Straights & Curves: Last Miles

9 stories to start your week. (4 min read)

Welcome back to Breakfast Club, stories about life in motion and the ideas that shape our movement through the world. For our Straights & Curves digest, here are 9 stories to start your week. (4 min read)

Midjourney generation of a 1960s advertisement for publications about the running boom.

1. The Brutal Wonders of a Late-Summer Run (Bulwark)

Nick Ripatrazone

goes on a warm summer run and travels back in time to the writing of the 1970s running boom.

The Brutal Wonders of a Late-Summer Run

Starting from the essays of the physician and runner George Sheehan, Ripatrazone surveys the lesser known writers of the decade.

I’ve always viewed these writers with a side-eye. Florid prose about “transcendence through running” seems like failed Boomer political activism morphed into vanilla, market-friendly mysticism—an early iteration of our current Goopified self-care hellscape.

But Ripatrazone traces this esotericism to the writers’ recognition of running’s unique totalism: “Running makes a claim on our entire bodies, and because of the sorts of spiritually restless creatures we are, that claim is most keenly felt in our souls.”

2. Extreme heat and the body (New Yorker)

Dhruv Khullar, a physician and writer for the New Yorker, visited UConn’s Kory Stringer Institute to endure their environmental chamber, which can adjust the temperature between freezing and 120 degrees.

“When you do intense exercise in the heat… the blood or the fluid in your body has to now be shared by three main entities: your skin, so you can keep yourself cool, your heart, so you can maintain your stroke volume and your blood pressure, and also your muscles so you can maintain that level of exercise and performance that you want.”

When a person suffers an exertional heat stroke, there’s little time to get their bodies under 104 degrees to ensure survivability. Best practice is to first cool the person using cold-water immersion and then transport to medical aid.

Read the piece | Listen to a podcast version | Watch Khullar get heat tested

3. Last mile predicaments (Iterate)

Chris Jennings

ponders which transit mode—ebikes, bikeshares, or electric scooters—will win out to solve the first and last mile problem of urban commutes.

I read this with interest. While I’m no longer making a daily commute down to the distant tech campuses of Silicon Valley, I still travel there every few weeks. And easily the biggest challenge is connecting the doors of home and office with public transit.

Thus far, the most catastrophic of these commutes was crashing an electric Lime scooter on the way to the train, sliding out on a slurry of bird guano beneath a night heron roosting spot and limping around the rest of the day, smelling faintly of ammonia.

So, yeah… I hope we figure this out.

4. Dublin Marathon Medal Honors Yeats… and Misquotes Him (NY Times)

The quote, “There are no strangers here; only friends you haven’t met yet.” is etched on the medals that will be given to finishers. But there’s no evidence the poet William Butler Yeats ever wrote or said the line.

Read more

5. Treadmill banger: “Can You Hear The Music” by Ludwig Göransson.

With smoke affecting the Bay’s air quality, I’ve been on the treadmill and listening to Göransson’s score for Oppenheimer. When I watched the film, I was deeply moved by an early montage of Oppenheimer’s training, conveying how his ideas were shaped by the cultural and scientific milieu of 1920s Europe. Göransson’s pulsing strings capture the wondrous and awful mania that drives people to a life of the mind.

Allison Cole, composer at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, writes, “Göransson uses rhythmic techniques such as triplets – when three notes are played in the space of two – to build the intensity and to create escalating cross-rhythms.” These layers of strings create cross-weaving rhythms, building a sense of agitation, momentum, and energy.

Listen on Spotify | Listen on YouTube

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Quick splits

• Assefa demolishes marathon world record (LetsRun)

  • “Ethiopia’s Tigst Assefa ran 2:11:53 to win the 2023 BMW Berlin Marathon and take more than two minutes off Brigid Kosgei‘s 2:14:04 world record.”

• Bonnet breaks Pikes Peak Ascent record (iRunFar)

  • “Rémi Bonnet won last year’s race in 2:07:02, and so his run this year was significantly faster than his former best. The previous best was Matt Carpenter’s 2:01:06, run as part of the roundtrip Pikes Peak Marathon race in 1993.”

• No, I don’t want to go for a walk with you. (NY Times)

  • “Taking a walk with someone you don’t know that well feels, to me at least, a bit like a forced march into intimacy, or an unwanted conscription of a treasured morsel of leisure into our obsession with productivity and self-improvement.”

• Treat your day job like brushing your teeth (Little Thoughts)

  • “You might not get real satisfaction from the act of it. It’s just something you do. But because you do it consistently and without question, you are able to enjoy the things that do bring you satisfaction.”

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Tweets of the week

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That’s it for this week! Thanks for reading. Follow me on Notes, Strava, and what’s left of Twitter.