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

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