In 2021, like in years before, the writers of
The Michigan Daily Arts are stretching out their
hammies to participate in a grueling challenge
of mental fortitude and physical fitness: the Ann
Arbor Probility Marathon. A little pretentious, a
little weird, The Daily team is a mix of seasoned
athletes and … less seasoned athletes. For the
sake of journalism and prestige, The Daily’s
tenacious review-writing gremlins are closing
their laptops, tying up their Brooks and hitting
the Ann Arbor pavement. Non-gremlin but
marathon-interested University of Michigan
students can join the marathon with the discount
code “Goblue25.”
Brenna “I hate running, but I’ll die before
I’m bad at it” Goss
I’ve wanted to learn how to run ever since
I was forced to run a mile in sixth grade gym
class. I knew it was coming weeks ahead
of time, but I didn’t bother to prepare for it.
After all, I was spending 20 hours per week
in my dance studio, training for competitions
and a potential future career — how much
harder could running be? Unfortunately,
I didn’t get the answer I was looking for. I
made it one lap around the field before I gave
up and just started walking. Unable to stand
being terrible at anything, I started training
in fits and spurts. But although my mile times
gradually got shorter, I never made it more
than a month before giving up on the whole
idea, only to have to start all over again when
I got my motivation back. The problem was, I
just hated running. I hated the feeling of my
heart constricting painfully in my chest, my
throat dry and scraping. I hated the cramps
that would wedge themselves down through
my shoulder and up under my ribs. In the end,
my desire to improve was never stronger than
my desire to just avoid it all.
But, for better or for worse, I’m a stubborn
person. I’ve never been one to let things go
easily. And no matter how much my body
shouts at me that it’s just not meant for cardio,
I am determined to prove it wrong. Even if I
nearly passed out while forcing myself to the
peak of a 14,265-foot mountain. Even if my
heart was beating 195 bpm while climbing
up Colorado’s sand dunes. Even if running
makes me feel like I’m always just a couple of
steps away from a heart attack. If my body is
the instrument through which I experience
the world, then it better be well prepared to do
everything I’m going to ask of it.
I made up my mind in sixth grade, and even
a decade later, I haven’t forgotten it: I’m going
to learn how to run.
Elizabeth “I have asthma, but I’m not
asthmatic” Yoon
Within our lives, we live out little loops,
becoming certain kinds of people defined
for a moment by our fascinations. Soccer
player, high school debater, school doer. Our
pet obsessions and interests memorialize
and drive our outward presentation. It is, in
part, subconscious while also a sustained
performance. Who we are (how we are
perceived and how we envision ourselves) is
tied to our own baked-in idiosyncrasies. They
are the result of compounded habits and tics.
The graphic novel “Habibi” by Craig
Thompson illustrates this well. Toward the
end of the novel, Thompson has a visual
spread of the many different lives the main
characters have lived. You see the characters
as children, teenagers and young adults. Each
iteration is drastically different, adapted to
changing circumstances and lifestyles. Their
lives were trying yet expansive and different:
constantly changing, evolving, devolving
and mobile. I want the same. I want to
look back and see my life segmented
into vibrant and distinct phases.
Thus, I run the marathon to
reboot myself post COVID-19.
I want to build new habits and
successfully merge the athlete I was in
high school with the more sedentary
co-ed I am now. I want to make use of
my many sports bras and evolve myself
into two things: a person who rises early
and a person who can gleefully run seven
miles. The first goal is already in the process
of coming true. My summer morning
commute had me very begrudgingly
trudging out of bed at 6:30 a.m. While I am not
yet gleeful (and have also not started running
more than two miles), I am very hopeful that
by October, I will have enough lung capacity to
laugh while running my leg of the marathon
relay. And if not laughing, armed with my
inhaler, I will definitely be making some kind
of laugh-adjacent, strangled wheezing noise.
