Ritual – Just like the Wind Journal

The scene on the VOID bar in Bordeaux, France, on 28 Could 2018 was typical of what made the place so standard. The basement live performance venue was packed. Nearly as busy because the stage, the place there was barely room to maneuver. Not that Eddie Geida III – lead singer of the band An Albatross – cared. He was in his factor. And he was prepared.

The lights had been low within the venue and all eyes had been drawn to Eddie, illuminated by a inexperienced blue highlight. He was wearing a saggy, black Mickey Mouse vest, black split-side working shorts and heavy black boots. His legs and arms coated in tattoos. Hair, lengthy and black.

The gig began with the keyboard and guitar hitting deep, vibrating notes whereas Eddie fiddled with the microphone stand, seemingly misplaced in thought. Moments later the drums kicked in, quick and explosive. After which Eddie as if woke up by a starter’s pistol – grabbed the mic and roared into the primary tune.

Within the cramped area between the keyboards to his left, the guitarist on the opposite aspect and the drummer behind him, Eddie was a whirlwind of vitality. Abruptly he was working on the spot – excessive knees nearly all the best way to his chest. Eddie jumped, spun round and hoisted the microphone stand above his head as the gang responded with the identical vitality.

Eddie remembers that evening in Bordeaux as being an ideal live performance. Little did he know then how a lot life would change throughout the next few years.

Eddie has been a runner since he moved to Philadelphia within the Nineties to see the place he may take his music profession.

“When I was in my early twenties, I had just moved to Philadelphia and my roommate at the time was a distance runner. He kind of got me tapped into the running culture a little bit. I’m fronting, you know, an extreme underground, subcultural band that requires me to have explosive energy on stage. So it really behooves me to have some sort of cardio capacity,” explains Eddie. “But initially I always had a ceiling with running that I just wasn’t able to supersede. Because I really didn’t take it very seriously. It was always an afterthought. Just a means to an end, to get in the kind of shape required of me to be a frontman for an extreme band.”

However the working behavior caught. Eddie describes his relationship with working as a “consistent arc”. At all times there, but in addition altering over time.

Alongside the best way there have been moments that cemented Eddie’s relationship with working: “Not to sound cliché, but a lot of those breakthrough moments were important for me as a runner. I didn’t come from a really sporty background. I was a creative kid, you know. So when you’re engaged in a physical challenge, like training for your first marathon, you have breakthrough moments. For example, when you run 18 or 20 miles and you’re able to see positive feedback. Those were really synergistic moments in my life. They tremendously spoke to me. I think I would say the same about running my first ultra marathon. They are all increasing steps.”

Working grew to become such part of Eddie’s life that he would lace up whereas on tour. Certainly, in Bordeaux, Eddie and his spouse Amanda had taken the possibility to discover the town on foot:

“I actually have a great picture of the two of us, in the really old part of the city, running together. Which was really great. Every morning, we’d get up about an hour and a half before the band and we’d go out with our tour manager – who is also a runner – and we’d run 5km or 10km. We’d get the day started that way. These are some of my fondest memories of being on the road.”

Then in June 2019, Eddie’s life was turned the other way up when Amanda was killed in a highway visitors accident. The couple had been again in Philadelphia on the time and Eddie remembers speeding to the hospital when he heard the information. Tragically, Amanda’s life couldn't be saved.

In an interview with Philadelphia journal, Eddie described the aftermath of the accident “After three days of not being able to eat, drink, sleep, or shower, I looked at my running shoes and thought: ‘Just put them on and get out of the house.’ They symbolised a normalcy, a means of reclaiming the iota of familiarity I had left in my existence.”

Eddie ran following the lack of his spouse as a means of dealing with the tragedy. He additionally determined to fulfil his spouse’s dream of visiting India, the house of Hinduism, the ideas of which the couple adopted. Eddie travelled to Varanasi along with his guru to immerse Amanda’s ashes within the holy Ganges River. It was there that Eddie realised he was honouring the reminiscence of his spouse by working each day.

“When I was in India, in early 2020, just before the pandemic, I felt I’d recalibrated my relationship with running,” says Eddie. “How running filters into my life and sort of diffuses though it. Running became much more of a meditative thing and much less about, like, the metrics of running and racing. Subsequently I started this running streak that has been going on for 670 or 680 days now. Running has become a daily ritualistic practice in a lot of ways. There’s less of a sense that I angle the activity towards a 16-week programme to hit a certain kind of time on a 26-mile course, you know?”

On stage, Eddie seems to have the frantic vitality of a sprinter. His working, although, is far calmer. However are there similarities between what he does on stage and on the roads? “Yeah, definitely,” he says. “I think it really boils down to a sort of detachment. I feel that in a really heavy physical experience, you sort of become a-physical, in one sense. The repetition of running or tuning yourself into a certain song are performances that really require you to detach from the physical shell in which you exist.”

With nearly two years of day by day working behind him, one query Eddie will get requested – and asks himself – is whether or not he'll maintain going. His reply speaks to the significance working has in his life: “I feel like the kinetic pattern has a level of motivation. As if an object in motion tends to stay in motion. I feel like, if I didn’t have 680-something days behind me, there could come a day to kind of have a rest, right? But you’re not going to take a day off on your 693rd day. The propulsion comes from everything that I have behind me. It’s actually easy, especially with the origins of the streak and the connection that I feel to where I started it and why I started it. It’s sort of undeniable. It would be heartbreaking if I had to stop it.”

The previous few years have been laborious. Dropping Amanda was a tragedy. Covid-19 put a cease to racing – one thing that Eddie says was “the backdrop for the social end of running”. It made touring for a band inconceivable at instances, completely closing many venues – together with the VOID. And but Eddie isn't downbeat in any respect.

“I think that running creates a hyper awareness of health – physical and mental,” Eddie explains.

“Running ties into meditation and the metaphysical side of life. It has helped me create a cyclical pattern of positive energy. Running has been one of the tools that has helped me get through adversity, fortifying the structures.”

And with that, Eddie explains that he's leaving to satisfy his tattoo artist – to get his first ink in additional than two years. Appropriately, he says, this new piece shall be a running-related tattoo.

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