Hi friends - thanks for sticking with me throughout this series. I've loved exploring the connections between fitness and writing, and loved hearing your feedback even more. This will be my second-to-last installment.
This week, I finally decided to delve into running, something I probably won't be able to do for the rest of this week if the predicted storm comes sweeping in. So happy reading, happy running, and happy cabin fevering for anyone in the Northeast!
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Despite the fact that I do it almost every day, I’ve been putting off writing about running. I’m not particularly adept at it, for starters. I’m faster than I used to be but I have leftover insecurities about being one of the slowest girls in sixth grade. Many of my writer friends are astounding, “real” runners who do marathons like I do brunch - that is to say, regularly and with little pre-planning.
Not to mention that running and writing is well-tilled soil: Joyce Carol Oates has written beautifully on the subject, Haruki Murakami has many essays and an entire book about it, just to name a few. And while I’ve found kinship in many of these pieces (or in great fictional characters who run), I haven’t found that passage on running and writing that makes me say yes, that is how it feels to me. Oates, for one, is overly ebullient in her praise of the sport: “In running the mind flies with the body; the mysterious efflorescence of language seems to pulse in the brain…” Conversely, Murakami is mind-numbingly moderate not only about his running but also his writing, speaking as if both are easy pursuits that, if one puts one’s mind to it, can be mastered. On writing, he says: “I had no concrete image of what I wanted to write about—just the conviction that I could come up with something that I’d find convincing.” And, on running, even more florid: “So, like eating, sleeping, housework, and writing, running was incorporated into my daily routine.”
I’m somewhere between these two extremes. I love running and it has a clear connection to the writing constitution. As opposed to dance or yoga, which drain me too deeply to leave anything left for the page, running fuels my writing. Running feels the same as writing, even - the discipline, the solitude, the ease of beginning and struggle to persist, that addictive high at the end.
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Some of the first documented group running was during the Roman festival Lupercalia, partly in honor of a she-wolf named Lupa who breastfed Romulus and Remus. Men would dress in the skins of sacrificial goats and run, en masse, around the city, whipping the exposed skin of girls and women who willingly crowded near. The lashes were meant to increase fertility.
I imagine the wild euphoria of this festival - these bloodied, able-bodied men probably half-drunk on whatever 100 proof sludge Romans called wine, high on endorphins and lashing the backs of local honeys to prevent sterility.
Sounds bizarre, but perhaps no more bizarre than paying to run 26.2 miles with hundreds of strangers on a random Saturday. Running is so solitary but so natural that we figured out a way to share it with each other, to stand around wrapped in shiny blankets afterward, basking in the communal runner’s high.
When I wanted to sign up for my first race, a 10 mile Jingle Jog, my boyfriend at the time quipped that I could “run for an hour in a Santa costume for free.” It is most difficult to argue someone is wrong when he is not, technically speaking, wrong.
On the first day of my MFA, my professor Jennifer Michael Hecht said “You must really not be able to do anything else, otherwise you wouldn’t be here.” And by this she did not mean that we, her students, were not many-talented, but that we absolutely could not tear ourselves away from the strange, lonely, and rhapsodic pursuit of writing.
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Recently, I’ve gotten faster. For the first time in my running life, something major shifted and a fat minute or more came off my mile time. Where once I had struggled to do 3 miles in 30 minutes, I was clocking 4 in less than that without fatigue. I started asking myself, is it your legs that want to quit or you? Is it your lungs or your bullshit head?
The last year of my life has been filled with upheaval. I’ve ended one relationship and started another. I’ve moved across the country and back. I’ve lain in a hospital bed with my grandfather on Christmas Day. I’ve subletted, couch-hopped, Amtraked, driven, and flown my way all over America. In the span of 18 months, I’ve found myself living in no less than five different places, not to mention the countless hotel rooms and friend’s air mattresses. Most mornings, when I wake up, I’m not immediately sure where I am.
What has saved me from this mania, this deep disorientation, is running. Just getting up out of whatever unfamiliar bed I’m in and putting on my shoes and running. During my brief stint in California, I ran so much that my toes were peeking out the sides of sneakers I’d had only five or six months.
I wish I had spent more of this energy on writing, but unfortunately for me discomfort does not breed creativity. Even when I’m stable, writing often feels fraught and never enough and unsatisfying. Even when writing goes well I feel certain I’ll hate whatever draft I currently love within the month, ill with anticipation for the next round. Like a boxer in a corner, pulsing with testosterone, slippery with blood. When my boyfriend, also a writer, received word that his poem had been accepted at a major national magazine, we hadn’t been celebrating fifteen minutes before he said “Well, it’s not like this will fix my life.” At the time, I was irritated with him for being such an Eeyore, but really I knew exactly what he meant. Nothing, it seems, can “fix” life. There’s always more to do and less time to do it in. As Louise Gluck says in her essay Education of the Poet, “The fundamental experience of the writer is helplessness,” that “...most writers spend much of their time in various kinds of torment: wanting to write, being unable to write, wanting to write differently, not being able to write differently.”
Running is a grand torment, too, but it never lets me down. Almost every lap feels like a victory lap, and I invariably write better when I have been running or know I will get to run after I’m done. It’s not that running makes me feel better but rather that not running makes me feel awful. No matter what the state of my actual appearance, I don’t feel beautiful if I don’t run. I feel foggy and soft. When I run, I become sharp. My bones get strategic.
