.𖥔 ݁ ˖ ✦ ‧₊˚ ⋅ Lai Yi Ohlsen

running

map from my Saturday run :) There’s something about the futility of running that I find extremely satisfying. There is almost nothing more pointless and less productive than running just to run and yet it’s truly the most accomplished I’ve felt about anything in years. Routes that loop are obviously more convenient but I get a kick out of running so far that I’m a little bit stranded, purposefully with no actual purpose dislocating my body inconveniently far from where I started

When anyone asks why I started running, I tell them that I’m doing it for my mental health. And that’s true! But I think part of the reason it’s improved my mental health so much is because I can’t actually explain why I’m doing it when I’m actually doing it. If someone who had no concept of mental health were to ask me why I was running while running (like a frog or a man in the 1950s) I think I would have to tell them, just to run. I don’t need to be anywhere, much less anywhere faster. Physically on a macro scale, I’m only making minor improvements — my body will continue to exist whether I push it in this way or not. I won’t produce anything for society or the environment while I run, nor will I take anything away. No significant matter will shift, except the time that I take from the day. It’s not nothing but it’s not something. I think this is how my dog lives her life. She loves to love, pees to pee, sleeps to sleep. If you really watch her, she's quite busy, but it’s never clear what exactly with.

The image I’ve always had of the capitalist rat race is one of men and women in business suits running through the canyons of the Financial District, clawing and pushing to get to the top. But when I run in a crowd of strangers in various forms of spandex on the perimeter of those same buildings, I feel I am a part of something vaguely opposite. It’s not quite a collective, but it’s not a hierarchy either… it’s a lulling rhythm, everyone headed in slightly different directions for slightly different reasons at slightly different speeds. None of us will win or lose and we’ll only be together for a little bit a time but we’ll move forward, one way or another