Imagine the room.
Tasteful sterility. Soft and yet stark. Homey and yet far from home.
This is the hotel room, the one you selected. It was one among hundreds, perhaps thousands, of options and yet here you are, standing at the threshold, bag draped over your shoulder, gazing into the circumstances of your evening.
It is a roughly 20x20-foot box and for tonight it’s your domain. A place of respite. A spot to gather yourself. An oasis of calm before the organized chaos that awaits you in the morning.
You step through and the door shuts behind you.
And then you’re alone. Standing in the stillness with only your thoughts of the looming effort. Maybe you watch television. Or maybe you lay out your kit, whatever that might be—warmups, shorts, singlets, bibshorts, racing suit, various portable foodstuffs, shoes and race numbers and pins and all the various sundries that will take you through the next morning’s tribulations.
You lay it all out now because you know you’ll be rising early in the grog of pre-dawn. That you’ll go through the morning constitutional in an anxious rush of semi-consciousness.
Eventually though, you’re all set. Your gear is ready. You look around and ponder your next few hours.
This is your race hotel.
Race long enough—in cycling, running, swimming, stock cars, or whatever—and you’ll spend a considerable amount of time in hotels.
The imperatives of cost or time or climate change might limit your travel, but eventually there’s an event outside the time horizon of a morning drive. Then you’re forced to find accommodations nearby.
It’s an experience so common, it rarely occasions comment. But temporary lodging, especially before a race, is interesting.
I didn’t spend much time in hotels until college. Then sports lumped me together in hotel rooms with groups of young, fit folks most weekends. During sporting seasons, we schlepped across the region and lived out of duffle bags. It was four to a room, angsty people in their late teens and early twenties wedged together in the wallpapered box of a Holiday Inn.
It was never rowdy because we always knew what awaited us in the morning. Searing lactic and the lung-ragging intensity of those final wheezing minutes of a cross country race or track 5K. The chance to grasp at greatness or at least protect our vulnerable pride.
Truly, I don’t remember much partying in the race hotel. The only friction was toilet access in the morning as four overfed runners shared a bathroom before shuttling to whatever track or park was hosting the event.
After college, the double jeopardy of the Recession and cheap interest rates for venture capitalists made roomshares appealing. I could rarely afford an entire house or apartment, but I soon learned the rented room was always a gamble.
Those online preview photos on AirBnB never tell the full story. The ‘Cozy Room in a Sacramento Bungalow’ turns out to be a large closet with a futon, where you’ll lay for an uncomfortable evening, listening to the host loudly watch The Voice just outside the door.
For me, the roulette of a roomshare isn’t worth it. Give me the benefit of standardization. Give me the race hotel.
When money is an issue, opt for the transactional utilitarianism of a cheap, roadside motel. Sure, it’s a spartan room, where you might be lulled to sleep by the sound of semi-trucks downshifting on the freeway.
Yes, the creature comforts do vary with the price of lodging. But there are also commonalities across all rooms: the bedspread folded neatly across the sheets, the scent of soap, the faux-marble countertop, the collection of differently sized towels.
There’s always a chair and desk in the room. The chair, too heavy, rolls poorly across the thick carpet. So you keep it shoved against the dark-wooden desk with its crappy stationary and disposable pen.
Why does the desk and chair still remain? They’re an anachronism hotels can’t let go. As if you might spend your evening in the hotel room handwriting correspondence to far-flung family members like a traveler of yore, when in actuality you’ll spend your night watching the middle hour of Transformers on cable in slack-jawed stupor.
Spend at a certain price point and the brand labeling flits just below your awareness: the “Hyatt Place,” the “Hyatt House,” the “Marriot Express,” the “Hilton Garden Inn.” The names are branded on styrofoam coffee cups and napkins, focused-grouped into existence by marketing agencies to evoke tones of indeterminate luxury. These spaces are comfortably forgettable, pleasantly unremarkable. Rest as pure bourgeois utility.
Yes, market forces are at play here and inequalities abound. But the race hotel—that transient, transactional stint of time on a bed in a room—comes from a most traditional, most ancient form of hospitality.
Perhaps this is why over the years the rituals remain the same: the check-in where you stand awkwardly before the clerk behind the counter, the stilted conversation in which you become a mere provider of data—name, phone number, maybe a booking reference—all plugged into the computer. There is that uncomfortable pause as your info is called up from an arcane system of servers. And then the almighty handover of credit card and license, returned with interest in the form of a plastic key card.
The final exchange: the clerk’s directions to your room. Maybe someday big tech will figure out how to monetize micro-navigation within an Embassy Suites. Until then hotels remain the last vestige of asking for oral directions.
And then you are released, luggage in hands to the elevator, to the stairs, to the hallway. The card chimes against the lock, the door cracks open, and you step into your air-conditioned destiny.
Thanks for reading.
Weekly run
Breakfast Club meets every Thursday for an 8-mile run:
When and Where: 6:30am at Lake Temescal in Oakland, CA
Pace: ~7:00 to 7:40 pace with a few hundred feet of climbing
Quick splits
Here’s your participation trophy. You remember the plastic trophies that lined your bookshelves only to make way for the laurels of your real accomplishments. So read this Shouts & Murmurs which starts with a bit of generational humor and then bowls you right over. (New Yorker)
My weird-ass career, explained. I had a blast chatting with Heidi Meyer about my journey from academia to UX writing. You can listen to ~35 minutes of vocal fry, filler words, and the vestigial tinge of a Southern accent as I chat about writing, work, and wax philosophic about spending too much time in the library. (Careers Explained)
Put me in, CoachGPT. Don’t delegate your training plan to AI quite yet. “When I asked it the same prompt again in a separate conversation—“Write me a 16-week marathon training plan”—it suggested running 19 miles the day before the race.” (MIT Technology Review)
The beautiful futility of perfection. Bryan Bishof, a mathematician, is trying to walk every street in Berkeley. But the vagaries of the physical world and digital tracking apps mean he will likely be stuck at just below 100%. “With this project, what looks like a very finite amount of detritus is, probably, in some dimensions, infinite.” (Berkeleyside)
Tweets of the week
That’s all for this week.
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