Happy New Year!
Unbelievably, Breakfast Club is entering its eighth year. We’ve outlasted three presidential administrations, a pandemic, and thousands of miles run.
And as you can tell, things look a bit different. We’ve got a logo.
Designed by Hristijan Eftimov, the concept is a geometric abstraction of two running elements, the bend of a track and the motion of a person’s arms running. The logo will let the newsletter continue to grow and change, while keeping it connected to its origins. I also love that it sorta looks like a piece of bacon.
We’ve also moved to Substack. To explain the shift and what’s on tap for 2023, let’s take a step back and look briefly at the newsletter’s history.
Early run, wacky email
On October 2nd of 2014, the first Breakfast Club run occurred in the Rockridge neighborhood of Oakland with myself, Jesus Romo, and Magda Boulet. It was, I think, Jesus who coined the name ‘Breakfast Club’ since we met at the early hour of 5:30am.
In 2015 these meet-ups coalesced into a weekly Thursday run. We pushed back the start time. More and more folks started showing up.
The email, the ancestor to what you’re now reading, began as a reminder for the weekly run. I lifted the tone from Ben Pochee, then coach for London’s Highgate Harriers, whose communications to the north London club featured a shouty erudite positivity.
At the time, I was wrapping up my PhD, spending my days teaching in seminar rooms and writing my dissertation. Looking for career pathways beyond the lecture hall, I began experimenting with freelance writing for a few outlets.
The Breakfast Club email slowly became more than a reminder as I added digests of running news, a bit of commentary, and the occasional interview.
Runs paused, newsletter evolves
With the pandemic, the Breakfast Club’s weekly runs were paused. But the newsletter grew in both length and audience size. More and more of the audience is here for the content, not the weekly run. As such, the newsletter has become more decoupled from the Thursday run itself.
This past year, I made a deliberate decision to use the newsletter as a place to write short- and medium-form essays. These blend my love of endurance sport with my humanities background and interest in pop culture, ideas, and society.
I’d become unhappy spending my weekends curating links to topical running articles or making hot takes about professional running. So I’ve mostly stopped. (If you’re interested in good pro-running newsletters, check out here, here, and here.)
Why Substack?
I’ve used Mailchimp for years, but that platform is designed for marketing. The emails look great, but they’re meant for ephemeral inbox blasts.
Substack is designed for writers and readers. Posts can be read via email, web, and in the Substack app. It’s easy to find and share older posts.
And while patronage is built into the Substack platform, the vast bulk of Breakfast Club will remain free. I’m grateful you’re interested and reading.
But to quote a famous film: “Big things have small beginnings.” If you like what you read, you can help for the cost of a cup of coffee each month. And I’ll be experimenting with dedicating some content for paid subscribers.
OK, so what’s next?
My goal with the newsletter is to take something from the everyday—a concept, a novel, a park, a piece of exercise equipment—and turn it ever so slightly, making its weirdness and peculiarities newly visible.
When you train as a professional historian, you learn methodologies to spot change happening over time. You quickly realize that nothing is “normal.” Rather, everything is the result of manifold choices, influences, contingencies, structures, and forces interplaying and intersecting in complicated ways.
And perhaps this is the connection with the John Hughes film, which ends with the students, the Breakfast Club, critiquing the principle for seeing them “in the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions.” Each kid in the movie, in fact, contains multitudes and complexities.
So let us wallow in the beautiful nuances of life. Thanks for reading.
What I’m reading and loving
Articles of Interest. I am loving Avery Trufelman’s latest podcast season on the rise of Ivy style as the baseline trend of modern fashion. The story follows Princeton students in the 1920s, post-war Japanese clothiers, the Reagan revolution, and much more. (Substack, Radiotopia)
“Why I Run: On Thoreau and the Pleasures of Not Quite Knowing Where You’re Going.” A gorgeous essay on running and rambling in North Berkeley. (Lit Hub)
Why is Majorie Taylor Greene Like This? How an upper-middle-class Crossfitter from the Atlanta exurbs became a leading voice of the right. (Atlantic)
Guilty pleasure of the month: Knife or Death. Hosted by former pro wrestler Bill Goldberg, a group of
earnest nerdsknife-wielding martial artists cut, slash, and hack their way through an obstacle course using homemade blades. No notes. This is great. (Now on Netflix)
Tweets of the week
Parting thought
“Still, when I run, I enter my animal body, I bask in the air shearing my skin, the crust of salt that forms at my hairline. I smell eucalyptus and redwood mingled with ripe compost in a bin for the waste management truck to pick up. I pass my high school track and laugh, remembering the girl who couldn’t have imagined this woman running by, waving, with miles and miles in front of her.” - Rachel Richardson