day and night. We dropped down to doing miles and half miles when we hit the heat in Death Valley and the runners who had the longer preceding stretches, which couldn’t be broken up due to lack of vehicle access, started to face serious fatigue and pain.

While TSP strategy is its own monster, during our speed test back in January we talked a bit in support cars about various other racing strategies. For marathons, Forrest told us about the 10-10-10 method: You run the first 10 miles with your head, the second 10 miles with your training, and the last 10k with your heart. Jes Woods is a Nike coach and TSP veteran whom I got to meet and run with for a Brooklyn Track Club long-run before heading to Death Valley, she broke down the 10-10-10 method in detail for Runner’s World:

Running the first 10 miles with your head means being smart, being patient, and listening to your coach. “You want to make a conscious effort to hold back and run the first 10 miles at a pace that’s slightly slower than your goal marathon pace,” says Woods. . . .

Running the second 10 miles with your legs is all about trusting your training, says Woods. “Let your body do what it has been trained to do,” she says. “This is where you want to hit goal marathon pace like a metronome. Let it feel rhythmic and settle in.” You know this pace; you’ve trained for this pace. . . .

Running the last 10K with your heart should be pretty self-explanatory: This is where you let it rip. “Your strength doesn’t come from your body, it comes from your heart—OK, and that fire in your belly asking you, ‘How bad do you want it?’” says Woods.

Since I’m still a little shaky coming back it’s probably going to look more like a one-mile-at-a-time run. I’m beyond thrilled and honored to be running for Team Beans. I’ve run for causes in the past, but this one is particularly close to home. As the pandemic drags on there are still so many suffering from other severe illnesses that need attention and resources. Cancer is still among the leading causes of death in America. Last year Andrew Kaczynski dedicated each mile to a child with cancer:

3. Links!

There is still time to donate!

Support Team Beans!

As always I’m still adding books to the reading list that could probably be broken down into several shorter lists at this point.

I jinxed myself reading this piece in Runner’s World last week on pre-race anxiety and how one of the top worries is getting sick. It hadn’t really occurred to me to worry specifically about illness before the race since there’s a pandemic and that’s just a constant worry now (I’m also a bit of a hypochondriac and always think there’s something wrong with me anyway). So naturally, I would come down with a lung infection completely unrelated to the pandemic—cheers to Murphy’s Law.

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I have spent months in a garage with two space heaters propped up and teetering on overturned plastic buckets pointed at the center of a treadmill I bought secondhand. I have watched entire seasons of teenage vampire drama television shows on Netflix while running on this treadmill after abandoning audiobooks I dutifully tried to get through. I have worn holes into the backs of three pairs of running shoes clear through to the heel counter. I’ve had my gait and running biodynamics analyzed by a sports therapist.

I have stood naked in an insulated octagonal chamber filled with liquid nitrogen. I have fought inflammation and won.

I have seen the sky turn deep blue while the mountains were still cast black in shadow before the earth had fully turned towards the sunrise. I have seen a lot of road. I now know intimately the various functions and settings on a Garmin Forerunner 945 watch (along with the many ways it can fail).

I have eaten frozen sealed peanut butter and jelly sandwiches wrapped in thin crinkly plastic. I have eaten pickles swimming in vinegar with dill and garlic. I have consumed state-of-the-art liquid carbohydrates suspended in “biopolymer matrixes.” I have eaten Cup-O-Noodles ramen with my hands, for the sodium alone.

I have watched a teammate peel back the skin on a blister the size of two silver dollars on the arch of her foot. I have watched her tape gauze over it then go and run 5k after 5k after 5k over hot blacktop, loose gravel, and sand. I have watched another teammate puke with an arm against the side of the RV for support before going out to run a few more miles. I have seen friends reach their limits–and keep going.

I have clipped off whole toenails down to the cuticle after draining blood welled up beneath them in blisters that had pushed the nails from their beds. I have soaked a tank-top in ice and water and tied it to my head during the high heat of the day.

I have watched a disco ball hanging from a Joshua Tree spin in the evening twilight. I have seen a graveyard of broken-down commercial planes and abandoned aircraft at the far reaches of the Mojave. I have screamed at dogs in the night to stay back. I have strapped lights to my body. I have been followed by an old limousine on a sand-covered road in the dark and had a light shined in my face while a stranger asked me questions. I have watched a headlamp bounce a dull beam on the side of a road for miles slowly dying to a mere dim glow.

I have fallen asleep while zippered into compression boots that made sounds like a ventilator, beeping as air pumped through fabric chambers working pressure up and down my legs. I have felt the full terror of the unknown when an inebriated man blocked our car with his in the middle of a bridge and got out to approach my teammates and me late into the night.

I have run across the hottest place on Earth for a total of 9 hours 11 minutes and 24 seconds. I have taken on 63 miles of a 340-mile course from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. I averaged 8:45 minutes per mile running through temperatures ranging from the low 40s to 103-106 degrees in Death Valley depending on which car thermometer you want to believe reporting the heat coming off the asphalt. I have seen the Vegas lights in the valley from 20 miles in the distance.

I have been sprayed with champagne and confetti beneath marquee lights. I have paid more than I care to admit for jalapeño margaritas at a hotel pool in Vegas riding an ebbing wave of adrenaline and delirium. I have put a poker chip hanging from a dog chain between my teeth and grinned.

It was the Speed Project.

Signs of a scorpion sting include intense pain, numbness, and tingling. In a way, it is not unlike the sensation one gets from a pinched nerve. On my first segment of the course, I had a little over 4 miles through L.A. and had tied my shoes too tight. This resulted in one leg starting to get pins and needles about 2 and a half miles in then quickly going completely numb by the time I reached the RV for the handoff. I regained feeling after loosening the laces—it’s an easy fix to get the pressure off the metatarsal region, but a stupid, nervous mistake. It was painful in a brief, disorienting way that let fear creep in.

In the days immediately leading up to the race I was haunted by the parable of the Scorpion and the Frog. If you’re not familiar with the fable, here’s Orson Welles telling it in Mr. Arkadin:

I prefer the translation with the scorpion saying it’s in his “nature” rather than “character,” but that might be a distinction without a difference—the point remains the same and both creatures still drown as a result of the scorpion’s decision and behavior. But it’s not just about the nature of the scorpion, it’s about the nature of the frog, too. The frog demonstrates its own nature to trust the scorpion’s promises and inclination to help the scorpion.

The only other pain I dealt with was an intermittent tightness at my hip and IT band that seemed to dissipate after laying on the ground in pigeon pose at a gas station before Death Valley.

I’m not going to lie, my legs were sore. Pretty much everything hurt, just from the sleep deprivation alone. Darlene gave Forrest and me massages to get knots out and she seemed alarmed at the state of my quads by the time we got to the Old Spanish Highway. But it wasn’t anything I didn’t know or wasn’t expecting—not real pain. Soreness has something sweet under it, all the micro-tears in the muscle fiber will heal back stronger.

