Hi folks, part two of the 2022 "top ten most read posts" series.
My thoughts ran a bit long today so we'll just do the one this time.
#7 | "We Back... Sort Of (On Breaks)" (October 12)
There's this Haruki Murakami memoir called What I Talk about when I Talk about Running that I've read two or three times over the years. I don't say this too often about a book but I remember it being rather disappointing. As I recall, it got started, kept going, and then finally ended... nowhere. Of course, it's been so long that I actually can't say if this was precisely my problem with it. As longtime TOA readers know, I don't object much to going nowhere. The problem might have been that I thought the best parts of the book could have been written with no mention whatsoever of running, which would be consistent with how I've reacted recently to similar work. As not just a runner but a (sort of) writer, and not just a runner but a runner who also occasionally (sort of) writes about running, the experience felt a bit like being served a piece of sushi by a cookout grillmaster - although the link to running intrigued me, I realized soon enough that Murakami's strengths as a fiction writer hardly ensured he could offer an equally satisfying experience when serving up different fare.
This post, which ended a TOA-record three month pause between posts, might have been my attempt to try writing Murakami's book for myself. It's partly a post about what running can do to your other hobbies (it kept me from writing) and partly about what running can teach you about your other hobbies (a break recharged me for writing just as it did for running), but it's mostly about the connection between writing and running. I'm not sure if I managed to succeed at the task. The astute reader, for example, will note that running comes up only in the final paragraphs, so how could it be about running? I could have clarified my point by plainly stating the connections, perhaps explaining how finishing a marathon the first weekend of October meant the preceding few weeks were absorbed by serious training, which I partly made time for by putting down the pen. However, I think I was walking a thin line between a post about the connection of writing to running and a post about just running, and I suspected overstatements regarding the connection would have pushed me across the line from the former to the latter.
The reason I wanted to avoid crossing this line is because I don't think writing about running leads to my best writing. In my mind, what I talk about when I talk about running comes at the expense of talking about far more important things. This may be an elusive realization for us amateur runners, who I believe generally rely on running as our main tool for figuring out how to live our best lives. For you non-runners, let me clarify - running takes a long time, during which there is little more to do than think. But I suspect this is also why I sense a certain futility when I write about running - there isn't an obvious difference between thinking while running and just thinking, so the extra work to explain why running played a role in my thinking often becomes a burden. I still may personally feel that I came to some kind of epiphany while running that could not have happened at any other time, but there isn't always an effective way to prove that to the reader. Could I have achieved the same result while walking, or perhaps sitting on the couch? From my experience, the answer is "sure, maybe" and that's enough to undermine any writing about it.
It may be unfair to tie this back to a book I read many years ago, but as I mentioned earlier it's also a reaction I've had to other similarly constructed work. The relationship between running and anything that happens outside of running always seems less obvious to me as a reader than it seems to me as a writer. I can relate - as a runner, you can have these moments where your entire being soars with each additional step, and in those situations it seems sensible to share the experience in writing. I remember an afternoon in late August when I was crossing from Cambridge to Boston over the Mass Ave bridge. At some point in the ambiguous zone between the two cities, I looked straight up in the air and became dizzy under the bluest sky I had ever seen. The strangest thought flashed through my mind - if this is all I get, I'll take it. I still have no idea what brought that to mind. In fact, my only conclusion a few months later is that I might now understand better why some people believe in God. But for me, those few seconds under the bright blue sky didn't lead to anything else - I didn't join the clergy, I didn't go down to the local church the following Sunday, I didn't even start wondering about God myself. I just went home, drank some water or Gatorade, and presumably took a shower.
I'd love to say at this point that such instances of pure wonder don't happen when you go for a walk. I believe for me the power of running is what brings these ideas to my mind, but I know better than to assume readers will accept that what is true for me is true on average (!). This is the toughest task for any writer - to read their own writing from the perspective of a reader. If the writing centers around some kind of anecdote, the questions for the writer-turned-reader are fairly simple. First, will the reader accept the anecdote's connection to the larger point? Second, has the writer overlooked anything that might undermine the premise? To return to my example, even if I had indeed built on this God Moment and changed my life in some meaningful way, there would still be readers who raised the thorny issue of all the other writing describing God Moments involving people whose two feet were firmly planted on the ground. In order for me to make this anecdote relevant, I would have to do a lot more than just share the story and expect others to accept it on its own merits - I would need to actually write much more about it until the reader was convinced that there was no other context in which I could enjoy such an epiphany. But then I would be writing about running, which would be a distraction from the far more interesting writing regarding my God Moment and what I think about that today.
This leaves the writer who runs in a challenging predicament. If something worthwhile happens while running, what's the best way to write about it? This is a big question, but I can offer an initial approach - a tangential method, making just enough contact with the running without giving it a chance to overtake the writing. I suppose this rules out any kind of post about my marathon, but I think the world will survive just fine without it. I've already said the most important thing about it in the initial post - taking a break from running to start the year helped me understand why I should take a break from writing in the middle of the year. Amusingly, I had some moments during the marathon which signaled to me that I was ready to return from my writing break. These resembled the way I recognized it was time to end my running break - just as those sudden urges to run told me it was time to return to running, quick thoughts at various mile markers regarding what I might write about the race signaled to me that I should soon return to writing. I may have continued with these musings all the way to the finish, but at around mile twenty the expected muscle challenges finally caught up to me and so from that point on I focused entirely on avoiding injury and completing the race.
I eventually dragged myself across the finish line, returning to where I had started hours earlier, which is a common feeling for runners - most days, it's just a bit of time and energy spent going nowhere. The meaning of such pointless exercise comes from returning to where you started as a slightly different person. For me, a marathon always seemed impossible due to my history of picking up ill-timed injuries, so crossing the finish line was just another item I could add to that list of things I was wrong about all along. But I think it was also a useful reminder that going nowhere, running the same circles day after day, is sometimes the only way to get somewhere. I think this is how writing works - most of your effort takes you nowhere, so you need to understand how going nowhere fits into the process of getting somewhere. What happens most days is that whatever you need to write about just isn't possible yet. Much like how the runner who hasn't trained up to the full distance isn't yet a runner capable of finishing the race, you aren't yet the writer who can write what you need to write. All you can do is find whatever reason you can to stick with it so that you can return to the desk next time as a slightly different writer. One day you realize something actually did happen, and it's a special moment - all those days of going nowhere has finally led you somewhere. I don't understand any of it, I just know that it's the closest thing to magic you can find, the moment when the finish line suddenly appears on the page or on the road, and the most obvious thought in the world comes to mind - if this is all I get, I'll take it.
