“Deciding what is and is not political, and always catering to one group of runners, is white privilege,” Chan wrote. For instance: other GVRAT participants had posted photos of themselves waving “Blue Lives Matter” flags and had not been similarly reprimanded. There was a note from Cantrell: “I am 1000% in agreement, but this is not a political site.”Ĭhan responded with a series of Instagram posts in which he asserted that Cantrell’s insistence on neutrality was hypocritical. The next morning, however, Chan noticed that his post had been deleted.

The post included a photo of Chan hoisting a championship belt in triumph (something he apparently had lying around the house) and wearing a “Black Lives Matter” singlet. He wasn’t bringing this up to elicit sympathy, Chan wrote, but to call attention to the fact that other runners had to endure much worse on a regular basis-including his wife, who is Black. and that there were times during these nocturnal jaunts when a passing motorist would subject him to racist and homophobic slurs. In the post, Chan noted that he’d done most of his running between 2 and 8 a.m. The event was organized by noted race director Gary “Lazarus Lake” Cantrell and required participants to complete the requisite distance between May 1 and August 31, while logging their daily mileage on the GVRAT website.Īfter crossing the virtual finish line with an 8-mile run in his NYC neighborhood of Elmhurst, Chan-whose Facebook moniker is “Ben Asian Sensation Chan”-followed the example of other participants and posted a race recap on the GVRAT Facebook Group page. On July 31, Ben Chan, a recreational runner from New York City, finished a 635-mile virtual ultramarathon, known as The Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee (GVRAT).

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