I was worried about the hip pain before in the lead-up to the race. I didn’t even want to directly acknowledge it like I did with my fears about nutrition. I’ve had trouble with it before and done races in the past where I had a whole roll of kinesio tape wrapped around my side fighting sharp stabs with each step stubbornly in denial making it worse. But somehow, I avoided reinflaming that injury, by what miracle or grace from a higher power, I do not know.

Any time it flares up I’m reminded of the whitewashed yoga-ism “the hips are the emotional junk drawer of the body.” Before the desert, I pictured a drawerful of scorpions I had collected pinching me as I ran. But they didn’t bother me once I was finally out there.

In the original Persian iteration of the story it’s not a frog at all, but a turtle who carries the scorpion across the river. Learning this felt like a significant cross-over given that other story of animal foils runners love: the tortoise and the hare. The shell protects the tortoise from the scorpion’s sting.

I want to say I learned some great lesson about the sublime austere beauty of the desert conquering all, but I don’t know if it’s true or if human brains are even wired to work that way.

Our brain’s primary function is to keep us alive. What that looks like in practice after putting the body through severe trials is to focus on threats and the moments of greatest danger to avoid or survive them should they be faced again. This is a normal and healthy response to stress—when it tips over into preoccupation and hypervigilance is when it begins to be cause for concern. Still, these are not the moments I wish stood out in my memory even if I understand why, from a sense of self-preservation, they would.

The moments I felt like myself far outweighed the times I was afraid. Before the race a friend and I talked about the exercise of writing down and recognizing the moments and memories in your life when you feel or felt most happy so that you might replicate that feeling more easily and regularly. The first time I made that list it was almost exclusively experiences of running alone in new places.

Among my many toxic traits is upon seeing that the solo runners had dice on their dog chains along with the poker chips was an immediate desire to earn those as well—to go back out and run it alone.

But the one thing this experience gave me that I had been lacking and wanting, was being on a team I not only fully trusted and respected but genuinely enjoyed being with and learning from. My history of being on teams is not a healthy one (I would not wish NCAA athletics on my worst enemy). I do think the GRIT team redeemed my sense of teamwork, fellowship, solidarity, and possibility. Joey on the team put it best: “Although I spent some lonely hours in the dark and in the middle of nowhere, I never really felt alone.”

We didn’t end up getting team tattoos together in Vegas. All of us were pulled in different directions by family and exhaustion. But I think I know now what I’m going to get to commemorate the Speed Project.

Thank you for reading along these past 10 weeks! Look forward to a few updates ahead of Boston.

1.     Pouring the Coal

It’s race day—at 4 a.m. PDT, fifty-odd teams are taking off from the Santa Monica pier for Las Vegas. There are over 300 runners gathered to compete through the desert.

“I wish it could be my first time again,” Forrest said on Wednesday night at Hinano’s, a dive bar in Venice Beach. The guys double over laughing and reminiscing about the last time they raced together.

It’s a TSP tradition to get burgers and beers with the other teams before heading to the desert. There’s a pool table on the other side of the dimly lit and crowded space. The crack of billiards crashing into each other competes with the sound of the burgers sizzling on the grill. The smell of grease overwhelms the salty air. Newbies and veterans alike press into the bar and cheer for the basketball game playing on televisions.

One such veteran is Leigh Gerson, one of the OG team runners who still remembers the night Nils, the founder of Speed Project, was convinced to turn the idea of running from LA to Vegas into a race, almost a decade ago. We talk briefly, swapping injury stories. I tell her about going to PT for some knee and hip trouble earlier this season—she has me step back, sizes me up, and immediately identifies the problem: “You have a lot of internal rotation.” She’s now a strength and movement coach in LA with every imaginable certification the California Department of Health could come up with to require. We part ways to go greet other friends.

The night at Hinano’s is also when everyone goes in on the Side Bet—a bucket of guesses of what the winning time will be written on five-dollar bills—whoever guesses the closest time wins the lot.

Aside from the unpredictability of injury, my main source of anxiety has been coming up with a plan for nutrition and the fear of bonking and cramping up. Marcus has been preparing everyone mentally for the point when the fatigue will hit—and it will hit. He and Forrest have both warned from experience about how towards the end we won’t want to eat but must force the calories for energy. Also sleeping and recovering between segments—part of the challenge is keeping legs from getting stiff and lactic acid buildup. We have compression recovery boots and Theraguns, which should help.

Our team spent most of Thursday running errands to Costco and getting the RV before the mandatory check-in and all-teams meeting at TSP headquarters. To keep things from getting too crowded in the main cabin of the RV, we’re all trying to limit our belongings to the necessities:

When we pull up to the TSP meeting the legendary old limousine is parked in front of a warehouse entrance that is covered in tape spelling out “TSP” and “LALV.” As RVs pull into a parking lot next-door to the LAX runways, it becomes more and more clear why The Speed Project has a reputation for being Burning Man for runners. A DJ plays a house remix of Bella Ciao inside a metal dome cage as the runners and their support teams load cases of Liquid Death and Maurten sports fuel into the RVs.

Another item GRIT has been avidly discussing while #bonding is brainstorming what we should get for team tattoos once we make it to Vegas (sorry mom). Many runners from past years sport ink featuring the line of the course and the abbreviations: both Marcus and Forrest have LALV on their Achilles. We’re open to suggestions in the comments.

2.  No Spectators / No Rules

“It’s not that there shouldn’t be spectators—it’s about participation, it’s about contribution,” Nils tells the assembled athletes, explaining the ethos and tagline that sometimes leads to confusion. “Each of you, regardless of if you’re the RV driver, a crew member, or a photographer—you’re contributing, and you’re participating—that’s the spirit of what TSP is about and that’s why you guys are our community, and we are yours.”

He went on to joke about how incredible it is to see so many people map their own routes and all the different ways people have approached the challenge. He thought people would just follow the original course they set out and he would have to come back and break the habit, but instead, people have embraced the spirit of finding faster ways to get from LA to Vegas.

In the midst of all the chaos leading up to the race, one of the greatest assets that has cut the fear and eased a lot of my worry is a master spreadsheet execution plan drawn up by our GRIT teammate Drew, who is a master at coding.

He broke down the whole route segment by segment and optimized the order of runners based on our strengths, taking into consideration elevation, temperature, and safety.

The first solo runners have already started to arrive in Vegas after setting out on Monday. It’s been difficult to pull away from watching their progress on Instagram—it’s a photographer’s dream: the landscape and the athletes at their limits.

