I am at the entrance of a stone staircase built into the side of Antigua, Guatemala’s Cerro de la Cruz, Hill of the Cross. This is the beginning of a an 8k run dubbed some years back the “Suicide Death Run Sponsored by The Sore Calves Inc.” Every bit of the 8k is different degrees of straight up a mountain. My first thought as I start running up the stairs is to regret the three gin and tonics Ray from Reilly’s Irish pub served me the night before.
Though I have not been to that part of the world, the stairs have always reminded me of something you would see in Asia, steps ascending without discernible end into a forest of birds with so much to say.
I reach the top, pass the cross and then find myself on the highway slithering up the mountain. My second and third thoughts are a barrage of disjointed reminders of unfinished work, of future plans and reflections on a week’s worth of yesterdays and the upcoming tomorrows. Without forcing them out of my mind abruptly, I try to leave these behind and focus on the mantra I repeat with each stride, find your bliss.
To all outside appearances, to the tourists I passed on the steps, the Mayan women I pass on the highway carrying bundles of woods, the birds and occasional car sharing the highway with me, I am running. Which I am, but I am also writing since running is part of my writing routine.
The synthesis between running and writing does not require too large a leap. Already, they share a common framework. Both require a commitment and success in either is a result of a sustained resolve. You cannot expect to be a writer, by writing haphazardly when you find the time. Likewise, a long distance run carries with it the accumulated training of months or years of previous runs.
When I worked an 8-5, writing was something that I squeezed in when I could, on the weekends and evenings. A year and a half ago I left the 8-5 and put writing front and center of my life. This changed the dynamics of the game. Suddenly, I was writing, editing, submitting, and reading everyday, full-time.
While I had been imagining getting to this point basically my entire life, I found it at first to be enormously frustrating and mind-boggling difficult to keep my focus through the course of the day. I tend to immerse myself with more simultaneous projects than the conventional writing wisdom recommends, which makes it even more difficult keep my focus and attention where it should be.
In writing you start somewhere and resolve to get somewhere else. You get there one word at a time. Running is the same. It is easy to anticipate the coming miles or focus on your burning calves, thinking about how good a glass of water would be or thinking about stopping. But with both endeavors all you can do is stretch one stride and write one word. The Zen of both, is letting go, not thinking about the ground you have covered or the words you have written, not worrying about whether or not you’ll fill the page with what you want or make it the next mile, but just being as present as you can be in the instant of a stride or the stroke of computer keys.
It is a fallacy of thought to focus on where you still need to go rather than thinking about where you are in the moment.
On an ideal writing day, I will write through the “business writing,” or the stuff that is paying the bills but is not necessarily the stuff I would be working on were there no bills bo pay. Then I’ll start on my own projects, poems, short stories, moving the first draft of a book to a second. I’ll go as long as my focus lasts, until I am deleting the majority of what I am typing and the ADHD itch scratches at my mind. That’s when I know it’s time to close the laptop and put on running shoes.
When I start my mind is still usually clenched, stuck thinking about where to take a certain piece of prose, or how to finish and article or blog post and the million of other thoughts that enter the mind. These thoughts, I let them come, but I work on finding a state where I am not thinking of anything but smiling into the next stride, repeating in front of the many other thoughts, find your bliss.
Only then, when my mind is calmed, do I consciously return to thoughts of the writing at hand. In this state, the fog concealing the solutions lifts and I begin drafting sentences in my mind, some that I’ll forget when I return to my laptop, but it is surprising how much stays with you once you’ve managed to think it for the first time.
On a mountainside in Guatemala, or a dust trail in Kenya, the path around the golf course near my parents Bismarck house, I run, but while I run I am writing in a way that I cannot do seated in front of a laptop or holding a pad. There is no pressure to type a certain amount of words a minutes.
Surrounded by beauty, views of vistas such as Guatemala’s Panchoy valley and the three volcanos clad in green, the right words seem to blossom on their own fitting as seamlessly into their home paragraphs as the bright blue sky above me , the aroma of the cloud forest’s wildflowers and a certainty that grows with the altitude that life is just one step and word at a time.
This particular run, up a mountain, lends itself to a ready metaphor for writing. You start at the bottom, and slowly battle to reach the top, where the view makes all of the struggle so worth while.
