at home in…, w| Gerald Zhang-Schmidt

A year ends, a new year starts, gym memberships go up – but it’s not the solution, it’s perhaps a part of the “disease” that we think we need fitness centers for our health and fitness. And no, it doesn’t necessarily take running, either. Of course, I sympathize with Scott Jurek, ultrarunner par excellence, when [...]

How do you make yourself at home where you are, as you are, but with growth and learning? For me, in 2012, this was very much about physical activity around the places where I live. Often enough, truly around, seeing how I usually run in circles – and tried to circle around Vienna. The prior [...]

Saturday, August 25 saw me at the mountain marathon in and around Linz (Linzer Bergmarathon). It brought to a close the mountain marathon cup in Upper Austria, the set of three mountain ultramarathons I participated in this summer – and where Paul Auster describes his memoir as working on a “phenomenology of breathing,” it seems [...]

… and the way is up, because it’s the Höllkogel (“hell peak”) I’m talking about, and it’s the path to better. The backs of my hands hurt. You can see a distinct line where the shirt began, and find another color again on my palms. Sunburn. I was dehydrated enough I partially re-filled my water [...]

Pedestrian. It just means “walking, on foot,” yet the very word evokes images of peasants unable to afford anything but a pair of shoes, people who represent an obstacle to the flow of vehicular traffic, lives and things that are hum-drum, everyday, boring. It is just these things that are the most normal, usual, that [...]