Probably the most entertaining and uplifting story so far on the course has been David Kilgore’s support crew taking over the remainder of his miles when he sustained an injury after leading the pack over the first 100 miles. They could have just stopped—the Tracksmith team called off their solo race after an injury on the course this year—but no, Kilgore’s party decided to tackle the miles and finish as a team effort.

They arguably appear to have had the most fun on the course as well, blasting the Mulan soundtrack in the desert while four-wheeling across a “shortcut” down the powerline road through the night. One crew member, Chris Lotane, isn’t even a runner and hadn’t run at all leading up to the event and still jumped in to help chip away at the miles. He also seems to be carrying the team’s morale with a jovial spirit and libertine stunts like running naked.

While all of the solo runners are obviously insanely impressive for taking on the distance alone, there is something gratifying about seeing a support crew making the choice to finish the run and get to Vegas on foot instead of abandoning the project. They’ve embodied the spirit of No Spectators/No Rules to the fullest.

3.     Links!

Read a Travel + Leisure write-up on Malcolm Ebanks, one of the solo runners currently on the course!

Follow The Speed Project and GRIT USA Team on Instagram for live updates throughout the day!

One more playlist!

1.     Clash Endurance

This week’s much belated newsletter is due to racing in Miami this past weekend for my triathlon team’s season opener. I did the 70.3 because I have a special talent for breaking the first Moscow Rule and made the very wrong assumption that “Middle distance” meant Olympic distance, not half-Ironman when I registered for the race.

It was my second 70.3 so I knew what to expect more or less. I didn’t train enough for the bike or the swim and had false confidence about the run. I thought if I held on through the bike then I could open it up on the 13.1 run and it would be a nice little confidence boost before heading to the desert. Unfortunately, that was not the case. There was a lot of wind, and the heat took more out of me than I expected. But overall, it went fine and was a gorgeous day—the bike course went all the way down to the Florida Keys, so the views were beautiful.

My teammates and I talk a lot about pre-race jitters and when it starts to feel real and sinks in that you’re racing—when you check in your bike, when you put on the wetsuit, when they play the national anthem at the start line—but I didn’t have much of that type of anxiety for this race. It really and truly felt like just a long workout, even if the run was more of a reality check than an ego boost. Was afraid of overdoing it before TSP, but the race did help mentally for preparing to run in the heat. I have a little bit better sense of how to handle and regulate body temperature headed into the desert now—it’s going to look a lot like just shoving a ton of ice in my sports bra since these are the projected race temps:

SANTA MONICA HI 74˚ / LO 56˚

PALMDALE, CA HI 86˚ / LO 42˚

BAKER, CA HI 91˚ / LO 54˚

DEATH VALLEY HI 98˚ / LO 62˚

LAS VEGAS HI 87˚ / LO 54˚

It also pushed me over the 300 mileage mark. I’m not quite going to make it to the personal goal of 500 miles before the desert. So far according to our leaderboard the team combined has logged over 2,000 training miles since January. For more serious/in-depth race recaps from Miami check out my teammate Darien’s Instagram as he breaks down each segment!

2.     Logistics!

This past week we also had a logistics call with our support team who will be joining us in Santa Monica. Nikki’s aunt Darlene will be our team leader helping keep us on track coming and going from the RV as we make our way across the desert. Part of the unofficial training guide lays out why it’s important to designate someone on the support crew to be point person:

Runners will get tired/delirious and will make poor decisions 

Such as: running from Los Angeles to Las Vegas

We covered a lot of old horror stories from past years, what to be prepared for and what to pack. Since we’re running straight for somewhere around 40 hours we’re bringing changes of clothes for the heat of the day and the desert lows of the night. It’s recommended to have multiple pairs of shoes to cover different types of terrain. We’re bringing headlamps for the dark and Marcus and Forrest warned us to not be afraid if we see the glowing eyes of wildlife that sometimes get caught in the beams.

This weekend there is a welcome party and runners are already headed out west. I don’t leave until Tuesday and am doing a final long run on Sunday with Marcus in DC.

It’s not just runners who are doing last minute preparations, the TSP main account posted this week about getting the old limousine tuned up and ready. The guide has been updated with the final schedule along with a reminder to read another document aptly titled “Your runner is the weakest link between LA and Vegas” going over the best practices for maintaining situational awareness on the course. That also includes a breakdown of the medical facilities along the way for every 30-40 mile segment in case there is an emergency.

Reading through the warnings and beginning to pull gear together has caused some of the nerves I lacked or ignored before Miami to start flickering. The last couple weeks went by faster than I anticipated. I was telling a friend recently about Kazou Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, specifically the ending because I’ve felt like it speaks to a lot of the grief and emotion of living through the pandemic: “We all complete. Maybe none of us really understand what we've lived through, or feel we've had enough time.”

Even though running can help give days and weeks structure and some measure of predictability, I still don’t feel as prepared or confident as I might have hoped. I have a quiet but nagging fear about whether or not I’ve run enough—if I’ll be fast enough and wondering how much of a difference it would have made if I hadn’t joined the team late and started training sooner. But I think that desire for more time is just an illusion of wanting control because no matter how ready you are for an event, things can still go wrong and have unforeseeable difficulties.

3.     Links

The Speed Project is raising money with every mile run for the people of Ukraine.

This week’s playlist

It’s the fifth year in a row where no one finished the Barkley Marathons, another infamously grueling running challenge.

“Every mile serves a purpose.”

Now that the race is less than a month away and the mileage has started to add up and take a toll and general morale is pretty low given the state of the world, I reached out to get some help this week. Tom Foreman is an experienced ultrarunner with a great sense of humor and the author of My Year of Running Dangerously, a memoir about running. He generously took some time to share a few stories and answer questions about what to expect while running an absurd distance and pushing the body to extremes. I’ve also included some of my favorite quotes from his book.

Hannah: Do you have any advice for first-time ultrarunners doing it on something of a lark?

Tom Foreman: Ultrarunning is different from marathons. The marathon is very special and it’s fearsome in its own way because it can grind at you, and you can make a mistake in the marathon and be ok. If you’re in reasonable shape, you will still finish.

The ultra—you make a serious mistake in your ultra strategy or preparation, and you can be 30 miles in, 40 miles in, and you are crushed, because you’re often in such challenging conditions they all take a toll on you. Because you’re out there so long you become much more aware of what it means to shepherd your body through that whole experience making sure you’re getting the right fuel and that you’re keeping your head right.

Ultramarathoning, for most of us, is not about speed. It’s mainly about keeping your system functioning and keeping your head right. Just one foot in front of the other relentlessly, grinding the miles down.

“Whether something is uncomfortable or unpleasant has no bearing on whether it should be done. The decision and commitment must be made, if not heedless of the pain, then at least with recognition that sometimes good things require bad days.” - My Year of Running Dangerously

Hannah: I’ve been reading a lot of running books in preparation and yours is by far the funniest. A lot of running books take on a quasi-spiritual seriousness. And yours, it’s not like it’s lighthearted—there are a lot of intense passages—but you do have a sense of humor. Could you talk a little bit about your sense of humor and keeping your head on straight?

