5 Lessons the Marathon Taught Me About Writing

When I was approaching my 40th birthday, rather than getting depressed and eating myself into a food coma on the couch; I decided to roll over the odometer by checking something off my bucket list. So, I signed up to run a marathon.

Now just to set the stage here, I had no distance running experience. I was 20 pounds overweight, and I had just had my ACL replaced two months before deciding to do this. So, what could go wrong? But it was something I always wanted to do, and I liked that it would set a good example for my children to watch me set a huge goal and accomplish it.

Fueled more by enthusiasm than common sense, I signed up for the race closest to my birthday and paid the money before I started to think about all those reasons this was a bad idea that I just mentioned in the previous paragraph. I then figured I better get some help from a professional. No, not psychiatric help, although as I write this, I see why your mind went there. Professional running help. Which means, of course, I did an internet search for marathon training plans and downloaded the first free one I came across. (It’s professional if it’s on the internet, right?)

My new “Professional” training plan provided me with a four-month running schedule that specified how far I should run each day, what days I should rest, and the days I should cross-train. I didn’t really know what it meant by cross-training, so I mostly just treated those days as rest days.

Because I know nothing about distance running, and because I was so intimidated by the magnitude of the task before me, I followed the training plan like the Gospel. My training became my primary focus. I would plan my schedule around the prescribed daily runs and get out and pound the pavement rain or shine. If I was traveling and not able to do my Saturday long run, I would swap the runs around and do the long runs earlier in the week, even if meant starting at 5am, running late in the evening, or taking part of the day off from work to complete it. I would then do the shorter run at the destination site or on the treadmill in the hotel.

Lesson 1: Do you make your work a priority? Do you find ways to put the time in every day or do you find excuses not to do it and put it off?

That said, most of my runs came in the wee hours of the morning. Day after day, I would drag myself out of my warm bed and out into the cold darkness almost always feeling stiff, slow, and rough. And while some runs were a slog from start to finish, by and large I noticed a pattern developing. Even though I felt awful at the beginning of the run—like I would rather be anywhere else but there—I would usually finish the run feeling good—in some cases fantastic. Lesson 2: Countless times, I have begun a writing session without an ounce of inspiration only to not want to stop when my time was up because I had so many ideas. “Inspiration exists, but it has to find us working.” –Pablo Picasso

I also noticed that if I sat and thought about the run ahead of me while putting my shoes on in the morning, it would take every ounce of willpower I possessed to get out the door. But if I would just hurry out the door and get moving before I was really awake or had time to think about what I was doing, and whether I actually felt doing it, it was much easier.

Lesson 3: Don’t refight this fight every time you sit down to do your work. If you spend time thinking about whether you feel like doing your work, you can definitely talk yourself out of it. Make up your mind now, so when the time comes, you don’t need to think about it; you simply get to it.

As my training plans progressed, each subsequent long run got longer than the one before. What started as a 7-mile run progressed to 10 milers, half marathons, 20-milers, and so on. Every weekend I was running farther than I ever had before. It was an amazing feeling to do something that even the week before I was not sure I could do because I had just finished that week’s long run feeling like I could not run another step, only to go out the next weekend and run even farther. But it was not easy. Each successive distance exacted both a physical and mental toll from me, with some of the runs being incredibly hard to finish.

But it all taught me one thing, and this is lesson 4: JUST KEEP GOING! The way I got through run after run after run was to just put one foot in front of the other and keep going, thinking less about how I was feeling and more about the goal.

Finally, the day arrived. A week before my 40th birthday, I climbed aboard a school bus at 4:30am. The bus is exactly the way you didn’t remember that you remember. The gray-green vinyl seats, musty smell of old milk, and utter lack of any shock-absorption to prevent even the smallest pothole from compressing your spine, and rattling your teeth brought back memories from my school days that I did not even realize were still stored away.

After a nausea-inducing ride up the canyon, they dumped us at the start line. It was cold. I was nervous. I felt nauseas from the nerves, or was it the drive? Was that a twinge in my calf? Would that be a problem in a mile or twenty?! Then the gun sounded, and a couple of thousand runners slowly shuffled over the starting line, and off we went into the unknown with nothing to lean on but the work we had all done to be there.

I started running with the herd, and I ran, and ran, and ran. When I hit the infamous “wall” around mile 21, where you are totally depleted, dehydrated, and you just want to quit, it was not that big a deal because I had been preparing for it for four months. Every time I had dragged myself up and trudged out into the dark or the rain to put in my miles, I was preparing for it. And I did what I had learned, I forgot about what my body wanted, and focused on what I wanted—the larger goal. I just put one foot in front of the other again and again 40,000 times.

Even though the marathon itself was not easy, I had already done the hard part by putting in the work day after day, regardless of weather, exhaustion, or personal desire. So now it was just a matter of going through the motions. I knew I could do it, I just needed to perform. But even so, you don’t run a marathon all at once. You run to that tree up ahead, and then you run to the mile marker sign up ahead, and so on and so on.

And just like that, it was over. I had done it! I had accomplished a goal so big that just 4 months before I had no reason to even believe I could do it. And there was lesson 5: Just as you do not run a marathon all at once, you do not write a book or tackle a huge project all at once. You do it by putting in regular, consistent effort a little at a time, day after day, week after week until the larger goal is accomplished.

Think now, how would your life be different if you treated your work exactly like those training runs? What if you planned your schedule around your writing time? What if you made your writing your priority every day, and did whatever you had to do see that you made time for it, whether it meant getting up early, or staying up late? What if you adhered to your writing schedule like that training plan? What if, instead of only working when you felt like it, you wrote no matter what? What if rain or shine you were at your keyboard, or your easel, or whatever right on schedule?

One final note: Isaac Asimov, the grandfather of Sci-fi, wrote over 400 books during his life. 400! His secret, as related by Seth Godin, is that at 6:30 every morning, he sat down at his typewriter and wrote until noon. He didn’t worry about whether he was in the mood; He didn’t worry about whether what he was writing was any good; he simply wrote. And from the millions and millions of words he produced 400 books emerged.

So, make a schedule now and get to work!