Lost kit #3: Every sport is a team sport if you’ve had enough therapy
Or, how to win at being on Strava.
Although I had terrible hair and was very lonely, and although I would not go back to that age now if you paid me, when I was 21, two fortuitous things happened to me. The first was that I was awarded a grant to study for a master’s degree and moved to London. The second was that I met my friends Justin and Aleksi.
Justin was 6’ 5”, from Maine, and suffered from a bizarre, specific form of narcolepsy brought on every time he tried to read William Gaddis’ 1955 novel The Recognitions (a series of photos from a group holiday show him sleeping in different armchairs with the book open in his lap). Aleksi was a corduroy-wearing Finn who seemed to have done everything already, and used to admonish me for using too many brackets in my writing (he now sings opera).
At that point, studying together at Queen Mary, we thought of ourselves as writers and worked with the haphazard intensity of people with no day jobs or real responsibilities. Aleksi, in particular, was prolific: having read a piece of advice from the fantasy novelist David Eddings, he took to repeating the idea that the “first million words are shit” — Eddings had used the word “practice,” but it never seemed worth raising — and would sit in the British Library logging each day’s words in an Excel spreadsheet. Whether because of this strange approach or in spite of it, he was also truly talented. “The Fear,” as we called it, meant he shared his work rarely, but when he did it was always excellent. Besides, we could tell he was good because the other people in his writing groups were all talented, and they’d let him in, too.
The most amazing thing about him was that he apparently felt no professional jealousy. Maybe it was because he loved the work, or maybe it was because he was good at it, but Aleksi was not competitive in his craft. Before the term “shine theory” was coined and feminist publications started repeating the maxim “a rising tide lifts all boats,” Aleksi saw every loved one’s success as his own. If a friend placed a story in a coveted magazine or won a writing competition, he never showed anything other than delight. “They’re on my team,” he’d say, when whichever poet he was exchanging edits with was awarded another batch of prize money.
I was meditating on Aleksi’s theory of teams recently while messing about on Strava. I love Strava, and my approach to it is straightforward: I only add people I know in real life and I award “kudos” to absolutely everything.
One of the beautiful things about sport is that the moment you start doing it, you are as much doing the sport as anyone. Joyciline Jepkosgei’s 5km time is almost half mine, but we both go out and run a 5k. On Strava, one friend’s trip to the bakery is as much a bike ride as another’s Three Peaks Challenge.
Like Aleksi’s writing buddies, the people on Strava are my team — just as Mollie is on my team every time we exchange sweaty selfies, Stephen is on my team when he shares his home spin set-up on Instagram, and Charlotte is on my team even though I think having the patience for the long, steady lido laps she swims is a sign of a potential killer.
Sometimes, I like to imagine all our activities adding up to one huge, communal distance. Naturally, our team’s opponent differs, depending on the day: cold or sadness; laziness; shame about our bodies or just a fear of being no good. What matters is that every time one of us laces up her shoes and heads out the door, she sets the counter ticking.
Together, we cover mile after mile of pavement or grass or road, wearing our mismatched team kit from the back of the cupboard. It doesn’t matter if some of us are faster or slower, or even if our team mates are doing a different sport entirely. Once you’re in the team, my kms are your kms; your laps are my laps—even if they’re done serenely in the lido. Weirdos.