Foreman: I’m serious about my running for me, but I don’t take myself seriously as a runner. I’m not going to win a race. If I win something in my age group, I’m thrilled beyond all belief. One time, third place in my age group at the Cleveland Marathon. And you know what’s funny—the fourth-place guy was something like 10 seconds behind me on every mile. And I thought, if you’d known, you could have beaten me.

I think it’s really worthwhile to be able to laugh at yourself because, because why not? I mean, everything is so dire in the world anyway. It’s like, why not be happy about it and have a good time? And I’m lucky because, you know, our family has always laughed. Great. And my dad and my mom grew up in a family that we laughed a lot. I think some of the bravest people in the world are comedians because it’s super hard.

It helps me in running because even when it’s hard, I remind myself, you’re here by choice and the world isn’t going—the sky is not going to fall.

“This is the real reason I love running like an idiot against the miles, against the calendar, and against the odds. Running puts me in touch with the moment, and reminds me how each one is rare and precious. As we get older, it is easy to believe in failure, cynicism, bad intentions, and worse plans. It is hard to believe in honest effort, the kindness of strangers, and true challenges that can be honestly conquered. Running pushes all the bad aside.” - My Year of Running Dangerously

Foreman: A friend of mine who’s an Olympian, Meb Keflezighi, we were talking one day, just chatting about the New York City Marathon and he said something about running the race. And I said, man, when we start that race, you and like six other guys have a chance to win—the other 50,000 of us are running for something else.

That's one of the things I like about marathoning, too: I just find that running in general is a really honest sport. For all normal people, you start here, you finish there, whoever gets there first wins. Doesn’t matter if you run backward or walk some, or you hop on one foot, it doesn’t matter. You cross the line, that’s it. I like that purity and simplicity of it.

And I like the fact that you really are racing yourself. You’re really saying what can I get out of myself. I’ve had races that were not particularly fast races but were beautiful races and I was really proud of them.

Hannah: I love how you put that—the rest of us are “running for something else.” When it comes to balancing life, especially when we’re going through something major like the pandemic and now global turmoil, obviously running takes a bit less priority, but do you feel that running has helped you deal with everything going on?

Tom Foreman: Yeah, tough couple years. There have been many times when I particularly have gone out trail running and have been on the trails in the woods, doing anywhere from 5 to 20 miles, and I may only see a half dozen people. During that time, life felt normal, which is a pretty big thing for these days. Everything about life was different: You couldn’t see friends the way you would, you couldn’t go places the way you would, but the woods were the same. The trail was the same.

Hannah: Do you have any tips or tricks on how to refuel or what to eat during an ultra?

Tom Foreman: Your fuel really depends on the race. For shorter races, you can do GUs and gels and blocks. If you're like me, usually around mile 18, 19, 20, you’ve had enough of that, the residue is hard to deal with. But you can do it for those because you want something that’s going to burn fast, getting you going and you don’t have to endure it for a long, long time.

For races beyond that distance, I think it’s wise to have alternatives. I typically run my 50 with at least some kind of mini burrito. It’s more of a slow-burning food, but it’s also something that I know I can process. Because your body starts sort of shutting down the digestive system at that distance in particular.

Above all it’s personal. The main two goals of fueling are simple: 1. Keep your energy levels up. Don’t let your muscles get depleted because it’s hard to bring them back when they do. And 2. Keep your stomach under control. I think more people have terrible races because their stomach goes bad on them. Because you’ve got the legs, you’ve got the lungs, but just couldn’t keep the stomach in check.

This talk, unfortunately, had to be condensed for space and clarity, but Foreman is a rich conversationalist and everyone should check out his book.

“’If it is inevitable, it is ideal.’ She was quoting an aphorism I had said to her since her youngest days. I’ve never been able to trace its origin, but I’ve thought of it countless times on the job as I’ve faced angry policemen, even angrier protesters, armed thugs, or even more heavily armed soldiers. … When I’ve been tempted to complain about the unreasonableness of the universe, I’ve remembered those words. They are my private clarion call to quit screwing around and get busy solving the problem. They tell me that the ground on which you are standing, no matter where it might be, is the perfect place to take a stand.” - My Year of Running Dangerously

Bonus links!

This week Tom Foreman was also kind enough to guest curate a playlist!

Read another recent interview Tom Foreman gave with Trail Runner—with recommendations for local trails!

And you can find his book on the reading list as always.

1. The Holodomor and Weaponization of Hunger

Any denial of basic needs can be a mechanism of control, abuse, or chaos. Food is the base of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs along with shelter, water, and rest. Given the human necessity for sustenance, starvation is recognized as a war crime under Swiss law—something to keep in mind while the invasion of Ukraine continues given Russia’s history of using famine as a method of warfare.

From 1932 to 1933 Stalin starved almost 4 million Ukrainian citizens to death:

The Ukrainian famine—known as the Holodomor, a combination of the Ukrainian words for “starvation” and “to inflict death”—by one estimate claimed the lives of 3.9 million people, about 13 percent of the population. And, unlike other famines in history caused by blight or drought, this was caused when a dictator wanted both to replace Ukraine’s small farms with state-run collectives and punish independence-minded Ukrainians who posed a threat to his totalitarian authority.

While this is an extreme historical example, Putin has shown he is willing to use any and all forms of aggression available no matter how depraved or evil. He is familiar with using starvation as a tool—facilitating and abetting Assad’s malnourishment of Syrian civilians by blocking aid to the region. Given these precedents and the possibility of escalation as Putin may get more desperate for victory in the face of greater Ukrainian resistance and stronger defense than he expected, the world should be prepared to see hunger used as a weapon again. The attacks on Ukraine are not happening in a vacuum and will affect all of us—there are also likely to be strains on global food supply chains resulting from the invasion.

Caveat: In no way do I intend to compare the plight of people in a war zone to the plight of people not in a war zone. I don’t want to be in the business of weighing suffering against suffering. But, running for recreation as others are running for their lives, I have been thinking a lot about how we intentionally deprive ourselves.

It feels gross to write about anything other than glory to Ukraine this week. It seems insignificant and weird to talk about something like nutrition and running as so many face peril. But war and masses of people potentially being denied food highlight the disconnect and privilege of American abundance.

Last week was National Eating Disorder Awareness Week. Terrible to consider and grapple with under normal circumstances, eating disorders are even more strange and disturbing phenomena to consider in the context of war breaking out. The human rights violation of using hunger in warfare lays bare a certain perversion in our culture that idolizes and rewards thinness—an idolatry that contributes to millions of Americans inflicting upon themselves a cruelty akin to torture under tyranny.