Kaitlyn “Retired middle school track star”
Fox
The start of my running career dates back
to sixth grade when my ex-Marine officer
gym coach approached me after the infamous
PACER test and said, “Fox, I’m recruiting you
for the 4×100 relay.” I didn’t particularly enjoy
running at the time, but I was terrified of
saying no to the coach that ordered burpees left
and right and had scrawny middle schoolers
flipping tires across the school soccer field.
I quickly discovered that I was actually a
decent runner after our relay team wound up
winning the local conference championship.
My middle school running career was short-
lived, however, when I came down with
pneumonia in the seventh grade, putting me
on the sidelines for nearly two years as my
lungs recovered.
While running never became my main sport
(I ended up dedicating myself to tennis in high
school), I continued racing on my own time,
even logging a few miles before tennis practices
and running my first half marathon before my
senior season.
Nowadays, finding the time and energy to
maintain my fitness is a challenge, and I’m not
always eager as I was in high school to lace up
my shoes and hit the road. But I’ve stuck with
it because running is a constant challenge, and
I want to
conquer it.
As a type
3
on
the
Enneagram
(aka
the
“achiever”),
running
presents
an
amazing
opportunity to strive for more and work on
bettering myself. I love the prospect of adding
extra miles to my weekly mileage, beating my
personal records and watching my body adapt
to the challenges of running. Even when my
legs feel stiff and lungs burn, I know that pain
is turning me into a better, stronger athlete.
To put it plainly, I love the “running
aesthetic.” I love waking up before the rest
of the world to go for a long run. I live for the
adrenaline rush before a race. I’m secretly
proud when someone tells me I’m crazy
for enjoying running. I chuckle at running
memes, and I love the wholesomeness of the
running community.
Darby “Inclement weather be damned”
Williams
I took up running out of necessity.
My senior year of high school was a disaster
of tempestuous proportions. Literally. Two
months into the school year my school and
home in the U.S. Virgin Islands were hit by
two Category 5 hurricanes. I was forced to
evacuate and live in Utah with my two little
sisters for the remainder of my senior year.
All in all, I spent eight months sleeping on a
deflated air mattress in the living room of my
grandparents’ basement.
That year brought with it six college
rejections, a string of chronic migraines and
the worst heartbreak of my life. Senior year
was as much an exercise in resilience as it was
an exercise in rejection. At its culmination, I
was left completely directionless.
I took up running because I needed
something to reach for. I signed up for a half
marathon, despite only having run eight miles
before. I trained and trained and trained. I
spent hours in the summer sun, sometimes
leaving the track at 10 p.m. Looking back,
my first race time was nothing to write
home about. Nevertheless, it left me
with a small pink medal, copious
blisters and the gift of something I
thought I had lost long ago: purpose.
I signed up for another race. And
another. During my gap year, I ran
five half marathons. Running afforded
me the luxury of losing myself in the
act of progress for progress’s sake.
The beauty of running, for me, was in
the sheer joy of moving forward. Speed
and direction became secondary as I lost
myself in the thrill of the race.
Running taught me the power of being
present. In past years, I had defined myself
through past failures and future anxieties.
In the time I trained, I was able to focus on
the things that brought me joy and fulfillment.
I taught at an elementary school, I acted
in Shakespearean plays, I sang. I left the
heartbreak, the rejection letters and that
shitty deflated mattress in my wake.
Amid the storm-stricken debris of my past
aspirations, I finally found my footing, and
having done so, I did what runners do best.
I moved forward.
Gigi “Send help — lost on a sidewalk
somewhere in the Midwest” Guida
When I first arrived in Ann Arbor, and for
many months after, I had no idea where the
heck I was.
Before freshman move-in, I’d lived on the
same block of Center City Philadelphia my
whole life. My family had moved only once,
when I was a far-from-cognizant newborn,
from a rowhouse on one end of our block to an
identical rowhouse a few doors down. Eighteen
years later, I moved again. This time, not a few
doors down, but to a Midwestern college town.
Driving through flat farmland, turning on
Washtenaw Avenue and walking up the steps
of South Quad, I entered what would become
more than a momentary state of geographic
and cultural disorientation.
