Taking a break from his classes while studying abroad at Harlaxton College in England, Kenny Farris traveled to Poland and the notorious Auschwitz network of death camps. He took the 45-minute tour through Birkenau [Auschwitz II] and the reconstructed barracks, walked through one of the gas chambers where hundreds of thousands had died, and returned to Krakow.
Then he ran.
It was his daily training run, the same multiple-mile regimen he’d been following throughout his time away and across Europe.
But this one was different.
“My runs were becoming a way of being able to reflect on what I had seen,” Farris says. “I had read of Auschwitz’s history, so I was prepared for much of what I saw. But the stories told on the tour, the shock of those atrocities, overwhelmed me.
“And there was an image at Auschwitz that really shook me, and I think it would shake most runners, too.”
In Block 5 of the Auschwitz Museum are displays devoted to “Material Evidence of Crime,” and there behind a glass case that consumes half a barracks room are shoes—about 20,000 pairs, just one day’s collection from those murdered at the peak of the gassings. Shoes of different colors and styles, shoes of men, women, and children.
“Some [of the murdered] were just boys,” Farris says.
“As a runner, I pound my feet every day, so to think of someone having to part with something that helps protect their feet, and when they’re malnourished, mis-treated…As I ran that day and the following week, I thought of my own shoes differently—how big the soles were, the way they cushioned my feet.”
He bought a poster of the display.
“I still have trouble looking at it. But I don’t want to forget it, either.”
Farris hadn’t intended his training runs to become access points to history. He had goals for his spring studies at Har-laxton and others for the upcoming 2011 cross country season. But the college is sit-uated outside of Grantham—which, Farris points out, was the hometown of both Isaac Newton and Margaret Thatcher—at a manor in the English countryside. Farris could run almost anywhere he wanted.
“There’s a different view of public and private property in England, especially in the countryside,” says the English/Rhetoric double major. “It’s a remnant of the old enclosure laws.”
So in addition to roads, Farris had numerous footpaths to choose from—and history to discover.
“Over hundreds of years this network of paths has developed through the farm fields, snaking through little villages and hamlets. I could do a trail run in any direction, without having to drive to a park.
“I’ve learned Crawfordsville by running through the town for four years, and that’s how I learned the land around Harlaxton.”
Except that rather than running with a dozen or more teammates, he was running alone.
“And that’s completely different,” Farris says. “Coach [Roger] Busch says this, and I found it to be true: The hardest thing about training alone is getting out the door and running those first five minutes. After that your body gets loose and you get into a flow and rhythm.
“It got me thinking about why I wanted to run in the first place. I knew right off that I wanted to maintain some fitness, yet keep my mind relaxed, without having to worry about races.
“But I didn’t realize the second reason until I was almost halfway through the semester: Running allowed me to think about all that I was experiencing while I was overseas. Almost every day I had 45 minutes just to myself. I could reflect on different issues we were covering in class—like colonialism or the crazy meanderings of English monarchs—but also on things that happened to me: new friends, my life at home. A lot of my training abroad was a little bit of a retreat: time to reflect and answer questions.
“And those runs gave me the chance to explore some history most students don’t see.”
He felt much of that history beneath his feet on his daily runs from Harlaxton:
? The Viking Way—“A piece of history now integrated into a public footpath, I was running on the transport route used by the Vikings when they were marauding the English mainland before William the Conquerer;”
? Relics of early industrial history—“I found these early railroad beds from the 1800s, lines that had been abandoned for tracks that could
support more modern trains;”
? The Grantham to Nottingham Footpath—“These canals were the original way the first steel made in the world was transported.”
“I could feel history,” Farris says. “I was looking at it, touching it. I was thinking about it before I learned what it actually was. I’d see it for myself, then learn in class about its impact in English history. It put the classroom and personal experience together.
“And those runs were fun: I ran on the cinders of that old railroad bed right after hearing a lecture on the Industrial Revo-lution in my British Studies class. I heard the lecture, then went running on the place it happened.”