There is even more irony and dissonance in an amateur athlete’s self-deprivation—itself another peculiar symptom of American abundance that sits uneasily next to news from frontlines.

At its core, disordered eating is about personal control. Except it is not just a conflict against self, but a conflict against a culture of denial.

2. American Denial: The Limit Doesn’t Exist

Idolizing the individual’s ability to deny their basic needs is yet another American pastime—not just as it relates to food, but rest as well—re overworking and fetishizing hustle culture. When looking at America’s relationship with food and health, this culture yields extreme behavioral disorders: starving and binging.

Eating disorders have “exploded” during the pandemic. And obesity is a leading risk factor for more severe COVID infections. These are two faces of the same coin—both speak to abandonment by the American government. The former is a result of isolation and uncertainty as those in power left people to fend for themselves with inconsistent guidelines, keeping schools closed, and limited direct support. The latter is part of a deeper trend in American health and political disregard for citizen wellness.

There is something insidious in the sequence of events starting with Michelle Obama being mocked for years over her “Get Moving” campaign, followed by the election of an obese man disdainful of exercise and any kind of public health consciousness—only then for the virus to arrive amid backlash to government efforts to promote the most basic of health initiatives in the 10th most obese country in the world. And it was not just his disdain, but his conviction that health is a matter of genetics—entirely out of anyone’s control and pre-decided by fate—therefore shirking any responsibility of the community and society to protect or meet the needs of the vulnerable.

Instead of addressing the ignorance and failures of policy contributing to the national problem of obesity, activists have taken a different tact to fight the animosity faced by the overweight: radical acceptance. But we should be able to address both discrimination against people who are fat while also working to improve the conditions and circumstances that lead to binging. There has to be a way to address the ways obesity contributes to health vulnerabilities without blaming and shaming the individual. 

Acceptance alone won’t fix the stigma of sizeism because it perpetuates the idea that America’s corrupted relationship with food, health, habits, and exercise is entirely the burden of the individual. It also works in shifting the conversation from one focused on finding solutions to denying there is a problem at all—thereby denying all the underlying problems causing it to begin with.

Obesity in America is in part a failure to implement policies to protect people that has been transmogrified into a moral failing of the individual. Radical acceptance takes the pressure off politicians to address real issues of accessibility, education, income inequality that limits the available time for those who work extra shifts could otherwise have to cook, limiting additives and food processing, and a multitude of other less easily quantified reasons contributing to America's failure to address overweightness.  

We as a society are choosing to accept to treat the gross policy failures of COVID the same way by blaming individuals and the two fiascos are colliding and resulting in massive death tolls.

Leadership matters—just as bad roads are prohibitive to getting more people running, just as discrimination and harassment are prohibitive to getting more people running—and having someone openly denouncing exercise from the ultimate podium of authority in America is prohibitive to getting more people running.

3. Manna in the Desert

“Regularly eat food, even if you are not hungry. If you become hungry it is too late.” – From the unofficial strategy guide to the Speed Project

This week I crossed 250 miles so far for the year, halfway to my goal of 500 miles before the race. We’re a month out from heading to the desert and as the long runs get longer, nutrition starts to play a bigger role. There is an illusion among athletes that because you are burning so many calories you can eat anything you want, but it’s a false premise. Two axioms oft-repeated by coaches: “You can’t outrun a bad diet” and “abs are made in the kitchen.” What you consume matters. 

Unfortunately, this awareness can slide very quickly into disordered habits of obsession, binging, and shame. I personally think anyone who was exposed to myfitnesspal or Weight Watchers before their prefrontal cortex was fully developed should be entitled to financial compensation as if they were exposed to asbestos. 

After battling my own cycles of disordered eating for years as a student-athlete, there remains the constant lure of old dark habits. Personally, running as a practice and discipline has forced me to be more pragmatic than emotional about eating for fuel–rather than as a response to stress.

As always, Emily Dickinson said it best: “After great pain, a formal feeling comes.” 

This week’s mileage:

A bonus link on running and military opsec: Data about exercise routes shared online by soldiers can be used to pinpoint overseas facilities. 

This week’s running playlist 🎵

1. The Buckeye Bullet and Aftershocks of Hate

So far, this newsletter has ragged on a number of American pastimes that hinder the experience of running—prioritizing automobiles, hating women, etc. But if there is one American tradition that’s been slipping lately that I think we should resurrect, it’s humiliating Nazis. And who better to look to as a model of excellence for that ambition on the last day of the Olympics and during Black History Month than Jesse Owens.

In the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Hitler wanted to show the world his vision of Aryan supremacy—

—and then America showed up and told him to get wrecked as Black athletes won gold after gold after gold.

Despite the passage of nearly 90 years and these historic victories abroad, for which these Black athletes ought to be celebrated as heroes and icons of the American spirit of freedom and triumph over discrimination—today, Black Americans still face harassment and racial profiling while running at home in their own neighborhoods.

In January, the three men who chased and shot to death unarmed 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery while he was jogging, were sentenced to life in prison. This week, their case is back in court—this time on federal hate crimes charges—and the prosecution has brought forth a mountain of evidence showcasing the defendants’ history of animosity toward people of color.

The high-profile nature of the case has brought attention to the added stress and persecution Black people face when running. Similar to the survey results released by Runner’s World on “Running While Female,” following the Arbery case the New York Times asked its readers to share their experiences “Running While Black.”

Even in my own neighborhood, I fear. I think about how Trayvon Martin was in his own gated neighborhood when he was followed and gunned down. When it starts to rain a little bit, as it did the night Trayvon was killed, I cut my run short because of what happened to him. I think, They won’t believe I’m just trying to run in the rain.

— Marren Ellis, Montgomery, Ala.

The responses are a capsule of anxiety not just of running while Black, but also the early stage of the pandemic.

2. Looking for Values-Driven Solutions

This week Coach Fitts was interviewed by District Fray about our team:

Currently in its third year, GRIT is so much more than a triathlon team. . . . At its core, though, is a critical mission: to enact socio-cultural change. GRIT seeks to challenge governing bodies of sport, increase the multi-sport enrollment of People of Color, inspire communities, and bridge the performance gap for athletes. You won’t see the word diversity here, because as Fitts points out, “Anyone can come together to showcase diversity. Inclusion is ‘how do we make [tri]suits that fit you?’” 

In other words, being action-oriented. . . .

In the last couple of years, Fitts and Team GRIT have received accolades for their work and commitment to an inclusive multi sport experience. Almost a year ago, his team was featured on the cover of Triathlete Magazine. In a sport and media landscape synonymous with racial homogeneity, this milestone might represent change to come. 

But, Fitts tells me “conversations around why representation matters have gotten worse,” as he recalls a thread last year on Triathlete Magazine’s Facebook Page that was overwhelmed with racist comments in response to an article about GRIT USA and the work they’re doing to amplify minority voices in sport. 