In a way I hadn’t predicted, I had a hard
time making sense of Ann Arbor. Where was
I? Would you call it a town? A suburb, maybe?
Certainly not a city like I had been told. Where
were all the elderly people, the kids younger
than college-aged? Or was the whole place a
large-scale hotel for transient 20-something-
year-olds who came and went? Where were
the parks? The old buildings? The gathering
spaces? What did it mean to live here? I didn’t
know, but I was doing it anyway. I was lost in
space, without a sense of place and, for a long
time, Ann Arbor didn’t feel like home.
It wasn’t until the spring of 2020 that
this began to change when, in a moment of
pandemic hysteria, I began training for my
first marathon. During that time, my runs
were vital nutrients to my everyday sanity; they
were a surefire method of escape, a delicious
departure from Zoom and my bedroom desk.
Crucially, my daily run also became an essential
cartographic tool; running in and around Ann
Arbor was when I finally came to know it.
Carried by my own two legs, I found forests,
parks, cabins, farms, deer and a gated mansion
or two. I ran through yellow sassafras leaves and
underneath snowy branches. Herons skulked
on the banks of the Huron River, robins and blue
jays fluttered across the path in front of me. Far
away from my hometown, I saw brightly colored
townhouses with front and back porches, cabins
made of varnished wood, an old church, now
refurbished and residential, a grand stained-
glass window letting light into a living room.
Notably, I got lost all the time. Outrageously
lost. Scarily lost! A certain sort of I-don’t-have-
my-phone-the-sun-is-setting-and-I’m-on-
a-dirt-road lost. But as I got more and more
lost in the Ann Arbor landscape (and do
brace yourself for the incoming cliché), I was
starting to understand exactly where I was.
I ran my marathon in December 2020 in
Philly. I finished Rocky-style at the top of the
Art Museum steps. I hugged my mom, I looked
out at the sunset and the skyline, I totally cried.
Months later, in Ann Arbor now, I’m still
running, still reorienting.
There are some musicians whose performances make
you forget where your body ends and the music begins;
they connect with the crowd so deeply that you feel rooted
in your current moment. This energy was palpable at Theo
Katzman’s Sonic Lunch concert in downtown Ann Arbor
on Sept. 2, for which May Erlewine opened. The same
friendly electricity was palpable in a long Zoom chat with
The Daily.
Katzman’s engaging manner in conversation felt akin to
the way he pulls his listeners in: He asks them to become
part of his musical world and volunteers his emotions so
that they might find something similar stirring within
themselves. “I’ve noticed that people that are fans, they
often sing all the words,” he shared. “It’s really cool,
because it’s like, they’re resonating with that, too.”
And indeed, at the Sonic Lunch, the crowd gleefully
sang along. At first, there was the hesitance that people
seem to find themselves submerged in at outdoor concerts
sometimes, as these so often feel less formal, and you are
aware that pedestrians crossing can see you dancing and
singing. Katzman encouraged the crowd to break out of
the everyday setting we had found ourselves in, until we
couldn’t help but twist our hands up into the air to his funk-
rock, singing his own feelings back at him and laughing at
his occasional dialogue delivery of the lyrics.
This return to his college town carried a good bit of
significance and happy memories for Katzman, saying
“I think I can basically trace every gig I’ve gotten as a
professional musician back to just, like, hanging out in
Kerrytown.” The 2007 U-M graduate still carries the
community he found in Ann Arbor with him, saying that
this school gave him friends all over the world. He met
many of his bandmates from the funk band Vulfpeck
through the jazz program here.
“A very innocent, beautiful time to be in Ann Arbor,” he
reminisced. “We were making music on our own terms. It
was like, so exciting to be a young person on your own for
the first time.” In what I now recognized as a classically
thoughtful Theo Katzman twist, he added, “I mean, I
would imagine you’ve had a similar feeling.”
Of course, now Katzman is more cemented in his
identity as a musician. “I definitely am a performer and
… I feel like I’m my best self when I’m performing music,”
Katzman said.
