Edinburgh review: Equations for a Moving Body (Summerhall)
© Niall Coffey
Two young women, elite athletes, run like old men: knock-kneed and frail. Over ten hours, they’ve swum 2.4 miles, cycled 112 and then run a marathon, and they’re floundering on the final straight: drunkenly zigzagging, bodies stalling, joints screaming out. Their legs give way beneath them. And so they start crawling – hauling themselves over the line.
Hannah Nicklin wants to know why people push themselves to their absolute limits, and then one step beyond. More than that, she wants to do so herself. At 28, she resolved to take on the ironman triathlon; a feat so gruelling the mere thought of it makes your limbs stiffen up in your seat.
It’s for herself too: a millstone and a milestone. Nicklin explains how, when we take on these goals, they become part of who we are; so much so that falling short can shatter a person’s sense of self. Yet, as she talks through her two years of training, you realise how many others feed in as well: John, who honed her running technique; Chris, her cycling partner and, briefly, her boyfriend; coaches and inspirations, friends and family. No-one runs their race alone. The same goes for life.
Nicklin doesn’t just push herself once, on race-day. She does so time and again. A natural-born swimmer, she reshapes herself into runner and cyclist. At a certain point, training takes over. Out of train windows she sees not landscapes, but cycle rides. She measures out journeys in running distances. She gets over break-ups by matching her ex-boyfriend’s PB, mourns a mate’s death by running his race. It’s borderline obsessive. Tunnel vision sets in.
Nicklin’s show suffers from the same thing. Equations for a Moving Body fixates on the race itself, not what it might represent. At its flattest, it’s a straight-up sports science lecture; a mix of motivational speech and training diary that’s too fascinated by its own subject – carb-protein ratios, rest and repair, cadences and kit. It still grips – sport naturally slips into storytelling – but it’s not as taut as it might be.
Mostly, it misses its metaphors – particularly some politics. Sat at a laptop, Nicklin cues up lecture aids live online, googling images, videos and fitness apps. It’s a neat counterweight – another obsession, anathematic to activity – but Nicklin only grazes its implications. If the early days of social networks were all friendship and sharing, the gamification of exercise pits us against each other. One’s collaboration, the other’s competition – the very things that feed into an ironman – but Nicklin never hauls the idea home.
The heart’s a muscle, she reminds us, and Equations for a Moving Body has a huge, healthy one. It could just do with going up a gear.
Equations for a Moving Bodyruns at Summerhall at 11am until 27 August (except 10, 17, 24).
