North Brooklyn Runners: A Community Running Group Serving Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Bushwick, and Beyond!

NBR MEMBER PROFILES – MISHKA VERTIN

NBR Profile No. 6

Rodrigo Toscano talks with MISHKA VERTIN

Mishka Vertin did her first NBR Saturday bridge run in January of 2010, but didn’t become an official runner for the team until the Healthy Kidney 10k in May. Prior to NBR, she had been a member of the NY Harriers for six years. A year prior to that 10k, she moved to Brooklyn – Clinton Hill.  By that point, she wasn’t working out with her old team anymore in Central Park, so she started checking out the NBR website, captivated by the overall feel of the team. Somewhat unnerved by her former team’s excessive run time ledgers and trophy counts, she finally made the switch. Mishka originally hails from rural Minnesota (near Fargo, ND, where “near” means within 100 miles.)  She has run three marathons, but ardently prefers half marathons and 10 milers. She is currently the social activities co-director for the team. Known for her love of running in costume (“nun” “cheerleader” “German beer girl” “Hawaiian (in coconut bra)” “reindeer in front of Santa” “sperm – chasing an egg”) NBR 2011 is sure to get really interesting. She also co-leads a (semi-renegade) NBR running group called “The Monday Morning After,” which runs in Prospect Park.  In college, she competed in long, triple and high jumping events. She enjoys FBD (full-body dancing), and recently scooped up some roller skates in hopes of joining a roller derby team. Given that she used to be a competitive figure skater, she figured the skills would translate. That is to say, Mishka aims to transpose her former lives onto the present – come what may. Very NBR. 

RT: Mishka, my lingering catholic schoolboy sensibility has me nervous just thinking about it … but what would it be – what might come of it – if we organized an all-nude NBR spring run? Two hundred runners!  Oodles of firm targets for the 94th precinct to chase down for summons, oodles of happy loons zigzagging all over the Northside – in zig zags, in loop de loops – around cars, trees, packs of pedestrians, “coffee at Urban Rustic” wouldn’t quite go down so easily that day. Where am I going with all this?

Well, by early 20th century standards we do run “nude.” But by standards of 2010, we’re “just right.” But this “just right” thing is voluble, in flux culturally. The other day while perusing the web looking for American 10k record holder, Chris Solinsky and 5k record holder, Molly Huddle, I ran into a blog whose pride is to collect pics of women athletes in special “poses” (ass shot, stills, etc – nothing in motion, the heart of running).  Honestly, it upset me, a lot. Besides it being certifiably douche, I thought, ok, in this arena of civic life, women’s athletics, if the sport gets trashed so easily like that, how can that be anything but detrimental for the sport at large (where running is currently reaching ever-new heights of gender parity). Also, I’ll admit I felt good amount of hypocrisy scrolling through the site to “see” just how messed up it was.

But also I started to reflect on how we, as runner “boys” and “girls” (each differently responsive to changing scales of sexual definition) how we do admire men’s & women’s bodies, their proportions, their expressive ways of releasing energy, their strangeness as well (“There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the
 proportion” – Francis Bacon) … I thought, how do we as devotees of running passionately assert the sensuality of sport, while fending off opportunistic appropriations of it?

MV: This is a really interesting question that, actually, joining NBR got me thinking about a lot. This is because to get to the Saturday bridge runs, I find myself running right through central Hasid territory on the Sabbath. So I found it important that you added the words “in cultural flux” to your question – because by whose cultural standards is my level of nudity/non-nudity (tank and shorts) “just right”? I guess I’m just right by whatever mainstream media tells me at this very moment is appropriate, because I am by most senses a follower of those guidelines. The Hasid community, on the other hand, by no doubt would feel as though I myself am using my body and sexuality inappropriately, “opportunistically” even. Sure I am scantily clad because it’s most comfortable in hot weather, but I suppose my shorts don’t have to be quite as short as they are – but what the hell would I be running so long for if it wasn’t to show off a bit of the bod then sometimes? I scoff a bit as the men turn their heads or lift their (and I hope I don’t offend by using wholly incorrect vocabulary here) ‘scarves’ over their eyes as I run by (yes, they do that). I get annoyed because I then feel badly about myself and my clothing choices.

