Tuesday 27 October 2020

Johnson City, Tennessee

Well it's been a little while, but this summer just passed I graduated from SCAD with a BFA and have now moved myself to Milligan, of all places. Having spent the last four years treating this school as my deadly rivals in all things running I guess I've lived long enough to see myself become the enemy. Every now and again I catch myself wearing a buffalo logo and have an awful case of imposter syndrome, but it's been more or less a smooth transition in reality. For those of you back on the Wirral, the move from SCAD to Milligan is something like if I were to jump from Wirral to Harriers, with the slight mitigation that graduation meant I couldn't stay at SCAD even if I'd wanted to.
So now I am in very northeast Tennessee, on the border with North Carolina and Virginia. America is so big that on a map the distance between Atlanta and here looks very small, but it's still about a four hour drive! I'm up in the mountains, in the junction between the Blue Ridge and the Smokey Mountains, both branches of the larger Appalachian range, and happily the hills are both blue and smokey. Nobody knows why they smoke, or why they look blue when you know they're covered in green and brown trees, but it's just one of the mysteries of this place. It is spectacularly beautiful.
As a concept it works for me too, I very much like the idea of hiding away in the mountains and then coming out and doing something impressive when the moment is right. I'm here to run, obviously. Over the last few years it's developed from something I do to more or less my whole way of life. It's not for everyone, but we are pretty isolated here (especially if you don't have a car) and in all honesty I love it. My days are just reading, writing and running, and the occasional hike.
Milligan is very different to SCAD. Similarly to Arran's college, it's a small, private, Christian school. I am pursuing a Masters of Arts in Humanities, a pretty broad-based programme that brings together parts of literature, history, and the arts. A lot of my classes deal in some way with the culture of Appalachia, this mountain region of parts of the southeastern states, which is really interesting for me, having lived in the area for four years, but having been in the city where I was largely shielded from the regional traditional culture. Out here, the old farming way of life is still alive and kicking. Probably the most typical Appalachian view would be rolling fields with a run down barn slowly reverting to vegetation with some blue mountains in the background. There is a general feeling that the hills have never been entirely conquered by man, that nature is always creeping back in overnight. Sometimes we have bears on campus.
I am running quite a lot. Sadly I have no cross-country eligiblity remaining, but the sole silver lining to this whole covid situation has been that the cancellation of track last summer meant I could eke out one more year of college running, so come March most likely with luck I shall be burning track once more. Covid has put a fire blanket on most of my racing plans in almost a year now. I seem to be plagued at the moment with long courses whenever I do get to run. I am very grateful to the organisers managing to host events at all at the moment, but I ran a local '5k' here lasy week and was massively frustrated to find it about 300m long. From my GPS data in all likelihood I ran a 5k pb, possibly even a sub 16, but the course meant I then ran almost another minute and so finished with a very disappointing time. Oh well, at least I'm making some sort of progress.