Potch III
The Goldilocks delusion, surrealism, dopamine immersion therapy
Hello from Potch! Welcome and thank you to all my new readers who arrived from Instagram (hell).
I’ve been here almost two weeks and, as I’d hoped, it’s been hugely different to the misery of my January experience. My training is solid and I’m feeling good. I’m healthy, I’ve been here before, and I’m back on the good meds (thank you sertraline sign_of_the_cross.gif).
This camp has a big aerobic focus because of how late World Champs is this year. Our weekly program is one track session, one hill session, one long Fartlek or ‘gears’, a tempo session, and two recovery jogs, with gym and cross-training sprinkled liberally in between.
Since most of the group right now are 1500m runners who eat up aerobic work, and the only other female 800m specialist is the literal Olympic champ, I’m fighting for my life out there, but loving it too. There’s nothing like three months of constant Achilles pain to make you feel grateful for the ability to run uninhibited.
A small part of why I started this newsletter was to have a record of progress that I could use as evidence when doubts take hold. Right now I’m in the ‘Goldilocks zone’ of the Sponginess Matrix (see Potch II) with high mental stability and appropriate absorption. At times like these, I joke to my psychologist that I’m now fixed and have finished therapy. For some reason she doesn’t find this funny.
Once you’re inside the Goldilocks zone, it’s easy to forget the factors keeping you there. This meant I made the poor decision of stopping my meds last November. The running equivalent of this would be stopping my calf raises because my Achilles doesn’t hurt any more. I always need to remind myself of one of my favourite memes:
Track of the week: All of them
Just kidding, but since I’ve already covered the two tracks that we use here in Potch, I’m going to talk about a general aspect of tracks that I particularly enjoy: surrealism.
Synthetic 400m athletics tracks (to differentiate from the diabolical synthetic ‘running tracks’ that are crammed into odd spaces – see @nocontextxctrack for some of the best) are a type of built form that is so perfect and regulated that when they’re plonked into the real world, the contrast to their context feels surreal. The unnaturally saturated and uniform colour of the track is like someone has laid down carpet in the middle of a forest or town square. To show this, here are photos of some tracks I’ve visited with vastly different surroundings.
Surrealism in architecture, to me, is about playing with form, time, associations, the uncanny and unreal, and how the body interacts with space. Sports infrastructure has an especially strong surrealist core, both in its temporality (a stadium is a monolithic shell waiting for its crowd) and its dreamlike quality (associations with childhood and memory).
Some community sports facilities – like the tracks above, where a perfect oval or square directly meets ‘nature’ – are best described as surreal landscape architecture, perhaps in the same category as crop circles. Imagine walking at night through a park when you suddenly come across an occupied hockey pitch, tennis court, football oval, or running track that’s illuminated with floodlights. The light defines a room even though there are no physical walls or ceiling. A strange sense of voyeurism strikes you there in the darkness, as if you’re on the outside looking in.
Participants in my research often associated sports infrastructure with school sport days. An athletics track could trigger feelings of anxiety, dread, and being very small. The guts of stadium seating can feel like a labyrinth to a child.
Can anyone recommend a book or article about sport and surrealism? If so, please email me.
A sketch of … Neurotic News
My current dopamine immersion therapy is listening to a podcast called Neurotic News through noise-cancelling headphones while in bed playing Cozy Solitaire. Sometimes I’ll also listen to it while doing my cross-training in the gym and will laugh out loud and try to avoid making eye contact with anyone. Mostly it feels like I’m listening to two of my bogan friends who just came out of a psych ward. Here’s an example of their comedy:
Bye!
X
10/10
Love your writing and insights Trina :)