Writing, Running, & Other Hard Things

Does doing one hard thing make it easier to do another?

Mar 13, 2021

“Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that’s the essence of running, and a metaphor for life—and for me, for writing as well.” - Haruki Murakami

In this issue:

Runners make me think I missed out on something important
Hearing from Terrell Johnson who runs and write The Half Marathoner
Free from my shelf to yours: two books by Lauren Hillenbrand
Sap’s running, sun’s shining, life is getting better
And don’t forget to reset your clocks on hour ahead tonight so 7:30 AM can feel like 6:30 AM (don’t you hate this?)

Running to Write?

People run past me every day. When I’m walking, when I’m staring out the window. There are all kinds: graceful, slim-legged cheetahs, stiff duck-footed waddlers, chatty joggers whose attention and bodies wander. There are some people whose stride is slower than I walk but the slow-motion arm pump, the rickety knee lift tells me they are imagining themselves to be running.

I admire them (except the maskless ones who sweat, gasp, and snort vileness out of one nostril while giving no quarter to others on a crowded path). They have embraced a practice that may be joyful but also requires discipline, sometimes pain, and, always, effort. There are some I see every day, rain or shine (okay, mostly shine here in San Diego), following the same routes as though they have memorized the path with the soles of their feet, leaving their minds free to go where they will.

I ran a bit in my twenties and thirties. It was an on-again, off-again relationship. I was encouraged to run in a local 10K when I lived in New Jersey and after feeling the rush that came with passing a few people and not coming in last for my age group, I was sure I would keep running. I did not.

As I look back on how I approached running -- I realized I pulled back from committing. I loved how it made my body feel. I loved how it cleared my mind. Still, I did not commit. I was never an athlete. I never ran or played on any kind of team at school. No one made a big deal about this -- it was common then for girls to opt out of sports and I was always more interested in reading a book. I reached adulthood without knowing the confidence that could result from pushing myself physically. Now, I suspect I missed out on something equally valuable: the way meeting a physical challenge could have helped me to write sooner, better, longer -- to commit.

All the pieces are there: the daily-ness of the practice, the testing, reaching, trying to go a little further, and the discipline to keep at it when it gets hard or boring or painful. Conditioning the body requires conditioning the mind, it seems to me. Conditioning the mind may not require conditioning the body -- but being as physically fit as possible sure helps. I can sit longer to write if I commit to some kind of exercise daily. I can focus more readily in the morning if I’ve gone for a walk first.

Some of us in the Spark community are runners, some are writers, at least a few are both. All of us have attempted to achieve something difficult. I’m wondering: how has doing one difficult thing - maybe it’s running or maybe it’s not physical at all -- helped you to do another?

Q: How does doing one hard thing make it easier for you to tackle another?’

Terrell Johnson: A Writer Who Runs, A Runner Who Writes

While you’re thinking that over, I’ll share a little from a recent conversation I had with one subscriber, Terrell Johnson who always wanted to be a writer, took up running when he was in his mid-twenties, and now writes The Half Marathoner, a very successful newsletter for runners that is also about many other things.

The titles of several recent issues shows how easily the principles of one can be applied to the other: “Running With A Beginner’s Mind,” “Nobody’s Progress is Linear,” “Running on Radical Hope” in which Johnson cites poet Ada Limón’s words on not giving up and how “What we say to ourselves has an incredible impact,”

In fact, Johnson often draws inspiration from writers who may or may not have ever donned a pair of running shoes, like Limón Lauren Hillenbrand, Jerry Seinfeld, or David Halberstam.

“I’d always harbored this secret dream of being a writer and never really knew what to do or how to go about doing it.” he recalls. “I was really inspired by Pat Conroy because I grew up in the Eighties when he was at his peak in his fame and popularity. He was the one who really turned the light on for me.”

He majored in English in college and “hoped it would show me the way.” He left college full of enthusiasm for the writers, themes, and ideas he’d been exposed to but he’d never written for publication until he took a job at a local newspaper in the small town of Thomson, GA.