It was a discovery reached after a long year, one filled
with gratitude for things after they’d been taken away, just
like for so many of us. “That’s what this whole last year has
been,” he pondered. “It’s like, man who really are you? And
what’s important to you right now? And are you going to,
like, double down on that? Or are you going to ignore it?
And I don’t want to ignore it.”
Facing yourself in such a manner is difficult, and
sharing it with a whole crowd is an impressive level of
vulnerability, but Katzman is nothing if not courageous.
His songs very often cover heartbreak and frustration:
his last album Modern Johnny Sings: Songs in the Age
of Vibe mixing political commentary (“You Could Be
President”) with songs about bygone intimacy; his singing
on “Fog In The Mirror” so soft you can tell he is walking
through the memory. His music over the years has
contained all sides of love, from the sharp panged euphoria
of new love, to the feeling of a glowing soft-edged love that
has existed for a long time and continues to exist. This
love reaches further to the pile of sea glass and pieces of a
heart that one resigned oneself to when originally opening
oneself to love.
“My music isn’t separate from my life,” he said. “I’m not
like that kind of artist … it would be cool if (I) were, maybe,
but (I’m) not. It’s like I’m trying to accept more of just who
I am and … how I am.”
This sort of thoughtfulness seems to translate intensely
into his writing process. “I feel like I’m just compelled to
write music and I’m compelled to think a lot about how I
feel and I think sometimes that’s a trap because thinking
can be a trap,” he admits.
But overall, music is omnipresent in his brain, whether
he is writing it or not. As such, he strives to stay productive,
allowing what is in him already to make an appearance
in the world. “When I’m writing … I’m trying not to lead
the music as much as follow it these days, because I think
it’s, that’s part of the magic if you can kind of not close
your mind off.” It is an almost generous sentiment from
a musician who has learned, through time, that you don’t
guide the music or the genius, it guides you.
Emotions, flaky paint colors that they are, so clearly
guide him too. Writing music seems to be an almost
therapeutic process of self-discovery for Katzman, as he
often learns more about what he is thinking and feeling
when trying to communicate it to others through music.
“I like when those emotions change while you’re
writing a song. And sometimes you write a song (and)
you’re like, this is about a person, you know, and then
you’re thinking about (that) person. And then you realize,
actually, this person is actually just symbolic. And then
you’re like, ‘Oh, shit.’ I’m just personifying a feeling,”
Katzman finishes, the casual tone making his piercing
observations seem almost easy to come by. But in the
end, this person he is writing about is a necessary part of
the song, in order to properly create a chain of empathy
between him and his listeners.
Simply writing about the feeling itself would make it
vague, open-ended, obvious. It can tell the listener what
to feel, instead of allowing them to reflect and figure out
why the song resonates with them. It might be different
from what Katzman originally intended, but to him, this is
something to be encouraged.
“I think it’s really cool when a song can mean different
things to different people, based on how it feels to them,
which is sometimes the challenge with lyrics,” Katzman
said. “It’s challenging to write words that are specific
enough to send a message but open enough to not direct
it.”
There is a kind of generosity to statements such as these,
a quality that seems to define Theo Katzman as a musician.
What is music if not generous?
The kind of openness that defines his discography can
be a form of giving of oneself.
“What’s the point of doing any of this? If we’re not
dealing with real shit? And it doesn’t mean I want my music
to be a bloodbath, you know?” he jokes, following up with,
“But I’d like … there (to) be some blood.”
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Arts
4 — Wednesday, September 15, 2021
Daily Arts Runs a Marathon: Introducing the 2021 runners!
BRENNA GOSS, ELIZABETH YOON, KAIT-
LYN FOX, DARBY WILLIAMS, GIGI GUIDA,
ROSS LONDON, KARI ANDERSON
Daily Arts Editors & Writers
Theo Katzman bars none and bares feelings
ROSA SOFIA KAMINSKI
Daily Arts Writer
Read more at MichiganDaily.com
Read more at MichiganDaily.com
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