Running Simulator 2025
I was strolling peacefully through Victoria Park on a recent afternoon after class, savouring the musty burnt-toast smell that hangs over the junction of Parramatta Road and City Road as the sun finally emerged from its August sabbatical. The ibises were sunbathing. The LimeBike helmets floating in the brackish water of Lake Northam could have been some kind of exotic lotus, newly introduced to Australian shores. I was at peace, briefly…
This reverie was truncated by the sweaty interruption of a shirtless body flying past me, clad in moisture-wicking short shorts and hot pink running shoes.
ON YOUR LEFT!
A flash of electric blue Oakley sunglasses screamed past my peripheral vision. I felt a spray of electrolyte-enriched, high-performance sweat coat the side of my face. Before I could register any more salient information about this athletic specimen, he was gone, running on a plane of pure velocity that I may never access.
~
I’m certain you know someone who runs. I’m also cognisant of the fact that many of you reading this may enjoy running. This is logical. Running is, in my eyes, the most essential or primal form of exercise, and uniquely accessible. (Do forgive my use of the word ‘primal’.) Where other sports and forms of exercise require some extent of knowledge and training in a specialised technique, or an understanding of a conventional set of rules, running is almost wholly intuitive. Running for exercise and outside of a competitive environment is, for an able-bodied individual, natural and ingrained in a way that perhaps no other form of exercise is.
In America (1986), Baudrillard’s attempt at travel writing and cultural dissection of the U.S.A., about two-and-a-half pages are dedicated to the phenomenon of jogging. The Frenchman is, as usual, incisive and slightly obscure. For him, “decidedly, joggers are the true Latter Day Saints and the protagonists of an easy-does-it-apocalypse.” For all its provocative flourish, Baudrillard’s analysis brings a unique cultural insight into a generally accepted practice. He sees jogging as symptomatic of a society brought to a standstill by excess, atomised individuals in a world of infinite abundance who can only find meaning through a machinic drive towards self-annihilation. The runner “has to attain the ecstasy of fatigue, the ‘high’ of mechanical annihilation.” We live in a late-stage capitalist, white-collar world where there is essentially no need to physically exhaust ourselves for our livelihood. This chase for what I have been told is called a ‘runner’s high’ should be more strange to us, a kind of self-flagellation for a white-collar leisure class with nothing better to do.
~
I have at many times in my life wanted to be a Runner. A Runner (I am capitalising here to create a distinct term for this cultural identity), rather than a person who runs, is often spotted in an Instagram story with a pained-yet-sexy grimace accompanied by a Strava screenshot reading “cheeky 25k”. The Runner may or may not be part of a run club with social media graphic design that is reminiscent of a Paddington small-plates concept café-cum-wine-bar. In my pursuit of becoming a Runner, I often find myself late-night doomscrolling through the Nike web-shop convincing myself I need Eliud Kipchoge-approved $400 running shoes with a carbon-fibre midsole.
This cultural identity — performance as Runner — disintegrates when I actually go for a run. I put on the Oakleys, pop in the AirPods (after careful deliberation on a sufficiently ‘hype’ playlist with a tasteful mix of deep cuts and old favourites), and try to run. I tell myself:
I am Running. I am a Runner. I Run. I am shiny blue wraparound Oakleys streaking electric past you, a slovenly walker. I am a speedboat; I generate a wash of pure athletic sweat in my wake that passes over the lazy masses who I only see through the rose-tint of my PrizmTM lenses.*
*Designed and manufactured in an advanced industrial process to blur out people with a VO2 max below that of a semi-professional triathlete.
This delusion, I quickly realise, is completely incongruent with the actual embodied experience of running. My lungs howl and bay for air, the blood vessels in my legs go on strike, and my pores can’t keep up with the quantity of sweat my rapidly-rising core temperature demands of them. As each Nike AirTM cushioned stride contacts the pavement, my knees rattle under the painful experience of actual physical effort, and the idea of being a fleet-footed gazelle bounding through Camperdown Park in lime-green short shorts fades as I see spots in the corners of my vision. Running is visceral, physical, and gross. I am reduced to an animalistic state as blood diverts from my brain to keep my body moving. Like Baudrillard’s jogger, foaming at the mouth, I annihilate my thinking self in pursuit of a goal that doesn’t materially exist. I have no finish line or competition beyond an arbitrary amount of physical exhaustion.
~
Running and being a Runner are completely different things. Experiencing running is to live in one’s body, experiencing Baudrillard’s “mechanical annihilation”, becoming someone “cocooned in the solitary sacrifice of his energy”. Rather, to be a Runner is to only simulate this “solitary sacrifice”, to signify physical effort and performance through the semiotic system of run culture. (“It’s all semiotics bro…”: Roland Barthes, Mythologies, 1957.) Purchasing the $250 MothtechTM t-shirt with performance-enhancing distressing or being featured on the run club Instagram story are just symbolic representations of actual bodily movement — they imply the activity of running, they signify that one runs. The most egregious of these obfuscations is the Strava activity: discontent with reality, the body’s experience of running, we need to translate our effort into a semiotic representation. Sweat, lactic acid, and exhaustion become numbers and orange lines on a map, christened with the offhand title “afternoon 5k”, which tactfully understates the difficulty of the run. The Runner sublimates their bodily exhaustion into an acceptable cultural representation of health, because this is the only way we can reckon with the horror of our IRL bodies in a post-real society.
If a 5k was run in a forest without 5G and no one is around to give Strava kudos, was it run?
We can only run as a hobby because modern society has no need for our bodies. Effort loses its productive value and now belongs to the domain of recreation. This is why the Runner exists. Being a Runner is a cultural performance that allows us to dissociate our bodies from health. Health is no longer a biological determination, rather, to cosplay as a healthy person is to be healthy. We are, for all social intents and purposes, healthy by donning activewear, by waking up at 5am to post a sunrise, by speaking about ‘carb-loading’, ‘interval training’, and how “I’ve been really getting into ice baths recently”. The total exhaustion of the self, the physical hurt and experience of running no longer matters. Health is now totally divorced from the body.
~
Oddly, this makes me want to run more. When I feel so removed from my body, from the visceral feeling of being a fleshy human with various fluids and organs sloshing about in my skin, maybe I can see running, or any sort of physical action, as an act of rebellion. Baudrillard postulates running as self-annihilation, but this is an annihilation of the intellectual, thinking self; a ritual murder of our subject-selves to resurrect our bodies in a time when we discard them as grotesque and unmentionable.
We now move in hyperreality. A state where our social world is completely overtaken by representations of real life, and our reality becomes constructed of simulations. How do we resist? By using our bodies, by moving and being in the world physically, running through hyperreality, we can perhaps regain bodily feeling, taking back reality from the hyperreal.
Designed by Ege Yurdakul