“I had zero journalism training,” he says. “I would just pore over the Atlanta Journal- Constitution, the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and USA Today. Over time I sort of got a feel for how to write articles and then doing it, of course, was great practice. I was writing for an audience and that was huge because I wasn’t doing it for myself, I was doing it to convey information.”

It was after he’d moved to Atlanta for another journalism job which turned into a series of journalism or “journalism adjacent” work which included writing for the web on The Weather Channel’s website. He also began to run. At first it was about a social life. “Friends of mine wanted to do a marathon and so we all trained for this race of the Fourth of July in Atlanta called the Peachtree Road Race which is the biggest 10K in the world.” A marathon followed, this time at the urging of a woman he was dating.

“I was really struggling with self-confidence at the time,” Johnson says. “So running this marathon was like showing myself I could actually do something I thought I couldn’t.”

His newsletter emerged from another challenging time, the economic crash in the mid-2000’s. He freelanced for local and national publications like The New York Times when he read about people who made money from their own websites. There weren’t a lot of magazines or sites out there for folks who ran middle distances so I thought I could try that out.”

He’s been running The Half Marathoner website since then. The newsletter followed. Both generate income for him but, now with a family, he continues his day job which involves writing and consulting on online user experience for the insurance company State Farm. While being able to go full-time with the newsletter and his writing would be great down the road, Johnson has already achieved the kind of success that means the most to him.

“The pleasure I get from it and the response I get from an audience that pays me -- I’m just bowled over. They could spend their time with anybody but they’re spending some amount of time every week with me. I am grateful.”

Like many writers with additional commitments and an audience who expects to find ``The Half Marathoner” in their inboxes, he writes whenever he can and struggles to balance his work and family who, like him, have recovered from Covid-19. He remembers something he heard in an interview, “I can’t remember her name but I remember she said not to listen to anyone who tells you that you’ve got to have this perfect situation, just write when you can. The other day, my son was playing with his trains and I had my laptop and just wrote what I could in there.”

He credits running with getting him to this point.”It didn’t change everything in my life. And there’s definitely still plenty of moments when I struggle with insecurity. But I think running that first marathon happened at this perfect moment in my life. When I proved to myself that I could do it, it helped me say to myself ‘maybe I could do other things too, like calling up The New York Times and see if I could write for them.”

Or start his own publication.

Check out The Half Marathoner if you’d like to know more. Not being a runner, I subscribe only to the free option right now which means every week I get one column from Terrell. He writes an additional one for paying subscribers and, every Friday, opens up a discussion thread to explore a question with those in his community.

Short Reads

Here is a quick look at eight authors who are as dedicated to running as they are to writing including Joyce Carol Oates, Malcolm Gladwell, and Haruki Murakami who wrote a “kind of memoir” about how both running and writing feed each other in his life, “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.”

Terrell Johnson told me he loved everything about Lauren Hillenbrand’s Seabiscuit. He wrote about it in this short read “We’re All Seabiscuit Sometimes.”

Books

In addition to Seabiscuit, Terrell shared these three books from the stack by his bed:

The Reckoning by John Grisham

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk (also mentioned by a Sparker, Janice, last week)

All of these are available new right now at the Spark Community Recommendations Page on bookshop.org. Click the photo to go check them out.

Seabiscuit Anyone? How about Unbroken?

As it happens I am rehoming my copies of Lauren Hillenbrand’s books Seabiscuit (paperback, good condition) and Unbroken (hardcover, very good condition). If you have a home for one of these books, let me know in the comments section below or by replying via email and I’ll get them to you. Let me know which one you want by noon Pacific time on Thursday, March 19. I’ll draw winners using random.org and send them out.

That’s it for this Saturday. Let me know how you are -- how’s your mood these days as spring and the promise of vaccines approach? And let me know what you’re reading now, what you want to read next. I love to hear from you. If you are looking for a new read, be sure to check out our Spark Community Recommendations Page at bookshop.org where every purchase helps to support local bookstores and can help us raise money for literacy programs. All the books mentioned here today are there.

Gratefully yours (always always),

Betsy

P.S. And now, your moment of Zen...sap’s running now too

But sitting’s good too. Imagine you’re relaxing in the sunshine outside this sugar shack while, inside, the sap bubbles its way to syrup.