Rawdogging

For my first treadmill marathon, I wanted to seek out a gym with as few distractions as possible – no music, no screens, no nothing – to fully embrace last year’s trend of “rawdogging”. Originally popularized in relation to long-haul flying, rawdogging is the opposite of all the scrolling and screens promising instant gratification: it is about forcing yourself to be fully present.

Luckily, my imagination needs very little prompting, so by the time I finished those 42 kilometres, I had been to both ends of the Pacific, climbed the hills of Alvados, and replayed conversations that never quite end. Somewhere after kilometre thirty, when the legs had stopped negotiating and simply got on with it, the absence of distraction began to feel like a relief. There was nothing but the slow, stubborn unfolding of time. Rawdogging, it turns out, is not about asceticism or nostalgia. It is about reclaiming the basic human capacity to stay with a thought, a feeling, or a stretch of time without immediately anaesthetising it. Forty-two kilometres on a treadmill may not be for everyone, but the impulse behind it probably should be.

As for my performance, I was positively surprised to be able to sustain a sub-5 min/km pace while keeping my average heart rate at 149 bpm. I took two short breaks to buy liquids and eat a banana, but kept the watch running throughout. Still, I do not want to count this as an official PB: there was no elevation (and, obviously, zero wind). One day, though, I would like to attempt this on a real marathon race course.