Everything is a first for everyone at some point.
I still remember my first punk show very well. It was 1992, Abwärts was playing at the Ostwerk in Augsburg (RIP, Frank Z.). The place was deafening, smelled of beer, and everyone there seemed twice my age. I already knew and loved the wild music and angry lyrics, but this was my first physical encounter with a community that would stay with me, in one form or another, for the rest of my life. I was fascinated and slightly intimidated at the same time. Huge eyes, pumping heart.
And it got physical indeed: pogo dancing.
In 1992, there were no YouTube tutorials explaining what to do with your arms and legs at a punk show, and I obviously hadn’t practiced secretly in my bedroom. I just went in and figured it out. It wasn’t particularly difficult because everyone around me showed me how it worked. People bumped shoulders, kicked their legs around, screamed lyrics and pointed index fingers toward the stage, and when someone hit the floor, someone else pulled them back up. I simply copied what I saw until it stopped feeling like copying.
Nobody gave me a rulebook. Nobody tested whether I knew enough bands. I don’t remember anyone making fun of me because I was new. I watched, paid attention, tried to understand what was going on, and felt accepted almost immediately.
Before You Change It
I had no idea then how deeply I would eventually become involved in punk and hardcore myself. I would publish fanzines, release records, play in bands, organize shows and spend a considerable part of my life contributing to this weird little world I had stumbled into that night.
Of course I changed things along the way. Everyone does. I brought my own ideas, aesthetics and opinions into it, argued about what sucked, started projects because I thought I could do something differently and occasionally pissed people off. Subcultures that shut themselves off from new influences are usually dead ones.
Still, the way I entered that world mattered.
Before trying to leave my own mark, I had spent a lot of time looking around. I wanted to understand why things were done a certain way, which core values were worth protecting and which worn-out conventions were simply leftovers that deserved to die. I learned from people who had been there before me without treating them as authorities. There was a history, and I considered that history interesting rather than inconvenient. I asked questions. A lot of questions. Out of genuine interest. Some got solid answers. Others I eventually had to answer myself.
Looking back, one thing about this seems more important to me than I realized at the time: I was curious before I was certain.
And this is where running enters the story.
Because when I look at trail and ultrarunning right now, I sometimes get the feeling that the order has been reversed.
A very large number of people are entering this sport within a very short period of time. And to get something important out of the way once again: I think this is fucking great.
People discover trails. They sign up for their first races, spend weekends outside, get excited about running through the night and find out that covering a ridiculous distance on foot while eating salt pretzels can mean much more than the numbers on Strava afterwards. New people also bring new ideas with them. They change how running looks, how races communicate, what people wear and what kind of stories get told around the sport. Some of this is exciting. Some of it looks completely ridiculous to me, which brings us back to Old Grumpy Man Pt. 1.
I am trying.
Read the Fucking Place
My problem starts somewhere else.
There is a difference between bringing something new into a culture and behaving as if nothing existed before you arrived.
I increasingly see people enter trail and ultrarunning with a surprisingly complete idea of what the sport should become, while showing very little curiosity about what it already is. They know how they want to present it before they have spent much time inside it. The visual language is already there, the personal brand is ready, the content strategy seems surprisingly advanced for someone who has done two trail races.
Again, some of my irritation here is absolutely generational. I know that. I also know that running does not belong to me simply because I have been doing it for thirteen years. I entered a culture that had existed for generations before I showed up, wearing road shoes on mountain trails and knowing fuck all about ultrarunning. Plenty of experienced runners could probably have looked at me and thought: Who is this Lauch?
Maybe some of them did.
This is exactly why I have to be careful. The old guy who complains about newcomers usually has a surprisingly short memory regarding his own arrival. He mistakes the version of the culture he encountered for its original state and his own preferences for ancient law. I can already feel that mechanism working inside me, and I don’t particularly like it.
At the same time, refusing every critical thought because it might be gatekeeping would be equally stupid.
Some things are worth caring about. It’s like truly loving someone. You don’t really know why you care that much, and trying to explain it usually makes it sound smaller than it feels. You just do.
In my experience, trail and ultrarunning grew from a certain relationship with Mother Nature, personal effort and other people. It’s a wild mixture of individual hardship and mutual responsibility that I have always loved. You can spend an entire day fighting your own private battle and still stop when someone next to you needs help. Volunteers stand around in the cold for hours so you can eat boiled potatoes at 3 a.m. Small races survive because the same people mark trails, hand out bibs and take the markings down again the next day. None of this is glamorous, and much of it works because people consider themselves participants in something larger than their own race result.
You do not have to romanticize any of this. There has always been ego in ultrarunning. There have always been assholes, commercial interests and people who wanted to be seen. Plenty of old traditions are stupid, exclusionary or simply outdated. I have zero interest in preserving the sport in amber.
