[On the fifth anniversary of the Mockingbird Virtual Run, David "ZZYZX" Steinberg, aka The Timer, looks back on the origins of his impetus for creating the Mockingbird Run series , the advent of the coronovirus shutdown, and the first Mockingbird Virtual Run, which was five years ago today.]

In 2012, I had a bit of a health scare. I was diagnosed with type II diabetes. That was a wake up call for me, an announcement that it was time for me to get into shape. The one bit of advice that my doctor gave me is that I had to exercise for 30 minutes a day at an intensity such that I couldn't speak in a conversational tone of voice.

This started out as walking but then had to move to some running stretches and then I became a runner. My speed increased. My distances increased. For years, this became my morning hobby.

This was an aspect of tour for me. I would run in the morning of show days, occasionally doing races. I found a group in Colorado that organized races and I tried to get with them to do a charity run for the Mockingbird Foundation for Dick's one year. We never could get it organized but the idea stuck with me.

Fast-forward to 2020...

With the gym closed due to Covid, I started to focus more and more on getting my workouts outdoors. I was spending horrific amounts of time alone. Mel had to work outside the home but my job was remote. I largely spent my free time doing longer and longer walks, turning the walks into runs, and thinking. And on one of them inspiration hit!

We couldn't be together, but maybe we could all do the same thing. Dick's might have been canceled but we could do a group event. I came up with an idea: the Mockingbird Foundation Virtual Run.

I had two ideas at the forefront of this event. The first was to make it unique. Phish postponed 27 shows, so the short distance would be a 2.7 mile run. At the time they had played 928 distinct songs and Phish Stata had 1861 shows listed in my database, so the other distances would be a 9.28k and a 18.61k. With those non-standard lengths, a personal record was guaranteed no matter how you did!

The second was to have community aspects. Every Friday I wrote an essay about a running song that I love to the Virtual Run social media accounts. I collected photos from people's training routes and posted them so everyone could see. Even if we couldn't be together in person, it was a way for us to interact and see where everyone was. As we got closer and closer to the race time, the Facebook community became more active. At least for me, it felt like a lifeline to the Phish world, forcing me out of the isolation that it would have been easy to sink into, and I appreciated everyone who contributed to it.

In addition to being a run, I decided to create two competitions. The first is that I ran all three distances at a decent pace (22:01, 49:37, and 1:39:04 respectively) and created a challenge called Out-time the Timer. Everyone who beat my time received a certificate that I made with their name and distance. 11 people beat my 2.7 mile time, 19 beat my 9.28k (including me on my offical run), and 15 went for the distance and surpassed my 18.61 pace!

On the other side, I ordered 3 stuffed sloths from Amazon, larger ones for bigger distances, and whoever had the slowest time won those. A special shoutout goes to Becky Sumber who used her 18.61k virtual run as an excuse to go for a hike in the Adirondacks and finished in slightly over 7 hours. That's earning the sloth!

As we reach the 5 year milestone of the race weekend - the idea was to run between September 4 and September 7 of 2020 - I want to thank everyone who participated. It did create a fun connection during a bleak year and it raised thousands of dollars for the Mockingbird Foundation. This event also marks a sad milestone for me. In 2021 I would get a bad case of Covid that would morph into pneumonia and I have never been the same runner since. Never mind that the 11.5 mile run was my last time crossing the 10 mile run mark for me, but I haven't even reproduced the 5.7 mile distance since then.

Still though, I keep telling myself that I'm going to try to get myself back into running shape. I have the goal of a formal in person Mockingbird Race before a show and I have ideas for it. Whether it happens or not, let's at least look at a time when over 200 of us got together as a group and said that we weren't going to let distance or isolation get in our way. The event might have been virtual but the results were quite tangible.

If you liked this blog post, one way you could "like" it is to make a donation to The Mockingbird Foundation, the sponsor of Phish.net. Support music education for children, and you just might change the world.