Hi there, welcome back to Breakfast Club, a newsletter for thoughtful movers. My name is Sam Robinson, a former historian-turned-tech-worker who writes about life in motion and the ideas that shape our movement through the world.
For our monthly digest, we’ve got a recap of the Olympic Marathon Trials and seven more stories to start your week. Let’s go!
1) 2024 Marathon Trials
The quadrennial tradition continued this weekend in Orlando, determining who will represent the United States in this summer’s Olympic Games in Paris. '
Personally, I thought this year’s more selective qualifying standards put the race at a greater remove from the large community of semi-elite runners. But there were still storylines that gave credence to the democratic ethos of the trials selection system.
Chiefly, Dakotah Lindwurm’s 3rd-place Olympic berth will give hope to every runner with modest PRs. The D2 athlete was a walk-on at Northern State; in high school she barely broke 12 minutes in the two-mile. What a story!
Here were my favorite highlights from Orlando:
O’Keeffe’s headbanger debut. Fiona O’Keeffe was absolutely fabulous in her debut marathon. Grinding from the front, she literally ran everyone off her back. The performance elevates her into the medal conversation. (LetsRun)
Hall’s Trials heartbreaker. Sara Hall finished 5th, shattering the American masters marathon record, but 35 seconds short of an Olympic spot. Perhaps the most accomplished American distance runner to have never qualified for the Olympics, it was her eighth(!) Olympic trials. (Runner’s World)
The torch is passed. Behind the 1-2 finish of BYU alumni Conner Mantz and Clayton Young, Galen Rupp finished 16th. After dominating U.S. distance running since 2009, Rupp gave way to a new generation of men marathoners. (LetsRun)
Jules Winnfield Award for Bad MFer. Pour one out for Zach Panning who pushed the early miles in a bid to nab a top three spot and assure three American men auto-qualified. (Due to the vagaries of new World Athletics rules, the U.S. is only guaranteed two spots in the men’s Olympic marathon.) Panning faded to 6th over the final 10K. (Flo Track, Runner’s World)
2) The backstory on butts
“The muscles of the butt evolved to allow us to run. Running is one of the most important steps in human evolution because it helped early hominids to hunt prey that was highly caloric — a necessity for having a big brain — rather than only gathering berries and leaves.”
But the muscles of the butt are the less interesting part of the story, according to Heather Radke. It’s the other part that’s been the fascination of western culture for centuries: fat.
In an interview last fall with
, Radke explains that the butt’s fat has been the subject of immense cultural interest, interpretation, and shame. From colonial exoticization of African bodies, to the Victorian weirdness of the bustle, to Kim Kardashian, Radke explores the changing symbolic value of the female butt in her book Butts: A Backstory.3) More than a store
Check out this video from Brooks Running featuring Victor Diaz, the owner of Renegade Running in Oakland, California:
“I didn’t start the store thinking, ‘I’m Mexican and I want to start a running store.’ If I never mentioned my identity or race, it would still be a badass store . . . [But] I was at one of our major brand’s retail summit with about 75 retailers in attendance. I was the only person of color in the room . . . the entire room was white. That moment racialized the work I’m doing.”
The story highlights Diaz’s efforts to include more people of color in American distance running.
4) The Body Electric
How do we uplift our sedentary lives? More and more work, play, and communication involves sitting crumpled into a collection of fleshy angles, staring at screens while bent over desks and chairs. But our bodies evolved in motion.
Up until the 19th century, for most people sitting in chairs was a rarity. Now it’s killing us. Sitting too much has been linked with numerous health concerns, including heart disease, cancer, and diabetes.
In the podcast Body Electric, NPR host Manoush Zomorodi investigates how we can change the relationship between our technology and our bodies to sit less and feel better. Check out Episode 1.
5) Proto-Fascist bodies?
I enjoyed this quirky provocation by
on the work of Leni Riefenstahl, the German director, producer and Nazi fellow-traveler who directed Triumph of the Will and Olympia, the 1936 propaganda film on the Berlin Olympics.One strand of analysis of Riefenstahl considers the idealization of bodily discipline, especially the collective disciplining of bodies in mass choreography (parades, athletics, and marching bands) as proto-Fascist.
Far from it, argues Žižek: such mass choreography was stolen from working-class movements. More genuine forms of bodily discipline are authentically realized in the blue-collar aesthetics of media like 1970s Kung Fu films.
In contrast, Žižek is unsparring of the current zeitgeist’s individualist-oriented training:
“The ‘bad’ bodily discipline, if there is one, is not the collective training, but, rather, jogging and body-building as part of the New Age myth of the realization of the Self's inner potentials.”
Quick splits
Strava’s Chipotle Burrito Challenge Ends with Insanity. Strava and Chipotle teamed up to create a challenge whereby the person who logs the most reps of a given segment that starts or ends at a Chipotle wins a year’s worth of burritos. The Washington DC segment winner ran it 1,345 times. (DC Rainmaker)
How to Eat a Tire in a Year - David Sedaris on walking and talking with a friend. If you’ve ever had a running, biking, or walking buddy, you know how peculiar the conversations can get. (New Yorker)
Electric Tales. Non-sport content, but if you’re looking for something new to bop your head to while you work out, my brother’s band Doc & the Doses released an album of Grateful Dead inspired jams with a twang of Carolina rock. (Spotify)
Weekly run
Breakfast Club meets every Thursday for an 8-mile run:
When and Where: 6:30am at Lake Temescal in Oakland, CA
Pace: ~7:00 to 7:40 pace with some hills
For updates, email Katie Klymko at katieklymko at gmail.com to join Breakfast Club’s WhatsApp chat. More info
For more local events, join our Strava club, East Bay Strava Runners
Tweets of the week
Parting thought
“Make the weird shit you want to see in the world, and don’t just do it for likes or shares - reach out to the other weird shit people and start conversations.”
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That’s it for this week! Thanks for reading. Follow me on Notes, Strava, and what’s left of Twitter.
These are great links. I'll listen to the NPR episode on sedentary lives. I encourage you to read "Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do is Healthy and Rewarding" by Daniel Lieberman, an evolutionary biologist. It's fascinating. He challenges the "sitting is the new smoking" belief by looking at how our ancient ancestors actually were quite sedentary, to preserve calories, with short bouts of intense exercise (sort of like dogs who lie around napping most of the day, then do zoomies). Our modern notion of exercise that developed in the 20th century is not something we evolved to do, which is why it's so difficult for so many to work it into their lives. Anyway, interesting stuff!
Loved the videos on Renegade Running and want to support Victor. Let’s go in on Valentines gifts from there for the two adult women in our lives…..