My own upbringing by parents incredibly liberal in all things with the huge exception of sex and displays of sexuality in the public/media created a dichotomy within me regarding sex and nudity – I have a strong negative reaction to, let’s say, a gigantic Victoria’s Secret ad in midtown displaying almost-naked women – I immediately get incredibly upset. My response directly following is embarrassment with myself for having such a “buttoned-up” American response – such displays of the beauty of the body are commonplace and accepted in most areas of the world both more and less traditionally “liberal” than the US (Europe and South America, for example). So to get back to athletics – I definitely think the lines are blurred within all of us. Gabrielle Reece posed nude in some magazine and she and most others hailed it as a display of the athletic beauty of the body. Was her personal purpose in posing different than Amanda Beard’s in Playboy? Or Michael Phelps? That asshole football player from the Eagles – was he called T.O.? There was a naked photo of him in my gym once (holding an “appropriately” placed football) advertising some TV show about the athletic body, which would assume its intention was to celebrate his athletic prowess but of course all I was thinking about was how great it would be if he would walk down off the poster and have sex with me (wait, is this going on the interweb for my father to find when he periodically googles my name to make sure I am up to only good?) Anyways, I don’t know if we can have one thing without the other – our feelings of sexuality are enmeshed with images of nakedness.

When you ask how we openly celebrate the beauty of the body while “fending off opportunistic appropriations” of it, I have to wonder where your own personal feelings are coming from – judging based on your word choice, I guess. Are you assuming that you and I have the same standards for what would be crossing the line? And that we should not use our body to gain opportunities? I would like to hear more about your opinions on all this. I think an all-nude run sounds fantastic, though I might assume that my comfort with the naked body is considerably higher than even the “normal” person in “North Brooklyn” (haha – does that exist?). I mean, I take my pants off on the subway, and I lament that I ever have to put them back on. Yet my own socialization is such that if someone were to walk in on me while I was half-naked changing I would most likely scream and run. Anyway, I’ve rambled on too long  – and … I wonder how all that I’ve said here compares to your being “upset” as you scanned down the page of women in “special” poses?

RT: I really appreciate you offering up these from-the-hip perspectives, taking it to the level of concrete experience – cool.  I suppose my somewhat extravagant opening was to elicit such a response, a scratching of the cultural scabs, and edging towards the raw end of running matters as opposed to the “overcooked” (to use anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss’s phrase as regards civilization’s blind spots). So let’s dive right into this stinky hamper!

What do I think? “Down with fig-leaf o’er the nards mentalities!” – that’s easy for me to say, cause I feel it to be “right.” Like you –I admit it, I tend to hone to changing standards as represented by popular media. Though I try to maintain a critical (but relaxed) attitude towards those envelope-pushing billboards.  Also, I figure that since running requires so much deep physical exertion-pleasure, plus bonding over such deep exertion-pleasure, that the rewards that whatever rewards follow from it (each has their own notion of what constitutes “reward”) that’s it all plenty fine. If that sounds runner-centric to some, I’ll bear the flack for that.

And you are 100% correct. My assumptions on gender and sexuality vis-à-vis “athletics” can only be quite different from yours! Nobody has ever scoffed at me while on a run, or hastily adjusted a piece of their clothing due to my simply swooping by (on a hot day). But I should offer up something experientially concrete too. Let’s talk about class and body image.

So I’ve worked in and around the labor movement for over fifteen years, largely in the union world, and before that, five years in social services. And when I walk into a meeting where nobody knows me, unless I’m wearing my United Steelworkers’ swag, people immediately assume I’m on the management side. And it kind of adds up, I have to admit. The strata of people all the way from upper middle management strata to the near the top, is filled with people who I could drop names like Derartu Tulu, Paul Tergat, and be perfectly well understood. There is, of course, nothing about running in itself that predisposes it to be the sport of choice for any specific social strata of society, not at all, but here, in NYC, it’s more the case than not that a large percentage of the running community tends to come from the ranks of what might called the professional class.

