Running on Empty: Daniel Broh-Kahn, 10-time Baltimore Running Festival marathoner.

“The truth is, I really don’t like running. I just like the way I feel when I’m done.

I am 48 years old. I have been running, basically, since I met my wife a little more than 25 years ago. She was a runner, and if I wanted to keep up with her, I had to run.

I’ve been doing the Baltimore Running Festival every year for the past 10 years—since it began. I was already running marathons, so I said, ‘Here I am in Baltimore, might as well run the Baltimore marathon as well.’

I’m supposed to run five days a week. I know what I’ve got to do and I have training regimens to do it; I just don’t do it.

I’m definitely more of a morning runner. I run on the NCR trail and I also run around the Loch Raven Reservoir to get some hill action. To me, the whole key to finishing 26.2 miles is you’ve got to run three 20-mile races before the marathon date. If you don’t run three 20s, then you’re not going to be prepared.

The marathon is a fantastic tour of the city. The best way to see any city is running through the streets: You see neighborhoods. You see offices. You see where people shop. You see where people drink coffee. You see parts of the city that you can’t see from driving through it. The thing I enjoy the most is running through Fort McHenry. I would just say that is truly inspiring.

I would not run these races if not for the citizens of Baltimore. Baltimore’s residents have gone from ‘I hate those blasted runners for shutting down the city streets’ to ‘This is an inconvenience’ to ‘Well, here come those crazy runners again. . . . We might as well cheer them on!’ Their support is great and much appreciated.  

I think my best finishing time was 4:45. I follow a pacer for the first half, and then I slack off. I try to do a reverse-split, which is where you go faster the second half than the first, but I’ve never been able to do that because I get tired. I always have a great half marathon, and then at mile 13, I’m like, ‘Oh God, I’ve still got to run another 13 miles.’

The key is to start in your appointed time. If you’re a 10-minute mile person, don’t start with the three-hour marathoners, because what’s going to happen is they’re going to pull away and then you’re going to have 2,000 people trying to pass you.

I guess the craziest thing I’ve seen are lots of people going to the bathroom in bushes. The worst thing I’ve seen is when the organizers ran out of water a couple years ago because someone stole the water during the race. Somebody had driven behind the delivery truck and stolen all of the water, so the people who were running slow, when they got to the water stop, there was no water, and that really pissed a lot of us off.

I hate going by relay stations because you’re chugging along, and then these guys bolt out like it’s a horse race and shoot by you, and it’s very discouraging.

The worst part is when people double back on you. So, if I’m coming down mile nine and they’re going past [in the other direction] at mile 13, they’re four miles ahead of me. It’s like, ‘Oh, crap.’

When I’m running, I’m really just thinking about the finish, thinking about getting it over with and done. Eye on the prize. I get the adrenaline rush toward the end, when you come down Eutaw Street, through Camden Yards. That’s pretty neat because you’re running along the cobblestone, you can see the finish, everyone’s screaming and yelling and cheering, and you’re almost done.

My first thought when I finish is, ‘Where’s the beer?’ I’ll tell you why, because when I finish, the water’s been sitting out there for six hours, the Gatorade’s been sitting out there for six hours, it’s a hot day, and the only thing cold is the beer. The best beer I’ve ever had in my life was after finishing a race.

The best feeling I’ve ever had, personally, in my life is the first time I finished a marathon. There’s no feeling quite like that. I’ve spent hundreds of hours preparing for this, and now I’m done. But the flip side is that I’m exhausted. I go home and take a nap.

I get stiffer and stiffer after all the long runs. You get old, your body starts to ache, but when you see 70- and 80-year-olds crossing the finish line, I think, ‘Well if they can do it, I can do it.’”

David Sedaris: Always poignant, always inappropriate

David Sedaris, author, humorist, playwright and more, spoke at the Landmark Theater in downtown Richmond Tuesday evening.

Sedaris read from a New York Times essay he had written about people in airports.

“When an airport delay happens to you, it’s a national tragedy,” Sedaris said. “When it happens to someone else, it’s just a bore. When you fly enough, you learn to go brain-dead if you have to.”

