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Twitter Goes Wild After Kamala Harris Is Seen Jogging Up And Down The Lincoln Memorial Steps

Olivia Blair
·3-min read
Photo credit: Alexander Tamargo - Getty Images
Photo credit: Alexander Tamargo - Getty Images

From ELLE

While we don't know for certain, we can safely presume that Vice President Kamala Harris' diary must be pretty full these days.

After being inaugurated on January 20 at the Capitol, along with the new president, Joe Biden, Harris has already set to work just like Biden, who has hit the ground running with various executive orders, reversing some of Donald Trump's policies and attempting to bring the country's Coronavirus pandemic under control.

Harris too has been virtually meeting workers in vaccination centres, swearing in new US government officials and holding international conversations with bodies like the World Health Organisation.

But despite her new workload - not that it was significantly less before considering Harris is a lawyer who has already served as California's Attorney General and as a senator - the first woman in office is managing to fit in time for herself wherever she can. Including on the steps of one of D.C.'s most recognisable political landmarks.

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A post shared by 𝔹𝕠𝕓𝕓𝕪 (@gobobbygogo)

A couple of days ago, a fellow runner by the name of Bobby shared pictures on Instagram of a surprising encounter during his five-mile run in the city. The runner explained how during their run they had paused to see the new glass portrait of the history-making Vice-President when he soon spotted Harris herself running up and down the stairs of the Lincoln Memorial with her husband, the Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff.

Flanked by Secret Service personnel, Harris is seen in the photos and footage wearing a warm North Face jacket, running leggings, trainers, a baseball cap and face mask.

Since sharing the footage, the Vice President jogging at the Lincoln Memorial has gone viral with a number of Twitter users seriously enjoying the footage (especially the Secret Service attempting to keep up) while also feeling motivated by how the VP makes time for herself and her wellbeing during a very hectic job:

What a woman.

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    Before March of last year, Izzy Rose rarely spent an evening in. At 21 she was thriving on the first rungs of her career in music and fashion marketing; weeknights usually meant networking events at swish hotels, where she collected all the free drinks she could handle. At weekends, she danced with her friends in underground nightclubs. It “felt like the world was ending” when lockdown was imposed last year, she remembers, confining her to her east London flat, which she shares with her boyfriend. If the Government’s roadmap is to be believed, that adventure-packed life could be back on the cards by summer. But instead of filling her with excitement, Rose feels only dread. “It brings me anxiety to think about going back to how busy I was, meeting new people every day. I was so on the ball before; I could small-talk away. Now, I’ve kind of forgotten how to do all that.” Her words shed light on a peculiar trend some psychologists are calling “re-entry anxiety”. After a year of Zoom and banana bread-baking, psychologists fear we have become a nation of hermits, afraid to leave our front door – even once the threat of Covid has receded. A large study published this week by the Together Coalition, a charity chaired by the Archbishop of Canterbury, found one-third of Britons think the country will not go back to the way it was before Covid, because we have become accustomed to staying apart. “Everyone, to some extent, will have become deskilled at socialising,” says Dr Kamran Ahmed, a clinical psychologist who has written about his own battles with social anxiety. “If we’re not using our social muscles then we get a little bit out of practice – just like with anything else.” Those feeling anxious fall generally into two camps, he says. In the first group are those with a diagnosed condition, like social anxiety disorder. They probably felt relieved when lockdown was imposed, but there is a danger their condition has become “entrenched”. Far less attention has been paid to the second group: those without any diagnosed anxiety disorder, but who are feeling frightened, perhaps unable to sleep, at the thought of getting on a crowded train carriage, or seeing groups of friends. Dr Ahmed, who is from the UK but now lives in Sydney, remembers how bizarre he felt attending a party after the Australian city emerged from its first lockdown last year. “I think I’d almost forgotten how to dance.” In a 2010 study, neuroscientists looked inside the brains of socialites with large circles of friends, and found their amygdala regions (responsible for emotional processing) tended to be larger than average. Some think this region can grow and shrink depending on the rhythm of a person’s life; research published in 2012 found that veterans tend to have smaller than average amygdala regions after experiencing a traumatic battlefield event. A long time in solitude can also affect the balance of hormones in your blood associated with stress and bonding.

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