If anything, I let running down. I don’t go far enough, fast enough. Everything is there, ready for me. Inside my legs and my lungs. Even now, faster, being able to go much farther than I usually go, I am afraid of getting slower again.
That’s my big problem, maybe, the reason I find myself in this jagged limbo for the last year plus: I’m disciplined, but not disciplined enough. I’m ambitious but not ambitious enough. I want more than I’m willing to go after, even when I am able.
Both running and writing require very little to begin. Just yourself, one or two tools (a pen, a pair of shoes), and some grit. I’m not sure I’m gritty. I’m not sure I have what it takes. I haven’t run a marathon and I haven’t completed a book. I keep putting myself off.
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I have been a lifelong vegetarian, and proud of it. But as I become a more intense runner, I’ve started craving meat. This freaks me out. I’ve never wanted meat, ever. Even when I was dancing almost every day in high school or training for my yoga teacher certification three hours each morning, I never craved meat. Now, suddenly, as my pace quickens and my quads lift up off the bone, I want chicken fingers like crazy. I ran past an ad for Wendy’s last week (Wendy’s!) and my mouth opened on its own.
I’m not great at listening to myself. I don’t trust instinct.
When I decided to move to California for love, my little sister balked. She was as devastated that I would leave New York, where she also lives, as she was that I would move across the country for a man I barely knew. “You’re so regimented in your daily life,” she said. “How can you be so impulsive with your big life?”
I could never get any faster in California, though this should not have been the case. I had ample time, beautiful weather every day, and a new city to discover. But I wore my misery like a lead skirt, hobbling around with my knees buckled and my breath short. There was a brattiness to both my writing and my running - as if I should feel better, as if these practices should be giving me more. An entitlement.
My boyfriend is naturally fast. In California one of our favorite dates was a long run that ended at a bar called The Graduate. He always got there before me. But I’ll save drinking (and romance) for my final piece. Suffice to say that I was taking little pleasure nor relief in the things that were usually my sure tickets: writing, running, love, bars.
Luckily, even in the madness of the last year, running and writing have slowly come back to me, in tandem. The gnawing sense of failure, of “time torn off unused,” has been replaced with a consuming sense of ambition. There’s one line of Murakami’s that, despite its sentimentality and overtness, moved me very much: “People become runners because they’re meant to.” It will only be enough, I’ve realized, if I do way too much.
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Since I started running with any seriousness, around 2009, I’ve been lucky to have some incredible routes. I lived in Washington, DC for many years and chugged around the National Mall, circling the Lincoln, discovering forgotten, ivy-wrought monuments in the recesses of the city.
During my first three years in New York I lived two blocks from the West Side Highway, where I would run south, marking the passage of time by the construction of the Freedom Tower, watching it break the skyline floor by floor. Other days I was lucky enough to run in the runner’s heaven that is Central Park. Now I live in Brooklyn, a whole new borough to get lost in, with a whole different park to flirt with.
My boyfriend currently lives in Gettysburg, PA and I have had the unique and eerie pleasure of running for miles, uninterrupted, around the battlefield. As opposed to New York, where I am often subjected to the stop-go of traffic and street lights and surprise babies crossing my path in crowded parks, I can just run without breaking stride. The air in Gettysburg is thick, silent, and smells like woodsmoke even when it’s warm out. I wouldn’t know this, maybe, were I not a runner.
Since the dissolution of much steadiness in my life, new routes have given me both a sense of solace and excitement. Advancing in my running - becoming faster, thus being able to explore longer, more interesting trails - creates an air of accomplishment when I feel like a failure. As if the world still makes some sense, despite all the mess, and is full of discovery. Last summer, when we drove across the country on our move back from California, I ran in Wyoming, South Dakota, Minneapolis, Chicago, South Bend, and Cleveland. Chicago may be my favorite running city so far (the architecture, the lake, the cleanliness), though I have never tried it in winter.
Running is my favorite way to discover a new place. I’ve had some of my best runs in new cities, getting lost, going farther, getting stuck in the rain and loving it. When I had the great fortune to attend the Sewanee Writer’s Conference in Tennessee two summers ago, I spent every afternoon running through the woods, avoiding deer, compulsively composing in my head, once bumping into Robert Hass out on his own jog. The trees were that special kind of Southern gray-green, usually wet after the shatter of an afternoon storm. Everything smelled like cold dirt.
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Joyce Carol Oates compares writing and running to dreaming throughout her essay on the topic. Both can be out-of-body experiences, to be sure, but Oates claims a near-delirious state during her running, and to the composing she does in her head while running. “Possibly these fairy-tale feats of locomotion are atavistic remnants,” she writes, “the hallucinatory memory of a distant ancestor for whom the physical being, charged with adrenaline in emergency situations, was indistinguishable from the spiritual or intellectual. In running, ‘spirit’ seems to pervade the body…”
While I’m not sure I’m on the magical school bus with Oates, I do know I understand her gushing. I feel deeply indebted to running as a mental salve, as a reminder of my own capability. Some days - too many days - I’ve felt more like the woman on some Roman street corner during Lupercalia, dress open, waiting for a hopped-up man to come and lash my vulnerable back so that I may (joy of joys) have more children. When I run, and really run, I get to throw on the goatskin. I get to wield the whip.
Originally from Georgia, Jess Smith now lives and works in New York City. Her work can be found in Sixth Finch, Phantom Limb, Ghost Town, The Best American Poetry Blog, Lumina, and other journals. She received her MFA from The New School in 2013.
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