Sedaris opened his talk with excerpts from his newest book, “Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk,” in which Sedaris created a bestiary, or stories about animals that act like people.

In one tale about a purebred male dog and his owner returning from a little breeding rendezvous with another purebred female, the dog and owner stumble upon a house that’s on fire and decide to check it out. The dog chats with a longhaired dachshund being held by its owner after they had rushed from the flaming building.

“I learned that [the dog] was the single thing she had reached for when she smelled the smoke and realized her house was on fire,” Sedaris read. “Which is nice and everything, [the dachshund said], but she’s got a teenage son in there.”

“As the woman reached down to snatch [the dachshund] back up, [the other dog] caught a glimpse of the poor guy’s future. ‘I could have saved anything and I chose you.’ Who wants to live with that kind of pressure?”

Sedaris’ latest book takes aspects of human nature and issues such as divorce, public manners and adultery, and brings them into the forum of the animal world.

Sedaris has published collections of personal essays including “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” “Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim” and “When You are Engulfed in Flames,” all of which became bestsellers, according to the Barclay Agency website. He has also authored other books and is a regular radio contributor to This American Life, of Public Radio international.

In a reading from one of his sardonic pieces, “I Brake for Traditional Marriage,” which addressed Proposition 8 on same-sex marriage in California, Sedaris parodied a conservative older man who decides his whole life, marriage and morals are shot to hell the moment the law is passed.

“If the guy who does my mom’s hair is free to marry his boyfriend, then why can’t I marry my pizza?” Sedaris said.

He closed his remarks on same-sex relationships with sarcastic words of advice.

“As long as you keep your eyes shut, it’s really not that bad,” he said.

Sedaris visited the Landmark Theater two years ago and said he thought the local YMCA was “fantastic.”

“The pool was great. It was clean, and there was a cheerful lifeguard playing Earth, Wind and Fire,” Sedaris said.

Most of the attendees at the show were Richmond residents and Virginia Commonwealth University students, but University of Richmond students were few and far between.
Megan McNamara, a senior, said she hadn’t seen Sedaris before but that she had thought he was funny.

“I have his CD on my iTunes, and it’s pretty witty,” McNamara said.

Jan van den Bos, a senior, said he had seen Sedaris when he visited Richmond two years ago.

“He just has this amazing skill to be able to be funny and engaging, with his writing and especially when he answers questions on the spot,” van den Bos said.

Modlin Downtown, an offset of Richmond’s Modlin Center for the Arts, hosted the event.

A book signing after the performance made for a crowded lobby. Christine Newell, house manager of the Modlin Center, was organizing the crowds, and has been at the Landmark the last few times Sedaris has come to Richmond.

“One of the best things about Mr. Sedaris is that he does not want the line rushed,” Newell said. “He wants to spend as much time with each of his fans as are willing to come through. It has gone as late as 2 a.m. in years past.”

Sedaris addressed each question during the question-and-answer period with the same quip carried off in his prepared writing.

He said he would be visiting 35 cities in 35 days and then after just four days off, would visit 20 more cities.

“I am going to all of the top bed bug cities,” he said. “On the bright side, they don’t carry diseases. I haven’t met anybody who’s had a problem with them. Maybe I just haven’t been looking in the right places. If you have, I’d love to hear about it.”

Diversity retreat takes a year off

The Allies Institute program, a four-day diversity and social justice retreat held annually by the university in January, is taking a year off while a new Diversity Coordinating Committee reevaluates the program to encourage more cross-campus collaboration.

Students involved in Allies are very worried that this gap year choice will slow the momentum of increasing diversity and retention of a more diverse student body on campus.

Junior Jon Henry said he was questioning the year-off idea.

“[In Allies,] you come together as a group and share a lot of personal experiences and really connect with a lot of people from across campus that you may not have connected with because of normal socioeconomic barriers that tend to exist,” Henry said. “You make a very strong and safe network of people, and you become friends with everyone you’re with.”

