Before last year, whenever I thought of 1918, I thought of World War I. Mass bloodshed is rather memorable, even if it wasn’t your time. I always knew of the Spanish flu, but I was never too interested in life during a plague. And now that we are living through our own, I am more curious whether people next century will want to know the texture of humanity as Covid-19 ravaged the species.
This year, in this space, I quickly found myself drawing closer to warmer things. Dissecting an unfathomable murder, as I did in my January post, was so brutal I could only then write about snow. I followed it up with a eulogy for my elementary school experience and a few thoughts on the urge to travel away from our planet. In the later seasons, the Tokyo Olympics impelled a meditation on the joy and pain of the 800 meter race and the first anniversary of my running podcast, Let’s Get Uncomfortable, a bearing of the light and darkness of the New York City Marathon. My only Covid capture was on hygiene theater. I’ve never had much interest in chronicling the things we’re trying to survive.
Perhaps I’m proudest of my audio essays on classical piano. The audience proposition of this series is simple: listen, and you’ll get amped about some culturally maligned magnificent music. If I could spend my life creating such segments, why not? Mixing prose with sound for intoxicating effect is, well, intoxicating. It’s just that it takes so much time. I hope to finish in 2022.
Next year I will also get going on a “parks of the Bronx” photo series. I only did one such essay this year, on my beloved Harriman State Park, my trail running paradise. The form feels shortchanged.
As time passes, my sense of this space develops. It is a chronicle, but of what? I have some ideas, and plan to sketch them out for April, my two-year anniversary. Let the anticipation ignite.
Final mileage totals for 2021:
Running: 400
Cycling: 1,066
Nathan Schiller 
Thoughts, ideas, comments?