Gary House-Cutting Through The Noise. Dirt Church Radio 329.Kia ora e te whānau. You’d need to have been living under a rock over the last year not to have seen one of Gary House’s videos in the ultrasphere. From satirical stitches that poke fun at the absurdity of running media to no-nonsense and practical advice to aid in your running, e.g., “Stop being so British when climbing hills” Ali and Matt speak with Gary about his somewhat circuitous route into running, his coaching business, and his leap into the digital running media world. This conversation goes all over the map. We learn that there might be a man named Dead Paul wandering around Wrexham, and that there also might be streets he can’t jog down in London, because it appears that some people can’t take a joke. Dirt Church Radio- Best Enjoyed Running
--- --- ---
Episode Links
Sign up to the DCR AidStation newsletter
The Squadrun 4-Week Training Trial for DCR Listeners!
Dirt Church Radio on Instagram
Enjoy!
Music by Andrew McDowall, Digicake
DCR IN THE WILD
Ali Will be at The Possum Night Trail Run on Saturday June 14th, In Taupō
.
Our mates at Squadrun have come up with a special four-week training trial for listeners of DCR. Now as you’ll know from listening to DCR over the years, Squadrun is the baby of Kerry Suter and Ali Pottinger, and they have coached thousands of runners to success at a bunch of events we love and cherish and if you’ve been to any trail races on either side of the Tasman you’ll have seen the Squadrun colours being represented strongly. So, if you want to give it a crack, here’s the link.
Did you miss out on episodes of the Dirt Church Radio podcast? Listen on your favourite app. There are more than 300 episodes.
Check us out on YouTube!
Family Shapes
I didn’t know who Allan Gurganus was until a couple of days ago. Much to my horror, I’d found I’d stopped my lifelong habit of reading before bed and slipped, step-by-step, into a process of brain-rotting scrolling. The books I’d brought to read sat accusingly on the bedside, and I could feel my attention span receding faster than my hairline.
When I found myself walking out of a bookshop with a copy of The Best of Me, a compilation of the essays of David Sedaris, I was determined to reset. No phone in the room unless I was on-call, and books, books, books before bed. Spending a lifetime decoding other people’s truths has left me with a narrow window of interest in fiction writing, and embracing the reset ideology I’d stepped outside of my comfort zone with this purchase.
Sitting with Lily, on the steps by Queen Elizabeth Square, leafing through the book’s introduction, I came across this quote from Gurganus.
“Without much accuracy, with strangely little love at all, your family will decide for you exactly who you are, and they'll keep nudging, coaxing, poking you until you've changed into that very simple shape.”
What does this have to do with running? Well, nothing. And also, everything.
I have been thinking a lot recently about the identities we hold, and how we shift between them depending on circumstance. I’ve also been thinking about our generational identity, and how this relates to running, and in the wider context, our lives.
I’ve always thought that those of us whose first taste of running media was Unbreakable are now at the point where we are being left behind by the carefully curated world of trail running in the digital age. It’s a sport that can -in some cases, take days, distilled into the vertical video format. It’s not any worse or better, it’s just different. And different, generally, no matter how much I protest to the contrary, scares me. I feel old. And with that feeling of age comes the understanding that nothing in this world is permanent.
I remember the first time that grief interceded in my running on behalf of a dear friend’s wife who passed away from cancer. Not so much a battle, as he said in her eulogy, but a king-hit.
It was years ago, when I was much fitter and far less effective in my running. I was at a track, doing 800m repeats, and every second lap of the interval, I’d begin to have a panic attack.
The focus required for each interval, each descent into physical pain, left space for my reflection on the emotional pain of grief. I was unfamiliar with our friends dying, which happened to other people. Old People. Each time the bucket descended into the well, what it brought back was overwhelming.
Years pass. And we get better at grief, marginally. People in our lives leave. And as they do, we not only reshape the lives we lead, around or over the hole the person filled, but also against those roles our families, and other systems, nudge us into. For a sport that consciously (perhaps self-consciously) brands itself as being life-affirming, conversely, running offers us an honest space to talk about and think about death.
Listen to this episode with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Dirt Church Radio to listen to this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.
