yellow

“Why is this blog called Running While Smoking Coal?”

Thank you so much for asking!   

6 ½ years ago I spent a semester in China, doing research on a Fulbright and also running the Great Wall Marathon.  The Insider’s Guide to Beijing had a section called “running in Beijing,” which began with a sentence going something like, “I know what you are thinking—why not just get on a treadmill and light up a brique of coal”?  Thus, the name of this blog was born.  All the stuff below is a chronicle of that experience. 

Yesterday I spent a really wonderful day with some great friends, eating a lunch supposedly favored by Ming emperors when they visited the countryside to get away from the renao of Beijing.  Renao is a word denoting “lively” but literally meaning “hot and noisy”—usually it is used here in a complimentary fashion, as in, “it is a really renao restaurant, you should go!”  If the Beijing of the 16th and 17th centuries was too renao for those spoiled royal dudes, I’d hate to think what they would have made of it yesterday.   The sky was cloudless but not blue—it was more like an ominous shade of yellow.  Bad for photography.

And lungs.  This time, before I departed home, I started following @BeijingAir on Twitter, which is the feed of the United States Embassy’s air quality monitor.  A few years ago, because the air quality index was over 500, the Embassy caused a stir by describing it as “crazy bad” in a Tweet.*   In America we have the color-coded Homeland Security Advisory System, letting us know how worried we need to be about terrorism.  Here, there is this:  

You can see that above 500 is in fact off the charts.  In fact, in the American terrorism warning system thingie, red is the worst color, but on the air quality index chart there are two colors that are worse than red.   Due to the “crazy bad” international incident, causing China to “lose face” about its all-too-obvious pollution problem, some detective work is needed**  to realize that @BeijingAir is in fact still the U.S. Embassy’s air quality feed.    It now posts things like this when the air is particularly (or particulate-ly) bad:

My eyes do burn pretty much constantly.  Perhaps an investment in whatever corporation is responsible for Visine might make up for my Beijing real estate fail.

This morning I ran 11 miles and before I went out checked @BeijingAir and found today’s number:

  

Not a good air quality day, but I ran anyway. It’s like acclimatizing to high altitude—best done before the big event.  For awhile breathing was difficult but then it got a little better.  11 miles is three laps of Houhai-Shichahai plus the 1.25 miles to and from my apartment.   I swear I heard a few people saying things like, “Look at the foreigner running in the pollution!”  But, then again, that might have just been a hallucination of my jetlagged mind.

So, let’s review!  “Beyond Index”=”crazy bad.”    Air China=China’s national airline.  BeijingAir=a really depressing and constantly-updated reminder of the unfolding environmental catastrophe in China.   Yellow air=bad.  Yellow day on air quality index=better than orange, red, super-red, and extra-extra-red!

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*This index is in fact that of the United States Environmental Protection Agency, the same bureau that some members of one political party love to hate (though it was established by Richard Nixon, also of that same party), and that has had some 93% of its workforce furloughed due to the government shutdown.  The origins of the index may help explain the Chinese objections to it, as an indicator of American arrogance/socio-political-environmental imperialism.  However, this also invites consideration of two propositions.  (1) Members of Congress should spend some time in a place where you can actually taste the air (say, Beijing) before they decisively vote to rid the U.S. of the bane of environmental regulations.  (2) Some things (for example, determinations of air quality) may in fact just be freakin’ universal.

**or,  in the 21^st century, some Googling—here it is Google Hong Kong because Google left China a few years ago, ostensibly for political reasons but probably just because they weren’t making any money.