“It always comes up, anytime Black, Brown, or Asian voices are elevated, the backlash is always about not understanding why it needs to be about color or race.” 

This type of negating response always reminds me of a footnote in Christopher Hitchens’s memoir about how the class system persists in America:

The same is true for racism and the lack of racial equality or equity in America. There is a collective denial of reality among some white Americans who would rather ignore or place blame elsewhere for the state of society than confront the ways privilege works in their favor and advantage. You can’t start to fix and address a problem if the agents most in need of change won’t recognize or acknowledge the problem in the first place.

3. Extras!

Another favorite Hitchens quote is from his take on the Proust Questionnaire:

I think we the people should rise up and demand Tracksmith re-release their sold-out line celebrating the New York Pioneer Club—products aside, they also do great storytelling and photography. For this collection they shared some of the history of Black running clubs in New York:

Ted Corbitt has been hailed as the “spiritual elder of the modern running clan” and the father of long-distance running. The first Black athlete to compete in the Olympic Marathon for the United States, he was the co-founder and president of the New York Road Runners and instrumental in creating the course measurement standards we rely on today. A member of the New York Pioneer Club and an acclaimed physical therapist, Corbitt completed four 300-mile training weeks while working full time, averaging 44.6 miles a day, and set several American records. His consistency and longevity were astounding, running over 1000 miles in one month at age 50 and walking 300 miles in six days at age 82. . . .

Founded in 1936 in Harlem, NY by three Black Athletes—Joseph J. Yancey, Robert Douglas and William Culbreath—the Pioneer Club’s mission was “to support, encourage, and advance athletics among youth of the New York Metropolitan district, regardless of Race, Color or Creed. To encourage and further the ambition of our youth for higher education that they might become intelligent, civic-minded citizens, and to work toward a better racial understanding through the medium of education and sports.” Ted Corbitt became a member of the nation’s first integrated running club in 1947. 

This week was also the 44th anniversary of the first Ironman triathlon race! Read its origin story and resulting legal battles.

There is a Jesse Owens biography featured on the reading list you should check out!

This week’s running playlist!

1.     Risk Management

Violence is a summer activity. I tell myself, running like a fool in the dark, as the sun sets before the midpoint of my long run last Sunday. No one is going to be waiting to jump out from the trail and rape you when it is 30 degrees outside. Still, I pull out a Swiss Army knife and run with it in hand for the remaining 7 miles.

There are exceptions to the rule—crimes of opportunity, bad luck, and Russian military strategy.

In 2017, Runners World released a report on “running while female” following the murders of three women over a nine-day period that summer. The article detailed the results of a survey looking at the discrepancy of harassment faced by men versus women while running:

60% of the women who responded limit their running to daylight hours.

79% of women who responded reported being bothered by unsolicited attention and remarks while running.

30% of women who responded had experienced being followed while running.

54% of women who responded expressed they were sometimes/often/always concerned they would be physically assaulted or receive unwanted physical contact while running.

There is something sinister about statistics like these. I fit in all of them: I normally don’t run at night, I’ve been jeered at while running by men hanging out of cars, I have changed routes to avoid men following me, I avoid running through parts of the city where I’ve been groped walking normally and where other women have been attacked and try to stick to trails and tracks and parks with pedestrian lanes.

I made it back to my car safely after that run, my knees aching in the cold. Part of what makes the numbers troubling is that they represent a distortion of anxiety. I am not afraid of running the way these numbers and behaviors might suggest. No, part of my risk calculus is the knowledge that I am still safer around strangers, statistically than with the people I am closest to. Runner’s World acknowledges this fact and points to other riskier situations people regularly engage in, but the disproportionate sense of fear and danger for women running alone at night persists.

Everyone sucks at risk management. If we have learned nothing from the pandemic it is that people do not know how to assess threat levels and respond accordingly.

Women facing harassment isn’t a newsflash. The problem is when it comes to mitigating risk the burden seems to always be on women to take defensive precautions—draw less attention to our bodies, dress more modestly, carry rape whistles, mace, or pepper spray. Protect ourselves. What would it look like for society to not accept women’s bodies being constantly and hostilely viewed as sex objects that men feel entitled to?

2.     Adidas goes on the offense.

Since it’s Super Bowl Sunday, let’s talk about advertisements and wardrobe malfunctions. We’ve come a long way since Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime performance in 2004—or have we? This week, Adidas joined team #Freethenipple with the release of a new campaign to sell sports bras.

The question is whether Adidas is using this campaign to nakedly profiteer off women’s bodies in an exploitative manner or if they are genuinely pushing a progressive agenda to desexualize how women are perceived in our society while addressing the need for more inclusive clothing design.

The big criticism the ad received, aside from puritanical backlash, is there are no sports bras in a picture for a campaign ostensibly selling sports bras. On Instagram, they took a more demure approach prior to posting tits on main by featuring images of the indentations left on the skin from sports bras. These I personally found slightly more compelling than the clinical style catalog shot of naked chests, they also have better ad copy in the caption.

But do the products themselves back up the shock value of the ads?

While I have not tried any of these on, they don’t look especially promising. To boast 43 new styles and have only 14 (which are actually only 5 different styles with different color options they are counting as separate designs) of them be High Support for running is disappointing. One of them has a structured cup that looks like it includes an underwire for the low price of $75. If there is in fact wire support, I highly doubt it would last more than a couple months of wear and tear before the metal poked through the fabric and started stabbing your sternum. It looks beautiful, but absolutely not. Another design has adjustable shoulder straps so you can customize the fit, another feature I do not trust under stress for a minute.

Again, I have not worn them or road-tested them, but I am skeptical. The only one that looks like it could possibly hope to rival Lululemon’s Enlite bra (which still after about 10 miles begins to chafe despite being the best high-impact option on the market) is the FastImpact Luxe design, except for the removable padding (an ironic bit of fabric to include in this case given the main purpose of padding, typically, is to keep nipples from showing).

Not only that, their Bra Finder search function is terrible. I put my main activity was running and that I was looking for high support and the #1 and #2 recommendations it suggested were light support because I also specified I didn’t want padding which seems to have outweighed the more important aspects of functionality I was looking for.

Given Adidas’s past marketing success with partnerships like Parley for the Ocean and the Ivy Park collection with Beyoncé, this campaign is in line with the brand’s forward-looking and progressive identity. But there is just something off about it, a disconnect between the ads and the products themselves. Strong messaging, but the bras don’t quite come across as a cohesive line being released, this might be attributed to the color schemes seeming random.

I really want to defend this campaign. I want to believe it is possible to change the way our culture and society views women’s bodies—but it’s probably not going to be thanks to a corporation trying to get you to buy something. The longer I sat with the ads and went through the bras on offer the more it seemed like the aggressive use of nudity was a Hail Mary to bring attention to a release of ok designs that otherwise wouldn’t have generated a huge response in a competitive market.