Henry said the creation of the Student Alliance for Sexual Diversity, and his position as president of SASD, were directly instigated through the Allies program.

“They already have the program developed, so why not continue it until you have the new program developed,” he said.

Glyn Hughes, director of the office of Common Ground, said part of the reasoning for reevaluating the program was because of the introduction of offices such as Common Ground, the Center for Civic Engagement, and the Living Learning Communities, which have been brought to campus since Allies was started in 2003.

“Over the last eight years,” Hughes said, “those offices have been created and we’ve gotten expertise on campus in those areas.”

Hughes said these new offices and programs also meant that the Allies program’s beginnings in the UR Chaplaincy were less grounded that when it was originally created by Camisha Jones, former arts and education director of the Chaplaincy.

“When the new chaplain came on,” Hughes said, “part of his charge was to focus the Chaplaincy’s energies and strengths in a way that complemented the other offices that existed on campus.”

Hughes said the committee had sent out letters to former Allies last spring explaining that the Allies program was going to continue in some form, but that it was being overhauled.

Hughes said the committee had then issued a survey to former Allies at the beginning of this semester and had organized two focus groups with himself, students, and university chaplain Craig Kocher.

Hughes and Kocher explained the ongoing plans of the administration with the students and sought student feedback.

Kocher said the focus groups served as a starting point toward future plans.

“The plan is this year for a team of administrators and a team of students who have been a part of the Allies program in the past to work together,” Kocher said.

“We want to do something very tangible in the spring. It won’t be the Allies program, and it may not even be at the same time, but it will be a program that will be a bridge into the following year.”

Kocher also said Jones had been involved in the transition process last spring and she had left the university of her own accord.

He said a big part of the student-administrator partnership would be to evaluate strengths and weaknesses of the program.

Henry said he thought the administrators would do a good job evaluating the program moving forward.

“I don’t think any program should just be given a blank slate and never have to change or evaluate,” he said. “My biggest thing is I don’t want the gap year to occur.”

Junior Johanna Gehlbach said she was equally concerned about the gap year and its effect on students.

“I think it would be a shame for the admission office to keep working on making each new class more diverse,” Gehlbach said, “only to have this gap where we’re going to lose all this diversity now. It’s going to lose all of the momentum that it’s built over the last seven years.”

Gehlbach also said she thought if the administration didn’t take on this initiative in the way the students would like, that the Allies themselves would be looking into putting on the program themselves.

Henry said he thought a year off might affect student retention on campus.

“Without Allies, a majority of students would have transferred,” Henry said. “I think without this program, this incoming program of first-years, or sophomores or juniors, could lose this final form of connection they have to the Richmond community.”

Hughes said the university was committed to reevaluating and continuing the program so that the transition year wouldn’t hurt students.

“I think that we’ve got the institutional commitment and the resources,” he said. “The students are clearly invested in ensuring that the program doesn’t lose momentum. We just have to think about what’s the best way to ensure that doesn’t happen.”

Art for Social Change

Daniel José Custódio, a poet who founded the Slam Nahuatl local slam poetry group in 2008, said he thought anytime an artist depends on an institution, he or she is compromising the art.

“The artists really have to go beyond the channels of institutions, beyond the university, beyond getting the grant money or the pat on the back [to create change],” he said.

Two years ago, Custódio created the End Hunger slam poetry series in which Slam Nahuatl troupe took the proceeds from their shows and provided a single mother and her two children with funding for an entire year’s worth of groceries.

Custódio was one of six artists who discussed the role of art in creating social change at a panel discussion Sept. 3 at UR Downtown on East Broad Street. The panel, titled “The Citizen Artist,” focused in on the debate of whether a large institution or foundation can play a role in the concept of art creating social change.

Two of the six panelists included Patricia Herrera of the Richmond theatre department, and Tanja Softic, a member of the Richmond art faculty. The remaining panelists included Noah Scalin, a member of the Virginia Commonwealth University art faculty, Adria Hoffman, a member of the University of Southern Mississippi music faculty, and William Ashanti Hobbs III, a member of the Virginia State University English and creative writing faculty.

