Local Runner Vows Not to Resume In-Person Racing Until He Can Convince Himself Through Contorted, Self-Serving Rationalizations That It's Safe
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A local runner who hasn’t raced for a year due to COVID-19 said today that he won’t return to in-person events until his own warped, egocentric risk/benefit analysis tells him it’s safe to do so.
“Do I miss in-person racing? Oh my God, yes,” said Alexey Goloborodko, 34. “But I wouldn’t want to put myself, or others, at risk.”
“That’s why I’m absolutely sticking to virtual races, until I decide I really want to do a certain race and my unconscious mind manages to patch together a series of self-serving justifications, using flawed logic and cherrypicked ‘facts,’ that will let me feel OK with going ahead and signing up.”
“Returning to normal racing will be so awesome—and safe, according to the vagaries of my own defense mechanisms.”
To date, the United States has seen 28.1 million cases of COVID-19 and 499,000 deaths. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention continues to urge Americans to “delay travel and stay home to protect yourself and others,” advice that Goloborodko said he will continue to follow until his brain tells him he can ignore it in order to do something he really wants to do.
Goloborodko said he doesn’t know which event might finally lure him back to in-person racing, but when it happens he’s sure he will think it’s safe, thanks to his capacity for rationalizing irrational behavior and making decisions with a sort of tunnel vision that blots out our wider, shared reality.
“No matter what race it is, or how far I have to travel to get there, I know I’ll be stoked,” Goloborodko said. “Returning to normal racing will be so awesome—and safe, according to the vagaries of my own defense mechanisms.”
“See you on the roads!”
