TTLG: A Marathon, Not a Sprint
This article is featured in the 2025 Commencement & Reunions special issue.
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This article is featured in the 2025 Commencement & Reunions special issue.
At 5:45 a.m. on Sunday, May 18, a hot air balloon lifted into the sky. It rose above a dinosaur sculpture made from scrap lumber and used nails and a wooden building filled with sewing machines, dusty beer bottles and plastic flamingos. This is the Post Mills Airport, located 17 miles from Hanover in the town of Thetford, Vt. For years, it has served as the site of the Experimental Balloon & Airship Association Meet, which took place this year from May 16 through May 18.
Mirror, Mirror, on the wall: it’s Gretchen, writing from one of the mysteriously-stained, slightly-too-squishy couches that lives on the second floor of Robinson Hall — the same couch I’ve sat on for the past four years at Mirror story assignment meetings. To be honest, I’ve been dreading this Editors’ Note — the last of the 181st Directorate — because the end of my time on Directorate is akin to taking the first step on the path that leads to graduation. And that, in turn, feels somewhat like stepping off the edge of a cliff when you don’t know what lies beneath — not to be dramatic or anything. Clearly, our last night of production is filling me with the first twinges of nostalgia for my college experience.
When I think about it for too long, the idea of originality makes me a little nauseous. In a fit of nostalgia — and a desire to procrastinate studying for an exam — I reread my Common Application essay earlier this week, which centered around the feeling that everything I write was destined to be a worse version of something that’s already been created.
Dear Diary — I mean, Mirror,
My winterim looked like this — five hours wearing a tangle of wires and detectors to image my brain for research, four showings of “Wicked” in theaters, three Christmas dinners, two drinks at Purdue University’s most famous bar and one impending move. Make no mistake — the last item in this list occupied far more of my time than these other, albeit narratively compelling, anecdotes.
Welcome to week 8, Mirror. The combination of Homecoming weekend, the presidential election and the New York City Marathon — all of which somehow took place within the past week — have stirred up a strange cocktail of emotions within me, ranging from nostalgia to dread and everything in between. While I spent the better part of Election Day glued to the incremental shifts of The New York Times election forecast needle, I’m fairly confident that no one who reads this Editor’s Note is looking to me to provide political commentary — especially since this is the first presidential election in which I was old enough to vote.
Sunrise last Monday found me summiting Holt’s Ledge, drenched from a predawn rainstorm, shivering and about 37 miles into the Dartmouth Fifty — a 57-mile, 31 hour nonstop hike from Moosilauke Ravine Lodge to Hanover. A few minutes later, I sat on the side of the trail and closed my eyes, wishing fervently that when I opened them again I would find myself wrapped in a blanket in my bed, instead of sleep-deprived and with fifteen miles left to trudge.
A few days ago, I decided that I would write this week’s Editor’s Note about trying to slow down and pay more attention to my surroundings. Mere hours ago, I was out on a run and, in a cruel display of irony, my advice came back to haunt me. For a moment, I stopped paying attention to the road beneath my feet and started mentally cataloging my to-do list. I promptly tripped and scraped my knee, hand and elbow, leaving me to run the last mile back to campus covered in blood and extremely upset.
It’s reached the point in the term where I look back on the past nine weeks and wonder how the days passed by so quickly. This term, I’m feeling the fickleness of time even more so than normal — on Friday, my younger brother and only sibling will graduate from high school. It feels like just yesterday he was 14 years old and starting his freshman year.
Last Sunday, I ran my first official half marathon: the NYCRuns Brooklyn Half Marathon. The race went about as I expected — I ran a time I’m fairly proud of but also spent much of the last six miles squeezing a Clif bar like a stress ball and cursing my decision to ever lace up my running shoes.
This week, I have senior theses on the brain.
When students want to listen to music or tune in to their favorite podcasts, they might first turn to streaming services like Apple Music or Spotify. But another option for Dartmouth students lies on the third floor of Robinson Hall — the Web Dartmouth College Radio station, a hidden gem from which students host radio talk shows and stream their curated playlists. According to the organization’s website, WebDCR is Dartmouth’s freeform, online and student-run radio station. The organization, which occupies a unique niche in Dartmouth’s media landscape, has undergone numerous changes throughout its history — most notably, the College sold its FM station to WFRD, a commercial radio station in Hanover, in 2021. Since then, WebDCR transitioned to exclusively online broadcasting.
Happy Week One, Mirror, and happy 24S! Gretchen here.
This article is featured in the 2024 Winter Carnival special issue.
This article is featured in the 2023 Homecoming special issue.
This editors’ note is featured in the 2023 Freshman special issue.
With every second that passes during your time at Dartmouth, you become less attractive — if you identify as a woman, that is. This statement is almost laughably absurd, yet it is the narrative that the Dartmouth X peddles to women.
This article is featured in the 2023 Commencement & Reunions special issue.
I’m taking my off term this spring, so in fewer days than I’d like to admit, I’ll have to say goodbye for 10 weeks to the people who have become my best friends. In the face of my impending departure, I’ve spent much of this term reflecting on friendships at Dartmouth. After five terms here, I can confidently say that I have grown closer with my best friends than I ever thought I would, especially considering how nervous I was before my freshman fall about the prospect of making friends.