This Christmas Santa brought a heart rate monitor. Putting the pointy-headed intricacies of heart-rate training aside for a moment, what the numbers showed me was that my normal workout pace is a hair’s breadth away from my normal quitting pace.
Ask E, who trained with me most of last summer. Many of those workouts were shaded with intervals of sullen trudging, or once, my earnest threat to chuck an expensive titanium racing bike by the roadside and hitch-hike home. The solution has been to back off, keep my heart rate in check, and enjoy the scenery.
Fast forward several weeks to today: E, a friend and I finished our first half-marathon of 2010 at a respectable pace. I had fun, and could have kept going. At some point during the race–while running in wind and rain through the Willamette farmland–it struck me that ignoring a certain few of my writing goals would make me a much happier writer.
I have been looking for a better way to end my novel before re-submitting it to an agent, and been driving myself through a breakneck series of revisions since early December. But in order to rewrite the final two chapters, and to write them richly, I need to back off and enjoy the scenery.
Even if running is ultimately incomparable to creative writing, I suspect that this is probably right. As an editor as well as a writer, I know that rushing makes for empty fiction. Now for the test: Give me five writing days, and I’ll report back.