What follows in such encounters is that even after my union creds become clearly palpable, people have a hard time shifting out of what screams out from their subconscious: this guy’s a “cadet!”  Added to this (and this is where it gets really interesting) is that the women have a harder time glossing over what they’re seeing. The men can more easily be switched into a masculinist discourse of, well, “brawn” (funny, cause by my NBR-stimulated standards, I’m anything but brawn).  It’s not as easy to “switch” into anything with my union sisters (until they get to know me at least). It’s from the onset questionable (unforgivable?) that I should have so much time to run and cross train. So the sport is assumed (whether rightly or wrongly) to be doubly poaching on female-generated work (the assumption here is that asymmetries in work vs. pay are still operable in 2011). And toss in the Great American Hard Body discourse into it, as a cultural surround, and I’m backpedaling—hard. At this crossroads of cultural contradictions, I take the bullet, not them. This (what do we call it?) “prejudice” runs counter to popular media morality show trials on TV, where the virtuous are “The Biggest Loser” (a syndicated show that’s really about people falling behind in their fitness programs, though it’s cast as people “succeeding” at their goals). So, in my work-culture arena, my body (actual, or perceived) cannot be so easily thought of as “gaining opportunity.”

But what are the demands of certain other work-place cultures, or demands of entire neighborhoods like Williamsburg? Is a desire for “hotness” fueling our ever-rising numbers of members? I would say, yes, in part. What are the concrete social “benefits” of a tight butt and/or tight gut in Brooklyn, in 2011? In Peoria – in a small factory under fire from a recession, the last thing people want to do after a shift is run 10 miles in the snow.

There, now, I’ve rambled on … but I’m hoping that by hitting on these hot spots of gender, body image, and class, that it might be something our members are already thinking about in some way. I should add that I don’t think that there’s an ultimate “resolution” to the contradictions laid out here, but rather that they’re “just there,” scratching at us.

Do you ever find yourself having to explain yourself about running to your non-running friends?

MV: Not really. I think the culture around being fit and exercising has changed so much in the past two decades that it is often my non-running friends having to explain themselves to the rest of us. Most of my friends run, if only as a part of a fitness plan. Sure when I leave a bar early on a Friday night in the dead of winter because I have a half-marathon to run at 8am in the morning I get the requisite round of Mishka is insane, but that probably is a pretty customary comment heard by most members of NBR or other running teams. And it’s always pretty funny to me because while everyone at work thinks I am this crazy runner doing these “marathons” or “mud runs”, in my mind I am thinking ha, it’s not like I’m running a 100-miler or rimming the grand canyon.

As to your other questions (many of them I think meant as mainly rhetorical illustrations), there is one thing that especially caught my attention. When you speak of this professional, upper-class “hard body” culture vs. the lifestyle of factory workers in Peoria (which is my mother’s hometown, nice work) the images that come to mind immediately are from the movie “The Fighter” which I actually saw the other day – it takes place in a small, economically struggling Massachusetts town in the mid 80s. The women in this film are fantastic, including crazy nasty hair and these tight jeans and short tops showing off round, jiggly bellies. Now for the most part, the women in this movie could make time for exercise and get rid of some of that jiggle – they are sitting around drinking beers and gossiping more than they are working – but the culture in a working-class, non-elite town does not put high sexual value on toned muscles or pancake-flat stomachs. In this way it is more similar to the rest of the world than it is to New York City.  So yes, I would go farther to say that it is not only running that is an “elitist” endeavor but it is most exercise for exercise’s sake (i.e, not in an attempt to win a team competition) – and thus long-distance running has been viewed as something “white people do” – white people being the generalization for people who have so much leisure time on their hands that they would choose to spend it on physical exertion for exertion’s sake. Well, at least this is the perspective I have gotten from the Achilles team I run with, the demographics being primarily urban working-poor and racial minority.

But I do believe people are generally beginning to see that running is different than, say, aerobics. Where the goal in the latter is primarily the “hard body”, the goal in the former has become so many different things to different people. Sure there is weight loss, but there are also mental health benefits, challenging the limits of one’s body and mind, and both the pursuit of solitude in a decreasingly private world and the pursuit of human connection in a big, lonely city.

RT:  This is interesting how these two aspects of being, “pursuit of solitude” and “pursuit of human connection”, how they can be concurrent to one another. At first, running (with the NBR) spoke to my desire for connection (it still does), but then at the same time, it started to ramp up my tendency to be an isolationist. And that’s something I think about: what are the unexpected effects that training has on people? I assume it varies quite a bit from person to person. You know what I mean? It makes some people sober, others it turns to lushes, it makes some people crazily frisky, and yet for others, training quite literally assassinates “frisky.” And there’s the effect is has on our workaday existences. I’ll bet a hen to a peck that for some it increases their “productivity,” while for others, it turns them into mush balls who can only think of the very next workout (what it might be, what it might feel like, what it might “produce”, etc).  In your journey with running over the years, have you run into any unexpected “results”, whether “healthy” or “unhealthy?”

