The Table Read

I set a PR this morning at the gym, deadlifting 170 pounds, 136% my bodyweight (and even more significantly for me personally, more than Adele can lift).

It's Week 2 of marathon training, with a kick off last Wednesday at a physical therapy clinic (auspicious, LOL) with my run club, the New York Flyers. I’ve got my little training plan that I’ll dutifully follow — and I've already been admonished a couple of times by my coach for running too fast. I am trying very hard to slow things down and really run the majority of my runs "easy," including yesterday's ~13 mile run up the West Side Highway to the Little Red Lighthouse and then back again. I left the apartment at 6am, hoping to avoid the heat which I mostly managed to do; but the trade-off with early morning runs is that, while the sun doesn’t bake you, the humidity tends to be rough; and so my heart-rate was still higher than I'd have liked. (Coach Amy didn’t chastise me though, so phew…)

I remain utterly overwhelmed by the thought of running 26.2 miles in 17 weeks' time. That's 12 miles more than I've ever run. My Garmin watch is predicting a 4:03:29 marathon. Strava is a bit less optimistic: 4:08:24. Coach Amy, on the other hands, thinks I can do it in 3:53:58, which is silly, right? But she looked me dead in the eye on Wednesday night and said "we got this.” I just have to put in the work (and stay injury-free). Crikey.

Last week, when I published an essay on Faith Kipyegon's attempt at becoming the first woman to run a 4 minute mile, I edited out a paragraph about how, thanks to Coach Bennett from the Nike Run Club app, I'd learned to become not just a runner but a fan of the sport.

On Saturday, I tuned in to the Prefontaine Classic -- live from the campus of the University of Oregon -- and watched, slaw-jawed as Kipyegon set a new world record in the 1500 meter, just blazing around the track, well out ahead of everyone (including the other finalists in last summer’s Olympics), finishing three seconds ahead of her nearest competitor. Her fellow Kenyan Beatrice Chebet set the new world record in the 5K too, becoming the first woman to break 14 minutes at that distance.

“Just do it” or something. (Danger: eyeroll-related injury.)

(A side-note: you ever notice how F1, one of the world's most popular sports and now some bullshit star vehicle for terrible-person Brad Pitt to try to rehabilitate his image, is one of the very few where you can only be a fan, never an athlete? Only spectate, never do?)

I am no longer a fan of the NFL, having quit watching football years ago when the league blackballed Colin Kaepernick for "taking a knee" during the National Anthem. (Also my team, the Denver Broncos, had just won the Super Bowl and it’s good to leave on a high note.) But goddammit, if Kaep isn't out there now, hawking some bullshit AI-in-education product. But I don't regret the decision -- there's something so deeply predatory about sports. All sports. It happens in running to be sure -- I admire Kara Goucher's boundless enthusiasm as a broadcaster knowing how much running (or at least Nike) tried to ruin her life. All sports, but particularly football.

Variety reported last week that Travis Kelce -- tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs but maybe more famous now as Taylor Swift's beau -- admitted that the hardest part of hosting Saturday Night Live was the table read because he "can’t really read that well." I was instantly brought back to my first year teaching writing at the UO when I had a student -- a defensive lineman -- who confessed to being barely literate. I had to go around the Athletic Department to get him the help me needed -- it would have made sure he passed his classes, no doubt, as long as he stayed injury-free (which he didn’t); but they weren't going to get him the academic support he actually needed.

It’s been 20 years now since I was a grad student, and when I watched the broadcast from Hayward Field, the UO is hardly recognizable. Faculty and students were already deeply concerned with the ways in which Nike’s influence (Phil Knight’s money) was reshaping the school, the community, its values. In some ways, we already lost higher ed to business interests — lost it decades ago.

It's so hard to figure out a path forward -- individually, culturally, structurally -- in education. I feel fortunate to have taken a weird and convoluted path through my own schooling, dropping in and out along the way but always managing to muddle through mostly unscathed and I’d like to think somewhat smarter for it. I've done some consulting work over the last week or so for the IB, and as I do credit that program with giving me a solid foundation in critical thinking, it felt really good to offer some critical thoughts back to the organization.

Writing: Friday's Second Breakfast newsletter. Today's. I have two keynotes to write in the coming weeks, as well as a book review and book blurb. Yikes. I need to get to work.

Reading: Kin and I finished Karen Hao's book, Empire of AI -- highly recommended. I also read that book I have to blurb. I finished No More Tears on Johnson & Johnson -- I'm hoping to write about this for Second Breakfast next week, tying it to educators' uncritical love of tech corporations like Google, despite all the malfeasance and harm that these companies enact. I read Girl on Girl by Sophie Gilbert, which is on the violent misogyny that permeates popular culture -- also highly recommended. I also read Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's Abundance, which I do not recommend -- although this will be part of an argument I'm making in one of those upcoming keynotes.

Eating: We had a burger at Lovely's Old Fashioned on the 4th of July -- really the only thing remotely celebratory we did that day. We stopped, on the way home, for an ice cream at Gelatoville. We're heading out shortly for Monday's Burger League -- this week's outing is to Le B., where the burger normally costs $62 apparently. (Our Burger League membership covers the bill, thankfully.) What on earth can a $62 burger entail?! I don't know! But after pulling a 170 pound barbell off the ground this morning, my body is more than ready to find out!

Yours in struggle,
~Audrey