Of the unimportant things that a reasonable group of Brazilians take seriously, street racing events deserve consideration.
The noisy little bubble of runners is unanimous in criticizing races that fail to calculate the distance covered, do not offer water every half kilometer and, heresy of heresies, have extravagant regulations.
This was the case of the Sorocaba marathon, which, by prohibiting runners from using headphones, exposed its organizers to the heaviest of sentences, as if they were, say, the federal government, and the federal government wanted to eliminate the subsidies given to an economic sector to survive the pandemic. And the pandemic, of course, is over.
Didn’t it occur to critics that the discretion of Sorocaba’s legislators was something only for the English to see? After all, how to monitor the rule?
Of course it happened, but I couldn’t miss the review.
I know I preach in the desert, because in Brazil, runners love to see Elvis’s clone at races, hear the usual announcer speaking the usual platitudes, dodge swarms of photographers coming from God knows where and take home every pamphlet that offers 5 % discount on any service he will never use.
Even so, I ask the rhetorical question: why on earth would someone prioritize the expensive and crowded race on Sunday over the free one in the morning or late afternoon on any ordinary day?
By betting so many chips on the weekend, fans may miss the beauty, the magic of what people usually call “training”.
The value of the test, and not so much of the “training”, is very much imported from the mentality of physical educators, who like to talk about “objectives” and who usually offer their pupils missions throughout the week with the aim that they “perform ” on Sunday. The so-called canon.
Not that it’s not recommended to do a series of sprints during interval training on Wednesday, which will most likely make the runner strangely better at endurance. But the question is knowing how to enjoy it.
Knowing how to enjoy — I didn’t say knowing how to suffer.
Hormones and endocannabinoids released during physical activity, and which would be responsible for the “running high” (in English it is better: “runner’s high”), are discharged at any time, not just in the race in which the Elvis clone makes his “cameo”. The problem is that, as with recreational cannabis, we barely feel the high, we say that “it didn’t hit”, but it is precisely in the feeling of well-being that it manifests itself.
(Usually you need, here’s the paradox, to stop running to notice the high).
Physical activity, and running is a winner in this, is the best way to make you enjoy where you are. If this place is nature, a park, the empty, tree-lined streets of USP at dusk, no cars around, birds singing, cicadas chirping, a somewhat endocannabinoid narrator writing, my God. You can even imagine living another year in São Paulo.
At this time, all you need are your headphones.
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