MV: Well, I have fallen in love, had my heart broken, and fallen in love again? Ok that’s not really a result of the actual running per se, but rather the subsequent happy hours. Let’s see, my running has resulted in … fitting into gold lame tights? That probably qualifies as an unhealthy effect.

More seriously … running has actually helped me to rethink the connections between my physical and emotional make up. By way of anecdote, when I was seven, I was on a family vacation when I woke up one day to find I couldn’t swallow. I was too terrified to eat anything other than jello, and I lost about 10 of my maybe 60 pounds in two weeks. Then one morning, I could eat again. And so it went the rest of my life. I never had the swallowing thing again, but I would have weird pains and injuries that would usually go away after having them checked out by a doctor and told they were nothing, or just by waiting it out. It didn’t affect my life too much – with the exception of some astronomical doctor’s bills – until about two years into my running.

I was just starting to get really into racing and pushing myself. Then one afternoon in May I was going through a few pitchers of frozen margs with a girlfriend – like any normal afternoon in May, you know – and when I went to stand up, pain shot up through one of my feet. It got worse and worse, and I spent the next two years more or less in and out of walking casts, doctors’ offices, physical therapists, X-ray rooms, etc. and nothing really got rid of the pain. It was insanely frustrating and it took a huge toll on my mental health (which at this point you are thinking was pretty shot in the first place).

Then I came upon an article in Runner’s World (which I had continued to read obsessively) about runners with chronic pain finding relief via discovering that their pain was psychosomatic – that their brains were causing actual physical pain in their body as a way of distracting their minds from deeper issues – as in freaking out that they wouldn’t be good enough runners, or people in general, or from pressure to do well, etc. As in, if you could focus on physical pain, you wouldn’t have time/energy to deal with what was really going on in your head. The “treatment” was simply to accept that this was going on, and go back to training as normal – it was essential that you get back into it 100%.

So, after over two years of never running more than a few miles, I decided to sign up for a marathon and run every single training mile no matter how much it hurt. I finished the Miami marathon a little over a year ago, and my foot has not hurt one day since. The moral of the story is that running has forced me to face a lot of emotional stuff that we – especially people who just want to go go go – don’t want to spend the time dealing with. Now whenever I get pains – even general running stuff like plantar fasciitis – my first focus of “treatment” is mental, not physical. And nine times out of ten it does the trick.  I still go to the doctor more than the average person probably, but not too much more!

And did I mention how I now love to wear gold leggings?

RT: Yes indeed! Your tights are lighting up my remaining early 80’s Tijuana nightlife memory neuron-noodle knots in a perpetual “window washer hands” dance …

So, Mishka … I’ve been pitching you curve balls with lead cores, and you’ve smashed them all. Nice golf swings! But I want to pop this your way too. Ok, so now that the NBR women’s squad are breaking into each other’s houses at 3:00 a.m. and dragging undisciplined girls by the hair to the track for – first, collective shovel work on the ice, followed by 400 repeats dressed in flack jackets – flocks of crows overhead in silver moonlight … how’s that all setting with you?

Context: the recent rather spirited NBR googlegroups thread about whether the NBR women runners should choose to be in “A” division or in “B” division (the two New York Road Runners team category options) was pretty raw.  Many of our guys (guys, this applies to me too – to a fault) have been considerably more demure about talking like that, I mean, about publicly goosing each other to higher levels training and racing. You all got pretty real, and pretty fast. I was personally pumped up by the discussion. But I also had this “gulp” moment watching it unfold.  Do you feel a page has been turned in terms of throwing down the gauntlet like that? And how’s your training orientation shifted since then?

