On Keeping a Running Log
Record keeping as staging for the self.
I'm not sure when I started my running log.
It began in fits and starts—my mother purchased a journal (maybe sophomore year of high school?) a glossy red affair designed for the purpose.
Subdivided into days and weeks, the journal had a few lines of space to note mileage and time spent running. It’s cover was defined by a photograph of a lower leg impacting the ground mid-stride, muscles and sinews almost pornographically engaged.
By college, I had standardized things: I settled on a basic, no-frills composition notebook, which I dutifully filled page by page with entries for each day. I began each week on the recto (right-side page) of the notebook, concluding on the verso (left-side page) with a tally of the weekly mileage.
For the past 19 years, every day has had an entry—a short 2-3 line collection of clipped sentences or bullet points, usually noting where I ran or the details of an interval workout, along with quantitive metrics of time, distance, and average pace.
The log will never be a source of literary value. Each day's entry is barely formal language. People and places are referred to familiarly without context. Mundane observations abound. “Out and back to Shi's,” reads a typical entry. “Left ankle still sore. Eric pushed the pace. Stressed from medieval history exam.”
You'd have to know that “Shi’s” referred to Furman University’s president and that the route passed by the university mansion. My roommate Eric did like to push the pace, though he was usually cheerful about it. And Professor Spear assigned a lot of secondary reading.
But this is the general gist of most entries. It’s an accountant‘s view of running: concise summas, often written in haste with little reflection, occasionally elaborated upon after an important race or when I feel pensive.
This lack of context defines notebooks more generally—a running log is written for an audience of one.
Joan Didion noted that a private notebook is never created for public consumption. It’s the idiosyncratic records of a mind in flux. “We are talking about something private,” she writes. “About bits of the mind‘s string too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker.”
The erratic assemblage of my running log is now a sizable record. Now spanning ten notebooks and four presidential administrations, it takes up half of a shelf.
The log is the only artifact of myself that I've maintained with any sort of diligence. And what was originally intended as a way to track improvement and training cycles over the course of collegiate cross country and track seasons has become something else entirely—a record of sorts for a life now approaching its midpoint.
Why keep using a paper notebook in 2022?
In the same way that contemporary exercise has been co-opted by the fitness-industrial complex, so has the humble running log been shaped by neoliberal trends toward the optimization of the self.
Digital fitness trackers saturate the App Store, waiting to suck up movement and biometric data from your phone or Bluetoothed device to transform it into sleek visualizations, brimming with insights, trend lines, and opportunities for monetization.
These products were mostly assembled in the same slurry of Silicon Valley venture capital that spent the last two decades leveraging behavioral psychology, computer science, and the world’s best engineering minds to build addictive platforms for adverts and subscriptions. Trackers like Fitbit, Strava, and Apple's various health and fitness widgets pixelate the lived experience of movement with slick UX design.
Capitalist imperatives aside, Strava's training log feature is both pretty and useful.
You can look through calendars of activities, hover-over instances of effort, and find helpful aggregates of exercises. It’s one of the platform’s better functions, but it feels like a secondary feature on the site, where the larger goal is to network fitness data to promote increased engagement.
I enjoy using Strava (and pay willingly for it’s premium subscription), but it will never replace my trusty composition notebooks.
That’s partly because data is ephemeral and short-lived.
It’s easily lost in the attrition of hard drives, apps, and data-storage plans. And I’m skeptical that the cloud is a long-term storage solution: the servers upon which our digital lives depend are not designed for duration, but rather performance and speed. I can easily pull up my running log for the year 2004. But my email and instant messages from the same time? Lost forever.
Ironically, this period of intense oversharing, wherein billions of humans carry a suite of communication tools in their pocket, might have a paucity of historical sources. Historians, if any still exist in 200 years, may find these decades to be a new Dark Ages as server banks crumble, circuits overheat, and files erode into obsolescence. Everything, the cacophonous calamity of online voices, will crumble into dust . . . silicon is fragile compared with paper.
The physicality of running logs is a feature, not a bug.
There is intentionality in the effort of putting pen to paper; it creates a reflective moment in the gap between your mind and the movement of pen between fingers. My penmanship is horrific. I grip a pen awkwardly, my fingers clasped clumsily around the cylinder like a seal grasping with its fin. But the sensation of writing—the heft of metal; the scratch against the paper; the blur of wet ink, smudging on occasion against the palm—there’s nothing quite like it.
Unlike the seamless funneling of data into a tracker app, the friction between pen nib and paper pulp creates space for the mind to move and dwell. As the pen meanders across the page, you become less vulnerable to the inputs of social media, notifications, and the innumerable affordances of the attention economy.
Cal Newport, a computer science prof at Georgetown who writes about the intersection of tech and culture, thinks these digital distractions make it exceedingly difficult to find the solitude necessary for creative work. The merest push notification or message can banish it from even the quietest setting. ”Solitude requires you to move past reacting to information created by other people,” he argues. “Focus instead on your own thoughts and experiences—wherever you happen to be.”
Pen and paper can become crucial components in a toolkit for solitude.
Because sometimes the words don’t come easy. A blank page sits before you and does nothing. And this is a good thing.
Oakland artist Jenny Odell argues in her book, How to Do Nothing, that one of the cultural problems of our time is finding “little gaps of solitude and silence,” which are important staging places for creativity:
The function of nothing here—of saying nothing—is that it‘s the precursor to having something to say. Nothing is neither a luxury nor a waste of time, but rather a necessary part of meaningful thought and speech.
The running log—or any notebook or journal for that matter—encourages these precursors to thought. Its contents will never be monetizable and will never have meaning for anyone outside of itself.
And that’s exactly the point.
A running log is a record, but also a staging place for the self. It’s a space to note what’s happened in the past to reflect upon the opportunities of the future. Cultivating such spaces, however old-fashioned they may seem, is more important than ever.
Thanks for reading.
The weekly run
Breakfast Club's weekly run meets every Thursday morning in the Oakland hills for an 8-mile run.
When and Where: Thursday, 6:30am at Lake Temescal
Pace: ~7:00 to 7:40 pace; routes include a few hundred feet of climbing. See route on Strava
Parking: lots are closed early in the morning, but street parking along Broadway is plentiful just beyond the park's northern entrance. Be careful with belongings as theft is common.
Meeting spot: north side of the lake at the toilets near the northern parking lot. The group runs a clockwise loop around the lake before heading out of the park. Vaccines are mandatory.
Quick splits
If you tap one link in this newsletter, let it be to this video featuring Antoine Hunter, a choreographer and dancer from Oakland who is deaf. “I want to see the world where people give each other time, listen, and express themselves fully as they know how to express themselves.” (YouTube, Doha Debates)
“I began to run farther and farther at night, in expiation, but also still looking for her.” Dive into this short story set in Palo Alto. The narrator, a recent college grad, temps at a government office and spends her evenings running in the South Bay hills. A must-read if you've ever rented an in-law apartment in the Bay Area. (New Yorker)
Molly Huddle describes what the next fifty years should look like for women’s running. (Runner’s World)
Margaret Talbot reviews several books investigating why exercise became so awful. Gym memberships, aligning behaviors to scientific research and dieting advice, the pressures of bodily appearance have squashed the joy of movement. (New Yorker)
Parting thought
“I have a great deal of company in my house; especially in the morning, when nobody calls.”
- Henry David Thoreau
That’s all for this week. Thanks for subscribing.
Amen to that