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On Writing and Running

JA July 29

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I’m not much of a runner. In fact, it’d be more correct to say I’m something of a slow and reluctant jogger, and a pretty amateur one at that. But I do run (or jog), and have been doing so for about three days a week for the past few years – incidentally, around the same time I started writing a novel.

Running is far from the top of my list of things to do at the start of any given day. I’m not a morning person, which means I’m also not a morning jogger. If anything I tend to prevaricate and postpone to the nth degree. But, slowly, as I spend yet another hour in front of my computer, not having written anything much and feeling increasingly sloth-like, I do feel the need to get up and shake some of the gravity away. Eventually, I’ll lace up my runners, stretch, pick up my music and head outdoors, trying to avoid the groups of schoolkids and dog-walkers also wandering through the park in the late afternoon.

From word of mouth and a quick google, I know I’m not the only one to incorporate running or some other form of physical exercise into their daily routine – many other writers do it too and do it much better. In an essay in the June edition of Meanjin, Ben O’Mara described his typical morning like so:

These days I rise at five-thirty every morning for a 45-minute run. One of the few things I can appreciate from all those years of Catholic indoctrination is the power of discipline. It gives me a big engine for writing. I hit the pavement for a solid hour in the crisp air before sun rise and I lose myself in the tunes and the rhythmic pounding of feet on asphalt. Often, the dramatic logic of a story I’m working on falls into place, or an ending I’m struggling with arrives quietly and without fanfare. Then I write for a solid hour before work starts.

Haruki Murakami is perhaps one of the better known authorities on the subject. I recently finished his book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, in which he describes taking part in at least one marathon and one triathlon each year. His daily routine comprises of getting up at 4am, working for five to six hours, and then going for a 10km run or 1500m swim (or sometimes both). I found this book, which is part-memoir, part-training diary, part-philosophy, surprisingly enjoyable, not in the least thanks to his many insights into exactly why running and writing pair up to well.

One of the first things mentioned is the importance of establishing rhythm and routine. Murakami argues that a lot about being a novelist is similar to building fitness as a runner. You need to start out slow, then gradually build up the pace, flexing your creative muscles until it becomes natural and unthinking. Like running the less you do it, the harder it gets.

Jeff Sparrow, interviewed on darkly wise, rudely great, echoed this sentiment:

Writing is like exercise. Now, no-one – no-one I know, anyway – actually likes jogging, at least not in the sense that they wake up on a cold drizzly morning and think, hurrah, I’ll soon be shuffling around a football field. But if you do it often enough, if you build it into your daily routine, it becomes something that you miss when, for some reason or another, running is no longer possible. Without exercise, you become twitchy, irritable, strangely dissatisfied.

If you write every day, the same thing happens. It’s not that writing becomes any more enjoyable. You don’t look at the blank screen enthusing about the prospect of filling it up. The empty page remains just as hateful as ever, possibly more so, but in some way, not confronting it becomes less possible

Angela Meyer also added that exercise can provide the mental clarity for ideas to take shape.

In yoga you’re taught to acknowledge a thought but not hold on to it. You’re allowed to let it go and have faith that if it’s important, it will come back. Sort of trains you to let the unimportant things pass through, and helps clear the fog. I don’t know what it is about walking, but walking is definitely the exercise most conducive to the symmetry of previously unrelated ideas. Other things like weight-bearing exercises help to tune balance and focus both physically and mentally, I think, but not so deliberately as yoga.

Another thing that struck me in When I Talk About Running were Murakami’s thoughts on creativity and health. There is, he says, particularly in Japan, an assumption that writers must conform to the stereotype of the degenerate, tortured artist in order to produce good work. People of ask whether he will be able to continue to write such dark, eerie fiction if he continues to run marathons. Murakami concedes that writing can be an ‘unhealthy’ profession, in the sense that in involves confronting some of the darker aspects of human nature. I liked the fugu fish analysis he uses here – ‘the tastiest part is near the poison’. Yet at the same time, he argues that in order to engage with such ‘toxins’, a writer also needs to be as healthy as possible:

[A] healthy soul requires a healthy body. This might sound paradoxical, but it’s something I’ve felt very keenly ever since I became a professional writer. The healthy and the unhealthy are no necessarily at opposite ends of the spectrum. They don’t stand in opposition to each other, but rather complement each other … When the body disintegrates, the spirit also (most likely) is gone too. I’m well aware of that. However, I’d like to postpone, for as long as I possibly can, the point where my vitality is defeated and surpassed by the toxin. That’s my aim as a novelist … Which is exactly why even though people say, “He’s no artist,” I keep on running.

 

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