Will the gambit of using nudity work to achieve either goal of desexualizing women’s nipples or selling more bras? Are they actually rising to the challenge of meeting the needs and demands of women looking for better activewear when the selection they’re marketing is thinner and less impressive than they’re letting on?

The paradox of modesty culture is that it contributes to the hypersexualization of women’s bodies as sex objects. “The whole idea of modesty as protection misplaces culpability for women’s objectification, implying that a certain style of clothing can be a prerequisite for respect,” writes Sara Weissman. “Being a human being should be the prerequisite for respect.” Seeing female nipples is not the same as seeing penises, it should be the same as seeing male nipples.

The paradox of using female nudity in empowerment marketing is that their bodies are still being used as objects to sell something.

3.     Links!

Adidas is also a sponsor for the Boston Marathon, which I will be running in April for #TeamBeans after the Speed Project!

“It is not acceptable that more than 50 percent of the world's population live in fear of violence solely because they are female.” An article on how harassment is not about sex, but about control.

Added to the reading list!

This week’s running playlist.

1. “Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow” 

One of the core questions at the start of this project was how do you know when you’re a runner? I have an addendum to the answer in my first post. I don’t think you can really call yourself a runner until you’ve had the experience of setting out on a new route for the first time, maybe you’re traveling or exploring a new part of your city, and then the path you were on comes to an end and you find yourself stranded either on the side of the road or at a dead end. Often, at fault here is not the runner’s failure to map out a safe course, but poor urban planning to allow for a safe course to begin with. Bonus points if the sun is setting and you are miles away from any kind of landmark or safety.

This is mostly in jest, I’m sure there are plenty of people who are runners without gods or masters that get their miles in exclusively on tracks and treadmills. But this could also likely be blamed on bad urban design. If roads were more amenable and didn’t randomly end, who’s to say those track stars wouldn’t be out hitting the pavement instead.

While not a regular occurrence, I’ve personally found myself in the side-of-the-road-dead-end situation more than a few times. Back in 2016, while in Florida (where all great stories begin or go to get weird), my sisters and I had planned a day at Disney World, and I decided to get a jog in that morning before we left for the park. Looking back at the map, since my memory no longer serves me, I am trying to figure out what exactly I was running to that resulted in me ending up on the shoulder of Route 4 calling an Uber (since my sisters didn’t love me enough apparently) to rescue me from my own stupidity and the atrocity of modern urban planning that is the greater Disney complex of Lake Buena Vista, Florida. I did run under the Welcome to Disney World overpass sign though, which was dystopian in its own way.

I don’t recommend this method of discovering a running route won’t work even if it is a free country and there are no signs explicitly saying you can’t. (I did check, and it is in fact legal to walk on these major roads, according to Florida pedestrian traffic law: “If there are no sidewalks by a road or highway, Florida law 316.130(4) specifies that pedestrians may walk by the side of the road. In all circumstances, pedestrians must walk on the shoulder of the road.”)

But more recently it happened again during our speed test coming back down Rockville Pike towards D.C.. Just past the intersection of Tuckerman Lane on the opposite side from the bus stop the sidewalk abruptly ends. I ended up jaywalking to the other side while texts came through from the team warning me that I was going to need to cross.  

The truth is, I was radicalized in 2012 by an excerpt from a book titled “Happy City,” that details how cul de sacs are ruining our health and happiness:

“The way we organize most cities actually encourages individuals to make choices that make everyone’s life harder,” Frank told me. “The system fails because it promises rewards for irrational behavior.”

Put simply, most people do not walk in American cities because cities have designed destinations out of reach. But they have also corroded the experience of walking. Road engineers have not even bothered to build sidewalks in many Atlanta suburbs.

…

Aesthetics matter. We walk farther when streets feel safe and interesting.

The same can be said for running and cycling. Cities without pedestrian thoroughfares and prioritized accessibility are ugly and kill the spirit of exploration. In short, Andre Leon Talley, may he rest in peace, put it best:

2. Say it with me: Boot Edge Edge

It is no secret I am a Mayor Pete fan, and I will not be apologizing for it. This November, he was the subject of ridicule—as he often is, and sometimes deserves—in this case though, he was unfairly maligned by Tucker Carlson and his ilk for having the correct take on Robert Moses making parkway bridges in New York too low for buses to pass so that lower-income people could not easily travel to the beach. In remarks at the White House, on Nov. 8, Transportation Secretary Buttigieg said: 

“I’m still surprised that some people were surprised when I pointed to the fact that if a highway was built for the purpose of dividing a White and a Black neighborhood or if an underpass was constructed such that a bus carrying mostly Black and Puerto Rican kids to a beach — or that would’ve been — in New York was — was designed too low for it to pass by, that that obviously reflects racism that went into those design choices.”

The famous historical anecdote he is referencing is now being called into question by experts and was fact-checked by the Washington Post which decided not to rule one way or another on its veracity and basically concluded, “it’s complicated.”

I have a hard time taking “disputes” like this seriously, considering the ever-growing culture of denial and contention of various major historical events on the right fueled by conspiracy and racial bias. So I am inclined to take Caro and Buttigieg’s side on this. Especially when it’s being used in a way to dismiss inequality and efforts towards equity.

The fact remains that many cities and metropolitan areas in America underserve and keep their communities impoverished with individual-owned car-centric policies and planning that disproportionately impact minorities’ safety and access to higher quality resources.

For those who don’t run or are intimidated by it, the risks presented by dismal infrastructure are rational reasons not to venture out and stray far from home for the sake of exercising: it’s not you who is limited—the map and environment itself are against you.

This is part of the draw of running out in the desert. Its inhospitability is naturally occurring and organic—even if it is as dangerous as it is poetic—rather than politically designed and motivated by powerful men’s resentment for their fellow humanity.

3. Links

Shel Silverstein:

Already linked above, but I really want to emphasize this report from the Brookings Institute on how in order to build safe streets we must confront racism in urban design. In his latest column, Jamelle Bouie highlights this quote from W.E.B Du Bois: “One is astonished in the study of history at the recurrence of the idea that evil must be forgotten, distorted, skimmed over. The difficulty, of course, with this philosophy is that history loses its value as an incentive and example; it paints perfect men and noble nations, but it does not tell the truth.”

Check out Chris Arnade’s newsletter and Twitter where he writes about walking and the urban divide.

Weike Wang in the New Yorker on the masochistic pride in overworking: "Workaholics are addicted to the solace they find in extreme fatigue; it’s like the high that a marathon runner might get in her last mile. I can be utterly depleted yet energized by that depletion."

