Archive for February 19th, 2009

I just got back from an easy 5-mile run along the East River here in New York. The weather, today at least, is warm enough to enjoy running outside again, and just in time. I have been getting monstrously tired of treadmill monotony and (particularly annoying for me) the Robert Gibbs press briefings playing on CNN in the gym.

I began running in earnest a little over 4 years ago. Before, I thought I was in reasonably good shape. I walked, hiked, used the elliptical machines. Then I started running and realized I was fooling myself.  The past 4 years have been a fairly steady advance in endurance and speed. I ran through my pregnancy with Jasper and emerged faster on the other side (and, incidentally, wearing my size 2 non-maternity jeans within a week of giving birth!)

But for me, running isn’t just about weight control. I’ve learned that it has massive benefits for my writing.

Joyce Carol Oates penned an essay in 2000 called “Writers: See how they run” about just this phenomenon. “On days when I can’t run, I don’t feel ‘myself’; and whoever the ’self’ is I feel, I don’t like nearly so much as the other,” she wrote. Most importantly: “The structural problems I set for myself in writing, in a long, snarled, frustrating, and sometimes despairing morning of work, for instance, I can usually unsnarl by running in the afternoon.” There is something about jogging that jogs thoughts loose in the brain, makes ideas come together and (just as critical) gives you the energy to tackle seemingly intractable problems.

Running trains the physical muscles, but also the psychological endurance muscles. Just as you attack a 10-mile run 1 mile at a time, you attack a novel a chapter at a time, or even better, 1000 words at a time (just run to the next lamp post, then set another target). These daily victories over the lazier, weaker self that would give up because giving up is easier remind you, as a sub-6 minute miler once told me that “you can do anything as long as you stick to it.”

I know it is dangerous to become too dependent on one form of physical exercise for keeping you sane. Runners can get injured, which would be depressing enough without adding the sense of having lost your discipline to the injury. But writers often rely on something to get themselves through their projects. As Anne Patchett wrote in the winter issue of O at Home, “James accepted too many social invitations. Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald all hit the sauce. Woolf had to fight off madness itself. I have a tendency to polish silver. All in all, it could be worse.”

Likewise, you can do much worse than lacing up your shoes and going for a run.