Herrera, co-founder and co-director of the Rubí Theater Company in New York City, uses her theater to target the Latino community.

“I feel like my medium is theater, but my medium is also, of course, the classroom,” she said. “There comes a point where I’m not thinking about the box office. That’s not my problem. To me, it’s the students. What’s important to them? But the institution’s always going to be there, so I think rather than seeing the institution as bad, we should instead say, ‘The institution is here. Let’s use it as a resource.’”

Custódio, who is the son of a Portuguese father and a Brazilian mother, said he was playing the devil’s advocate.

“I often find that in this capitalistic society, art is synonymous with privilege,” Custódio said. “So I thought to myself, how can it do something for someone who doesn’t have the privilege to sit down and enjoy it? What can the art do for somebody like that?”

Scalin founded Another Limited Rebellion: Socially Conscious Design and Consulting, an independent graphic design company.

“I’m sort of interested in making a living doing art and doing good,” Scalin said. “I’ll never be super rich, because I’ve limited myself by saying, ‘I can’t take these clients because I don’t believe in that.’ There’s the path of ‘do this and do the art.’ And then with me, I say I’m going to do it both ways.”

Tonja Softic, chairwoman of the departments of art and art history at UR, agreed with Herrera on the idea of working with rather than against the institution.

“Institution is such a bad word in this conversation, but let’s look at how ‘institution’ has changed,” Softic said. “Look at what University of Richmond used to be: very parochial, lily white, Southern school. Look at what University of Richmond is now. Students come from all kinds of backgrounds.

There is a point when people stop realizing that maybe they’ve gotten compromised a little too much to be useful at all, and I think one has to be vigilant about that, but also recognize that working with an institution, we can advance change and actually use institutions for good.”

Adria Hoffman, who is also a former K-12 music teacher in Henrico County, emphasized her own compromise.
“Do you need to get the right credentials or the right funding in order to bring the resources to your home community?” she asked.

“I think my own compromise has been, ‘If I get a grant, I can bring more resources to kids,’ and that in turn helps to make a more systemic impact with more children in a way that I wouldn’t have before.”

William Ashanti Hobbs III wrote the novel “Worthy,” which tells the story of a third-grade teacher whose status as a first-generation college graduate threatens the balance between her new ideas and her rough, dysfunctional past.

“Navigating and fostering that relationship [with the institution], that’s an art form of itself,” Hobbs said. “All my life I’ve been working on the boundary between the underprivileged community and middle class educated society. More than anything it’s about dialogue. People are just waiting for that opening.”

Liz Sheehan, the panel discussion director, said, “the citizen artist is a new generation and Richmond’s future.” Liz Sheehan is the director of Partners in the Arts, the University of Richmond School of Continuing Studies program that put on the discussion.

“In some respects, being broke gives you a certain amount of freedom,” she said. “In many cases, foundations have agendas, usually they’re wonderful agendas, but if you receive funding from them you also have to conform to their agendas. We’re looking for where you can change the status quo and still bring people along with you.”

Sheehan closed the conversation by asking the panelists what immediate goals they might have for using their art to bring social change to Richmond. Herrera said she’d like to create a production raising the issues faced by Richmonders affected by the Arizona Immigration law.

Custódio said he’d like to get the chance to work with the University of Richmond to expand his End Hunger series to feed not just one family but tens or hundreds of families.

“That’s the thing, I challenge everybody,” he said, “but I here I am trying to work with the institution.”

Gabrielle Misiewicz, Westhampton College ’11, attended the discussion.

“As a college student, you wonder what can I do really, and how can I make a change,” Misiewicz said. “Even in their small ways, these individuals here have been able to make a difference in their community.”

Partners in the Arts and the Bonner Center for Civic Engagement at UR Downtown sponsored the panel, coordinated by Liz Sheehan of Parners in the Arts as well as Judy Mejia and Liz Riggs of the CCE. The event was also co-sponsored by the Modlin Center for the Arts, the Department of Art and Art History, the Department of Theatre and Dance, Rhetoric and Communication Studies and Richmond College.