90s Hagiography and Half Marathons
Now that millennials are ageing into their status as Prime Consumers of culture, it’s no surprise that our childhood era of the 90s is being mined for nostalgia. Not all of this is cynical – I’m as charmed by games like Hypnospace Outlaw that harken back to the early days of the web and Geocities as anyone else.
But there’s a point where nostalgia tips over into hagiography. Lately, I’ve seen people pine for those days where we weren’t always being distracted by our smartphones, where we would all be present and engaged in discussions at all times. Or how programming was much more fun in C and Assembly, whereas nowadays everyone’s forced to use Javascript and Unity. Or how society was much more united in the TV we watched and the newspapers we read.
This is, as the kids would say, ahistorical: lacking in historical perspective or context. You’re kidding yourself if you think people didn’t daydream or zone out during conversations in the 90s – you don’t need a phone to be distracted. TV in the 2010s is unimaginably better and more diverse than in the 90s. So are games and books and music. And while society might seem less united today, perhaps that’s simply because we’re only now casting a light on differences that have always existed. It’s those differences that lead us to our own places to talk to one another, and yes, to find likeminded people to reminisce over the 90s with.
There’s nothing wrong with nostalgia, and some things really were better in the past. But always thinking the past was better than the present is a profoundly depressing thought that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Not that I want to claim we have achieved utopia in 2019; far from it. There is so much we need to improve in the world. But the way to do that is not to slip back into the 90s.
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Last Sunday, I got up at 6:50am to run in the Edinburgh Half Marathon. This was my first in three years, a fairly long gap that’s been otherwise filled with near-daily 7km runs around Holyrood Park. 7km isn’t an especially long distance for a regular runner, but when it includes 118m of elevation gain (or 30 storeys), it’s a proper workout that’s helped build my stamina.
That said, I hadn’t done any actual training for the half marathon. Most training plans have a ~16km run in the fortnight leading up to the race; not quite the 21.1km of the half marathon itself, but close enough to get you used to the distance, and not so long that it unduly tires you out. But the longest run I’d done in the past year was 12km running 700m laps around a cruise ship in the Caribbean. What I needed was to craft the perfect playlist to fill 1 hour and 45 minutes – 25 songs of exceeding energy.
I’ve written elsewhere about what makes for my perfect running playlist, and I stuck to the same formula this time – fun, poppy songs mixed with epic movie soundtracks. It was all loaded up and ready to stream from my iPhone to my Airpods when I realised, 30 seconds after dropping off my bag at the race start, that’d I’d left my phone in the bag.
As soon as I realised, I turned back to the bag drop, which was actually a bunch of people on a lorry who were right at that moment strapping down tarps and shouting at late arrivals to put their bags somewhere else.
“Fucking lol,” I thought. Yes, I still had my Apple Watch, but literally the previous evening I had deleted all the music from it to make space for a watchOS update (because Apple’s storage management is utter shit and either wants to store 7GB of music or none at all – and nothing in between).
But wait! Even though I couldn’t physically reach my phone for the couple of hours, it was still well within Bluetooth range of my Watch. Maybe, just maybe, I could use stream music from my phone to my Watch, which I hoped might cache it for the duration of the race. I sidled over to the lorry, jabbing at my wrist to fast-forward through as many songs as I could, under the dubious gaze of the race workers.
With only a few minutes to go, I spotted a friend in my timing zone at the race start. “I’m just hoping I don’t end up listening to the same song 25 times,” I said. And then we were off, and it turned out I had a good dozen songs on my Watch, enough so that I only heard them twice.
A lot of designers seem to think that runners are best motivated by competition. That’s why leaderboards have featured so prominently in running apps. I don’t doubt that some runners find a lot of pleasure in crushing others, but the truth is that most runners are only competing against themselves during races – if that. Runners will talk about hitting a Personal Best rather than coming in the top 10% of the field; or they might recognise their speed is slowing and simply have a target time they want to hit. They certainly aren’t motivated by beating random strangers among the 11,000 half marathon runners, most of whom will be much faster or slower than them.
But in a race as long as 26.1km, after overtaking and being overtaken for an hour, you’ll eventually find yourself amongst a cohort of people who are running at almost exactly the same speed as you. These are your people, at your level of fitness. And what surprises and delights me every time I’m in a half marathon is just how different everyone looks. Some look like they were ripped from a stock photo of runners, but most are thicker or thinner or younger or older than you would have guess. Some seem to glide through the air, others are fighting with every step. And many don’t at all look like ‘runners’.
Towards the end of the race, I was beginning to slow down when a woman in a light blue top appeared by my elbow. I vaguely remembered overtaking her several kilometers backs, but here she was again, fresher and faster than my cohort: an excellent pacemaker, providing I could keep up. And that’s what I managed for a good three kilometers as we mowed through the field, until I just couldn’t.
Still, I hit a personal best of 1:42:07 placed 1357th out of 11,000, and I gave her a solid high-five at the finish line.
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Playing
📱 Alt-Frequencies, an intriguing but poorly-written audio-driven game from the creators of A Normal Lost Phone.
🎮 God of War, this generation’s high water mark for visually stunning action adventure – and the tiresome Sad Dad game genre.
Watching
📺 Gentleman Jack, featuring the most charismatic, competent, and sexually manipulative protagonist since Don Draper.
Reading
📖 Phantom Architecture by Philip Wilkinson, a lavishly illustrated collection of sixty fantastical structures by Buckminster Fuller, Gaudi, Le Corbusier, Hadid, and Etienne-Louis Boullée’s enormous spherical monument to Isaac Newton.
Unfortunately the book is littered with typos and I spotted at least one glaring factual error (Blade Runner was released in 1982, not 1992, come on!) which casts a shadow of doubt over the rest…