Farris carried that approach to history and running as he traveled across Europe: Edinburgh, Dublin, the English Moors, Fountains Abbey, London, Sevilla, Krakow, and Croatia.
At Oxford, the two came together.
“My first weekend in England I took a bus to Oxford and Iffley Road, where Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile for the first time in human history. He did it on a cinder track; it’s rubber now. But it’s not a tourist attraction; it’s still the Oxford University Athletic Club.
Farris kept a running log describing every run. The entry that day includes: “I’m at freaking Iffley Road! This is fantastic!”
Farris also traveled to Punta Umbria, near Sevilla, Spain, for the World Cross Country Championships. On the plane there he met a manager with connections with many of the British runners.
“I spent the whole day with guys and girls on the British National Team and their parents, including the childhood coach
of 20-year-old Charlotte Purdue, the top European female finisher at the race.
“It was inspiring to see top-level runners, but it was even more pleasant to see just how personal it all was. It wasn’t a big system, a machine like some endurance sports. It was a small, family-type atmosphere. It reminded me of my team back home.
Farris saves this story for last, and for good reason.
There are urges stronger even than his passion for running, and this one could have gotten him killed in Croatia.
“The last place I visited was Croatia.” Farris smiles. “After all these reflective things that I had done, I almost put it all to waste, so to speak.”
Farris had flown to Zadar, a city of about 78,000 on the Adriatic, with Craig O’Connor ’12 and two others, and was getting familiar with the area on his usual 10-mile training run. At the start of his fifth mile and running on a paved road toward the airport, he passed an army barracks.
“I suddenly had to use the bathroom, and wasn’t sure where to go. I wasn’t sure what the laws were for indecent exposure there, especially right across from an army barracks.”
He saw a dense woods next to the barracks and dashed for it.
“I get about 30 meters in and I come upon this sign that’s taller than me. The bottom five or six lines are in the text of what I assume to be the native language of Croatia. So I scan further up and see a red skull and crossbones. The words forming a semi-circle around the top of the skull read, in big, bold English text: ‘Mines! Mines!’”
Farris stopped cold.
“I just stood there, arms at my side. I’m shirtless, in short running shorts, and I’m standing there thinking, What do I do? I realize, Well, I’ve still got to go to the bathroom, so I just dropped my shorts and squatted.
“It was the biggest adrenaline rush of my life, those five miles back to the apartment. I was still thinking about it a month or so later. If I’d taken just a minute to read more about where I was going—even on Wikipedia there’s a sentence about minefields along the highway near Zadar. That really drove home the necessity of knowing about where you’re going, not only for your personal safety, but so you can relate to the people you’ll be with, the place you’re visiting.
So Farris’s lesson learned: “Prepare, prepare, prepare!”
Lesson two: Not always. “You have to have some sort of balance between the two.”
Thinking back on his daily runs around Europe, Farris comes back to his time with the British athletes at the World Champion-ships in Spain and one of the most important lessons of his study abroad.
“That trip to the Championships was a little experiment of mine to see how I could deal just going with the flow. My Spanish is not very good, I didn’t have a room booked in Sevilla, and I didn’t even have a plan for how to get from Sevilla to the site of the event. I just wanted to see what was going to happen.”
And it became one of highlights of his semester.
He woke up the next day—the day before his 21st birthday—took a run around Sevilla in the morning to savor it all, went to Mass, drank some cheap beer, ate some good paella, and took the bus to the airport.
“I had chosen to travel by myself and to figure out a way back home, instead of hanging out with people in my program,” Farris says. “So when midnight struck on my 21st birthday, when most people would be having a drink, I was walking through customs at London Stansted.”
It was 6 a.m. when his train arrived in Grantham.
“I could have called a taxi, but it’s just a three or four mile walk to Harlaxton, and I thought, I’ve been walking all this time, why not finish the trip that way?
Part way there he left the road and took a footpath through a farm field. The sun was rising as he approached the school.
“It was the most beautiful thing that I had seen while I was there, the sun coming over the manor. And I thought, I’m really glad I did this. There was something formative about that trip for me, though I’m not sure yet what it is.”
