As promised, here is some more detail about the virtual challenge I chose. There were a few I looked at. The Berlin Wall was tempting but short, there’s a Lord of the Rings one, an Avengers one… but the one that caught my eye was Cuba – a 70 ish mile virtual journey from Santiago to Havana. It caught my eye for several reasons. In 2011 Kath and I went to Cuba and the trip we did was sort of that route in reverse. I thought it would be a nice way to remember that adventure and reflect on how much things have changed and how much they are still the same. I thought having a tangible excuse to spend time with those memories would be nice. It also feels like I want Cuba in my thoughts at the moment. Our god daughter and her brother are half Cuban, one of our best friends is Cuban. I don’t know anywhere near enough about how things currently are in Cuba because there is so little news coverage that really provides any detail but it sounds horrendous. From the news I do see, little help seems to be getting through, blackouts continue as the energy crisis worsens, there are critical food shortages as well as a lack of medicines and basic necessities. Add earthquakes and hurricanes and a government responding badly and US sanctions making everything even more difficult and you have what the UN last week called a worsening humanitarian crisis. And I can do nothing really. What I can do is keep Cuba and the Cuban people in my thoughts. I can look for ways to support humanitarian efforts, I can keep developing legal curricula that focus on the importance of international law so that the next generations do better. I can keep thinking about what I can do. It’s almost nothing, it’s nowhere near enough and I absolutely realise that me doing the challenge is really just self indulgent crap. But for me it is also away to keep my privileged perfect life in perspective, to remember that when I can, I need to do something, however small and insignificant that something is. It has to be better than nothing. It has to.
So the challenge works using an App. In the App you have your profile where you find a list of your challenges (yes there are monsters who do more than one at once). You can add distances manually or you can connect your app of choice – I have connected Strava so I don’t have to remember to upload. You can count any sport where you cover distance and apparently you can also convert things like weight training or yoga – not sure how, not something I am interested in doing. The challenge itself basically opens on a map. In my case it popped me on the map on the edge of Santiago De Cuba and as I clock up my miles here in West Yorkshire, I move along the map in Santiago de Cuba. At certain points I unlock what are called rewards. First I got a postcard. A postcard appears to be a little essay about the place. Some history and local info. I haven’t fact checked it but nothing seemed obviously incorrect when I read it – perhaps just a bit sanitised for tourists. That’s how far I’d got after my first run on Monday.
Next I ‘unlocked’ a Local Spot – Castillo de San Pedro de la Roca. The App gives me a bit of information and some pictures – the pictures were instantly familiar. And here the reflections begin. By the time we got to Santiago De Cuba on our trip, Kath and I were pretty fed up with the stupidity of most of our tour group (why oh why did we think we could do group travel, we hate people) so when we got to the Castle we kept ourselves to ourselves and just people watched. Then we saw the quickest and most spectacular sunset I have ever seen. It makes sense when you know, but it had never occurred to me that sunsets vary in the time it takes for the sun to dip behind to horizon based on where you are in relation to the equator. So I am used to slow lingering sunsets that go on for a while – because, hello northern Europe but not so much in the Caribbean – the sun just sort of drops out of the sky. No long lingering evening watching the sun slowly make its way through the sky – just a sort of constant steady decent down past the horizon. Spectacular. Anyway, it was a lovely evening and after the sunset went for a nice meal and I learned that when there are enough mosquitos just sitting next to Kath isn’t enough to keep me safe, I actually had to use repellent. No seriously, usually when I am with Kath, I don’t get bites at all, she does. Anyway, I wonder what Santiago is like now. I am sure the sunsets are as spectacular as ever, but what will the sun rise to? Does each new day bring hope or just more suffering? And as I was looking at the app, reading the information and viewing the pictures they have, I wondered if I could get fit enough to do something outrageous again, something that people might actually pay money to support or see me do. What if I could work towards something that could help just a tiny little bit. So maybe that’s something I could do. Maybe. Anyway, here are two 2011 photos from my 2026 virtual starting point for this journey.
I only did 2 miles today. I gave myself a month to do this challenge and I am now behind pace but that really doesn’t matter. I’ll catch up eventually. I also ‘unlocked’ a Local Interest spot. Again, information and some pictures from the App. I feel a little bit like I am reading a travel guide, and I guess in some ways I am. I am only just over 7km in. The app lets you see at a glance how far you have come (I think you can set it to miles or km, I’m on km at the moment) and how many days you have done/have left. You set the time goal when you set up the challenge – you can change it though. The App also gives you the option to view the area you are in in Street View – but of course this is Cuba. To my delight there is no official Google Street View in Cuba. A little bit of the world that doesn’t exist in Google. That feels perfect to me in this always online world. I was thinking back to 2011 when we took our trip. I had just handed in my PhD, I was enjoying my teaching and my writing, the thought of running hadn’t crossed my mind, in many ways the world was simpler then. But so much is also still the same. I don’t really feel any different – a little more cynical maybe, a little creakier and stiffer and possibly a little more unfuckwithable and less tolerant of bullshit.
Anyway, this is supposed to be a running blog. So today, after work, when the temptation to just fall face first onto the bed and whimper was almost overwhelming, I instead marched a mile uphill and then jogged a mile back down – no run/walk intervals as such unless you take one long mile slog uphill and an ok but slow plod down the hill as a giant walk/run interval. My legs were not a fan of uphill – my calf muscles were proper grumpy with that and then running down everything was a bit bemused that I wasn’t stopping after 30 second. I really wanted to stop and walk – but come on – it’s downhill. So I didn’t stop, because sometimes I can make my brain behave and I can think things like – ‘you can do this, you are good at hard, you’re breathing fine, no that didn’t hurt, oh look rabbit. And all is fine.
So, virtually I am on a random road in Santiago de Cuba and in reality I am trying to function in a world that has gone insane, in a world where I am safe and comfortable and oh so privileged simply because of where I was born and chose to live. The virtual challenge is making me want to run, it’s making me want to unlock the next ‘reward’ and move through Cuba because I want to know where this will take me, what ideas I might have, what rabbit holes (not literally I hope, Kath did that once) I will go down and whether in all of that there is anything I can do that can help make the world a better place.
really (not) a runner 