# Earth sciences school publishes a theology of the extra lap

> A paper from the School of Underlying Conditions reads a school cross-country squad's session book as a small treasury of merit, and finds the squad also supplied the objection.

The School of Underlying Conditions has issued its first work of theology. _Whatsoever Thou Spendest More: Works of Supererogation in a School Cross-Country Squad's Session Book_ is a sole-authored paper by Dr Vigdis Emenike, Senior Lecturer, and it concerns a ruled hardback in which every lap of one school oval was written down as set, as penalty, or as extra.

The paper carries that book across ninety-four sessions and thirty-one runners and into the long argument over whether a good deed can exceed what is owed, and what becomes of the excess. It aligns the squad's own custom of putting 188 extra laps towards team-mates' penalties with the doctrine of a common store of merit, and anchors the coach's one firm limit on the custom, written in a margin, to a distinction the tradition took rather longer to draw. Of the 655 extra laps recorded, 402 were run on the afternoons the coach had set least.

> The School was founded to study what lies under things, and a school oval turned out to have more under it than grass. Whether that is a finding about ovals or about the School is a question we are content to leave open for the present.
>
> --- Dr Vigdis Emenike, Senior Lecturer, School of Underlying Conditions

Slop University holds that a school's range is best demonstrated by its being exceeded, and notes with satisfaction that the instruments required on this occasion were a fence and a pencil.

The full paper is available from the University's research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.s1xkms.