Potch
Welcome to page 1 of my diary about life as a professional runner and sometimes designer.
After the Paris Olympics I joined M11 Track Club, a squad based in Manchester, which will be my home away from home. It’s been an exciting change. For several years I trained mostly solo; now I’m training with Olympic medallists. However, recently I’ve also been dealing with an Achilles issue – my first injury in two years (excluding psychic trauma). So I was understandably terrified/elated about joining my first camp with the team in the hot, humid, slightly elevated (1,340 m / 4,400 ft) town of Potchefstroom, South Africa.
My time in Potch so far has produced some of the worst training performances of my life, and boy, have I been letting everyone know about it. I’m in my group chats asking people to “gas me up” because it’s begun to feel like my professional running career has been a huge scam. Obviously, that’s insane. It’s just that conditions are tough, and my preparation was compromised. But when something you thought was second nature doesn’t come easily, you feel cheated and maybe a little disgusted at yourself.
Something I realise now about training alone was that it was easy to hide. I didn’t compare my sessions to anyone, I didn’t have Strava, I was coached entirely remotely. I ran around in a hyper-insulated space. As an anxious person, this was a dream, but perhaps it hindered my tolerance to the self-comparison, public scrutiny and general discomfort of competition environments. Like I was running on a treadmill, seeing flattering numbers on the screen, only to be confronted by varied weather and terrain come race day. In my new group, I’ll have to learn to be real chill about repeatedly and publicly getting my ass handed to me on a platter.
I’m reminded of a time that I experienced what I call “transcendental shame”: when you experience something so embarrassing that your consciousness leaves your body so that you can see yourself objectively from the outside, allowing you to appreciate the humour of the moment – and to apply the loving kindness you would to any other human being who is bombing hard. This happened to me last year while giving the student speech at my graduation ceremony. I was the final speaker of a three-hour ceremony after 600 architecture and built environment students had had their names called one by one and shuffled to and from the dais to receive their certificates. The atmosphere was serious and boring. Everyone desperately wanted to go home. Now picture me getting behind the lectern, smiling nervously, delivering my opening joke:
“I’m a runner, so here’s some advice for the future in a language I understand. Pace yourself. Stay in your lane. Life’s a marathon, not a sprint!”
Silence. Not one laugh in a hall of roughly 3,000 graduates and their relatives. Time stops. I’m floating in the air looking down on myself, standing in a sea of black robes. That poor girl. Look at her ploughing ahead with her speech knowing that everyone is cringing. I love her. She’s perfect. Anyway – I hope this is how I can handle the hundreds of defeats in store for me this year. I love it when people bomb. Hopefully I can learn to love it when it’s me.
Track of the week: NWU Grass Track
For the final project of my master’s I studied athletics tracks and why they were interesting architectural places. My favourite part was documenting the different tracks I visited over the year as part of my professional training and competition schedule. In this section of my newsletter, I want to bring back this practice of collecting tracks and giving my opinion as middle-distance runner, amateur architect, and critic/hater.
This is the grass track at North-West University in Potchefstroom.
We did a 12 × 200m session here my second day off the plane. I felt like dogshit, but the grass was nice. And it was fun to watch the groundskeepers frantically paint the lanes just minutes before athletes started their sessions. There have been multiple flash storms while I’ve been here, and each time it rains the groundskeepers have to re-paint the lanes.
A track connected to a university is one of the top three most common ownership typologies: school, council/city, or university owned. Tracks are expensive to build and maintain, so it makes sense that they’re funded by large institutions. The only track I’ve visited that didn’t fit in these ownership models was at the Nike Headquarters in Oregon. Then again, maybe that falls under university/institution – the HQ is so big the company calls it a ‘campus’. (One day I hope to visit a track owned by a sole super rich person; hit me up if you have a connect.)
In my eyes, all good tracks should have at least one Greco-Roman sculpture. It’s honestly crazy how few actually do.
In fact, classical sculptures at sporting facilities should be mandatory. Spectacle design (I include all sporting venues in this, given their scale and entertainment program) is ostentatious and camp. Realistic sculptures, especially nude ones, are also ostentatious and camp. The NWU’s inclusion of a replica Discobolus (“the discus thrower”) beside their grass track is a perfect gesture. Despite looking like a cheap concrete fountain in the middle of someone’s front lawn, or perhaps because of that, it adds a certain je ne sais quoi to this otherwise ordinary track.
A sketch of … roof materials in Potch
Three roof types I’ve noticed here in Potchefstroom: thatchwork, terracotta tiles and corrugated metal. There’s definitely an essay in these materials about the history of South Africa but sadly I’m too stupid to write it, so enjoy these three sketches instead.
Bye,
Trina xx
Yay!