As the name intimates, PATHOS for us represents the flame of running that twice burns: it is the pains of passion but also the force of affirmation pressed upon the spirit, an event of transformation realized through practice and duration. With PATHOS, we’re striving to hold these two flames as one, to delve into the transformations born of the strife between them, flickering one ever-forward along the path.

The goal, then, is to present and display this dual movement, to share the manifold ways in which we undergo an experience through running, emerging differently in its course. A Poetics of Running is one such effort. It is our liquid attempt at conveying this manifold potentiality so unique to running, where our relationships with self, community and land are lush with creative resonances! Seeing as no medium can wholly translate an experience of the flesh, we figured all ought to be fair game: words, images still and moving alike, and perhaps something wholly material will gesture towards that great flame. 

We’ve opted to leave the article indefinite on this little project, for what we’re gathering here has no ambitions of gospel when it comes to what ‘running’ or ‘poetics’ need look like. Rather, it functions as a chronicle of the ideas, events and excursions that have so moved us in a given season, remaining ever-open to novel significance as our perspective–and with it– our understanding shifts.

Seeing as PATHOS is not without the terrain and topography through which we as runners move, it was judged fitting to sync these A Poetics of Running transmissions with the elemental. We’ll be releasing these zines on the equinoxes, and they’ll be Janus-faced in nature: reflections on seasons past, anticipations of those to come, all the while punctuated with odes to those waves on whose crests we’re carried forth. 

What you have before you now is something of a Prologue, a small introduction to the project, quietly slipped into the world on the year’s longest night. It is an incipient entry into what, come Spring, will assume a more fledged form (read: print!), and something to tide us over as we await the lengthening of the days. Perhaps you’ll find something in our labours to latch onto, or perhaps–even better– it will compel you to consider running anew on terms wholly your own.

For the love of the sport,
P A THOS