But I just wish people would spend some time with it before changing its surface without giving much of a fuck about what lies underneath.
The Culture You Enter
Back at that Abwärts show, I could have concluded after twenty minutes that pogo dancing needed improvement. Perhaps more elaborate choreography? Nicer outfits and some individual lighting. A personal photographer following me through the pit.
Luckily, I was too busy trying not to eat shit on a beer-soaked floor.
There is something essential about entering a culture without immediately making yourself its center. Take the time to understand what people care about, what has held up for good reasons and what probably deserves to change or disappear. Then bring your own shit into it and see what you can add.
I genuinely love seeing what a new generation of runners contributes to this sport. I already see parts of it happening, and some of it is much more interesting than another bunch of middle-aged white men explaining how things used to be at Western States in 1987.
New influences and ideas are healthy. Friction is healthy too.
What worries me is an approach that treats running mainly as a backdrop for attention, identity, visibility and business ventures. When the actual sport becomes a side issue, its unique peculiarities become annoying very quickly.
The long periods when nothing happens.
Training for months without anyone caring.
Bad races that are just bad and produce no heroic redemption story, no matter how hard you try to change the narrative.
Repetition. Endless repetition. Because that’s how it works.
Getting injured, of course.
Running alone. Feeling alone while doing so.
Discovering after seven hours that you are still only halfway there.
Running can become absolutely spectacular, but most of the time it really isn’t.
Running itself will probably take care of some of that bullshit over time.
Trends move on. People who came to running mainly because it currently carries more social currency than cycling or Hyrox will eventually find something newer that delivers even more of it. Running will become uncool again. I’m pretty confident about that, because it has happened many times before. And when it does, much of the bullshit that came along for the ride will disappear remarkably fast.
Can’t wait.
The ones who stay, though, will start digging deeper almost automatically. A few years of training, races, DNFs, volunteering, crappy weather and hanging around with other runners changes your relationship with the sport. You learn things without realizing you are learning them.
At some point you know who’s really done and who just needs someone to kick them out of “the chäir” and send them back onto the trail, why everyone hates the guy with the speaker, and why helping another runner can matter more than ten minutes on your finish time.
Eventually, they might even become Lauchs themselves.
The Deal
And this is where I arrive at the slightly uncomfortable compromise with myself.
I will keep working on my old grumpy man problem. I’ll try to distinguish between something actually damaging the culture I care about and something simply looking unfamiliar to me. I’ll remind myself that nobody appointed me guardian of trail running (would be a cool title, though) and that a sport which cannot absorb new people, aesthetics and ideas deserves to die.
In return, I would like something from the new people entering it. A little of what I brought to that punk show in Augsburg in 1992.
Curiosity about what was already happening before you walked through the door. Enough sensitivity to notice the unwritten rules before deciding they are stupid. Respect for people who have carried this thing for years without assuming they therefore own it. Appreciation for a culture you want to change without losing sight of why you cared enough to enter it in the first place.
You can bring your own dance.
Just pick people up when they fall.
That seems like a reasonable deal to me.
Everyone else can fuck off.
Everything Not Running
Things you don’t need to know: I got some more tattoos. Why? Because apparently I’m still not done. I don’t even have a good explanation anymore. At 47, I’m also well past the point where tattoos are going to impress anyone. Including myself.
Twenty years ago there was usually some grand idea or meaning attached to it. These days I mostly look at an empty spot and think: Let’s fill that gap. And if there’s no gap left, there’s always the option of a second layer aka blast over.
There’s also a point where getting tattooed stops feeling like a decision and becomes basic maintenance. Very expensive maintenance, by the way. Money that could definitely be spent more wisely, or simply saved. Other people repaint their apartment, buy new furniture or finally fix that wobbly shelf in the kitchen. I lie on a flatbed for ten hours until my back hurts more than the body part being tattooed.
I’m not sure this qualifies as personal growth. But the arms look better now.
On Repeat
Ministry, a band like a car crash. Drugs, noise, chaos, weird genre collisions, ten-minute songs, more than 20 people who played in the band, symbolism no one understands, and the constant impression that everything could fall apart at any second. Yet somehow they became one of the most influential bands of the ’90s, despite having already been around since the early ’80s. They basically invented industrial metal and never were interested in whether anyone could follow.
N.W.O. is Ministry at their most direct and vicious. More than 30 years later, the song could hardly feel more current. Which probably says less about how well it aged than about how little some things have changed.
I think it's no small coincidence that the Sports and Music sections in every bookshop are next to one another, usually tucked away on the 3rd floor.
I feel your pain my friend. I have those “ get off my lawn” moments too from time to time. I try to check myself but sometimes it slips out. Thanks for the ministry tune I hadn’t heard that or seen the video in years. I was more mosh pit than punk but a few of those bands could pull off the cross over.