MV: Damnit, my big mouth always comes back to get me! Well if you guys are “demure” in talking about your own training/racing levels, you certainly aren’t demure in talking about the women’s – most of the posts in that thread were from guys! But all of the guys were challenging us to step up … and for me, the “A” or “B” issue really wasn’t as much about a decision to change our training or our purpose/goals as a team, but more about not choosing to put ourselves in a category below where we have already proven we belong just so it will be easier to end on top. I personally have never paid attention to our standings as a team and don’t really care where we end up “placed”. What I do care about is the women on this team supporting one another, and helping each other to not necessarily beat other teams, but to the best runners each one of us can/wants to be. So if that means that there is a group of women who want to PR all season and use other teams as motivation, then hell yeah, I think that’s awesome. And if there is another group of women who want to run a few miles together every couple of days and drink PBRs and play pool together every couple of days too, then hell yeah, I think that’s awesome. My own personal goal is to figure out how to be a part of both of those groups! I never really gulp at getting pretty real, pretty fast, as you say. This is a super diverse group, and if you don’t like the training – or talking – style of some people, then luckily there are lots of other people whose style will mesh with yours. And people like me who think mesh is stylish. While our team standings mean very little to me, I personally am pumped at the enthusiasm of a lot of our ladies of all speeds to train smarter and get faster, because training harder and better is something I am excited about right now. And I love it when women get organized and kick ass.

As far as my own training regimen … having spent so much time injured (even if it was just injured in my head!) I am really wary of pushing it too hard, especially now that I’m an old person.  I love hard workouts, I love running hills, but I will probably never run over 40 miles a week (Where do you people find the time for this? Share the amphetamines already!). So I’m putting my efforts into training smarter, and trying to limit my “junk miles” while at the same time not taking the joy out of running. I’ve been able to do this recently by hooking up with other NBR peeps to train, and it’s probably the only thing that’s gotten me through a brutal winter of training. I try for more or less the Monday Morning – After run, Prospect Park hills with the same crew on Wednesdays, Thursdays I try to make it to Jen and Linda’s track workout (yes I said “try” – I plan to be more consistent this spring!), and doing the bridge run on Saturdays as part of a long run. I’ll skip one of those each week to get in some “alone time,” but running with teammates has had an enormous impact on my running this year – we push and encourage one another and use each other’s successes as motivation. We also cross train together, using our “off days” to bowl, duck-hunt, buck-hunt, and push shopping carts through the streets of Bushwick. Of course, my teammates have also brought back my college-days hangovers, so it may all even out.

RT: Yep, “evened-out” as I write this, rrr … and you bring up a good point.  Since the team is so large now, people have the option of grouping into “sub tribes,” switching between them even. This bodes really well for finding evenly matched training partners, and also for meeting people with common interests outside of running.  Because the group grew many of us have made real friends in, as you so well put it “the pursuit of human connection in a big, lonely city.”

The downside of that might be that these conditions might precisely give us too many “options.” Another great potential of the team, the way I see it, is that we also get to mix it up with people we wouldn’t have with otherwise, people from different walks of life, views, passions, and dreams.  Back in the day, when there was, say, 15-25 people in the group, it was really amazing having to think of someone new who just sauntered in, there was this private (and maybe collective too) who dat moment. We had to deal with people who – get this, at first, we didn’t’ really “like”, but then grew to understand, and then later got to like – a whole lot!  NYC has this crazily sped up people-shopping culture (don’t like in the first 10 seconds – toss), and I honestly think that the NBR has tried to roll that back, but we’re not immune from that culture, right?  That’s why the tireless work of our social committee (Lidie Lajoie – who set the tone, Todd Zino, and you) its “come one, come all” outlook, has been really key in reshuffling us back to one deck, so to speak. What’s next?

MV: Next five NBR all-inclusive social events:

1.    Fun run down (the middle of) Bedford Avenue, only apparel allowed are running
       shoes and ipod armband, police protection not included.

2.    1890s Prom, Theme: “Violin Sonata No. 1”

3.    McCarren Park Olympics. Polish Soccer team v NBR v unattended four-year-olds
       on bikes. Gold medal projections: soccer team takes the vodka mile,
       four-year-olds Red Rover, NBR the hurdles.

4.    Live debate at Turkey’s Nest. Owen v Mike E v Rodrigo v Anna. Topic: If NYRR
       opens up a Division “Naked”, but charges us $5 more per race, do we join?
       And if so, do we videotape for proper form? Discuss.

5.    Ugly holiday undies speed dating.

 

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