The effects of the spread of coronavirus are being felt and sometimes have at least singular manifestations. Pan Shancu is a Chinese man who claims to have run the equivalent of a 66-kilometer ultra in his living room in six hours and 41 minutes and to be able to prove it (not only with the video he posted) but also with his GPS tracking.
The feat he accomplished may provoke hilarity or have him mistaken for a madman, but the context in which it unfolded is unfortunately dramatic and is one in which millions of Chinese citizens live who have been asked not to leave their homes to contain the spread of the virus and avoid new infections. At the same time, however, Chinese authorities urged not to neglect physical activity so as to keep the body efficient and ready for a health crisis. Many citizens have been engaging in challenges involving a wide variety of ways to perform movement, all of them regularly indoor: there are those who lift packs of water bottles, those who do push-ups with their children on their backs, and those who engage in challenges to climbing condominium stairs.
Pan Shancu thought he would do what he loves to do: run. Unable to do this outdoors, he began to run obsessively for nearly seven hours in his living room at home, thus completing the distance of an ultramarathon.
It is certainly an extreme and somewhat alienating testimony, but it is also significant of the current times: both in the sense of the crises our society is facing and in that of the love for a discipline that forces you, as Shancu says, “to run because if you stand still for too long then your feet itch.”
We know something about that, don’t we?