Outside interviewed legendary naturalist-ultrarunner Bernd Heinrich: “I feel that my lifetime miles—70,000 or whatever they are—have not hurt me one bit yet. Not mentally, not physically. The mental controls the physical, anyway. There aren’t two halves; there’s only one whole.”

I added a couple more urban design books to the reading list since I don’t have space to tackle all of them here! 

This week’s running playlist!

1. Looking for Ludicrous Speed

“This isn’t Connecticut,” Justin, our driver said, “I don’t think this is where we’re supposed to be.” Nikki, the other girl on our team, and I were doing the math on how much time we would have between our turns to run and where we might stop along the way to go to the bathroom when Justin realized we had taken a wrong turn. We were pulled over with the car’s hazard lights flashing on Massachusettes Avenue. Justin pulled up the course map on Strava. We were definitely in the wrong place.

Marcus, our coach, and Mahogany, the other driver, were behind us in another car and had made the same mistake. We had gathered at Union Station at 4:30 am and were all still groggy despite the freezing wind chill. Forrest, our designated lead runner, had been on the course for at least 30 minutes.

While an honest mishap, it was amusing given the route is a straight shot. There was only one turn and both cars missed it. Not only that, Forrest was running so fast he made it all the way to the zoo before we caught up with him.

Despite the rocky beginning, we settled into a rhythm, and in All-American fashion had breakfast at McDonald’s as the sun started to come up.

Through the morning, the temperature dropped from the low teens to near zero. When I finished my first segment the sweat from the back of my neck that collected in my hair froze solid as I got back in the car. Nikki experienced the same with the whisps around her face turning into little icicles.

We decided to turn around early at 30 miles out. On the way back Marcus was clipped by a car backing out of a gas station, which resulted in a tear in one of his shoes. He finished strong in spite of the vehicular interruption.

We each ended up doing roughly 10 miles.

2. Meet the Team

Since December 27th, according to our Strava leaderboard, we have collectively run just over 885 miles. Here is a Q&A with each team member to get to know who will be running in Death Valley for GRIT USA!

Marcus Fitts aka coach fitts | from Washington, D.C. | @coach_fitts | “Stay Hard.”

Why do you want to do The Speed Project?

I’m always up for an adventure and out-of-the-norm challenges. Endurance events make me feel alive and it’s giving me this burning desire to test my limits before my body breaks. I haven’t reached that point yet.

Do you have experience doing ultra races or marathons?

I’ve done 5 marathons and 1 ultramarathon. This will be my 3rd TSP

What are your expectations or hopes for the experience?

For the whole team to have fun, be healthy, and competitive. I don’t want to just participate but leave it all out in the desert. Show the world how 9-5 regular working folks from DC can throw down.

Favorite running shoes?

Asics Metaspeed Sky

Favorite snack or way to refuel?

Coconut Rice Cakes with chocolate & peanut butter.

Favorite athlete or sports team?

Michael Jordan

Forrest | from Graham, N.C. | @tyrannofaurus_rex | “The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, the second-best time is right now.”

Why do you want to do The Speed Project?

It's a race unlike any other. There's nothing like running through the desert at night. The teams are competitive, but there's a feeling of camaraderie that permeates everyone. We're all in it together.

Do you have experience doing ultra races or marathons?

I've done TSP twice before. My first and only official marathon was in Athens Greece in 2019. I did an unofficial marathon for Juneteenth in 2020. I also did a 24-hour virtual Yeti challenge.

What are your expectations or hopes for the experience?

I'd love to maintain a consistent yet challenging pace throughout the entire race. I'd like to be able to mentally push myself beyond the point where I want to quit. As a team, I'd like to see us break 48 hours.

Favorite running shoes?

Whatever's in the bargain bin. I have no brand loyalty. I gravitate toward shoes with lower drops and less cushion though. Pampered feet tend to let you down on harder efforts.

Favorite snack or way to refuel?

Normal post-run: a Nuun dropped in about 3/4 water and 1/4 orange juice. During longer runs, I use Huma gels.

Favorite athlete or sports team?

Baltimore sports teams. Let's go Birdland.

Nikki Keeter | from Ozark, Missouri | @nikkilaturista | “Enthusiasm is common, endurance is rare.” - Angela Duckworth

Why do you want to do The Speed Project?

I have always loved to challenge myself both physically and mentally, but to be doing it with a team as crazy as I am sounds even better!

Do you have experience doing ultra races or marathons?

I’ve completed 4 half marathons and 4 full marathons before!

What are your expectations or hopes for the experience?

I am hoping for an experience unlike any I’ve had before, with amazing athletes!

Favorite running shoes?

Brooks, all the way!

Favorite snack or way to refuel?

Boba’s - omg, the PB&J ones? To die for…

Favorite athlete or sports team?

Kansas City Chiefs, baby! No, not a bandwagon fan… I have loved them for 26 years, through thick and thin!

I appreciate those who are following along! This is going to be an amazing experience, yet a challenging one. Anything worth working for won’t come easy, however, having a support system can make all the difference. LFG!

Joel Frye, but everybody calls me "Joey" | from Cameron, N.C. | @fryeberunnin | “Most people never run far enough on their first wind to find out they've got a second.”

Why do you want to do The Speed Project?

I've wanted to participate in this event since I first learned about it when they had the inaugural TSP. I think this is a bucket list experience for runners and beyond the incredible challenge it will present, I'm excited about the camaraderie with my teammates and the awesome run views along the route.

Do you have experience doing ultra races or marathons?

5 Marathons: Chicago (2015 & 2018), Marine Corps (2016 & 2017), Richmond (2019)

What are your expectations or hopes for the experience?

I expect this to be extremely hard--both physically and mentally. But, I also expect our team to finish within reach of our goal. I hope this will be a fun experience and an opportunity to build relationships with my teammates, and ultimately I hope I am able to uphold my part in contributing to our success.

Favorite running shoes?

Nike Pegasus

Favorite snack or way to refuel?

I love Uncrustables (specifically the grape jelly ones).

Favorite athlete or sports team?

Michael Jordan is my hero.

Matt | from Chapel Hill, N.C. | @cantstopcow | “One mile at a time.”

Why do you want to do The Speed Project?

Looking for an epic running adventure.

Do you have experience doing ultra races or marathons?

Yes, TSP DIY during the two pandemic years, Blue Ridge Relay, three marathons.

What are your expectations or hopes for the experience?

I hope to not get injured and have an adventure with a cool group of runners.

Favorite running shoes?

Normally wear Nikes

Favorite snack or way to refuel?

Chocolate milk post-run

Favorite athlete or sports team?

UNC Tarheels and AC Milan

3. Links!

Allyson Feliz on Adam Grant’s podcast: Defeating disappointment and savoring success.

“NFTs are a lot like sneaker drops” a story from the Wall Street Journal about people buying virtual running shoes.

The team curated the running playlist this week, check out their favorite pump-up songs.