What Training For a Marathon Can Teach You About Writing a Novel
When I was a teenager, the only job in the world I wanted was Poet. By the time I was eighteen, I’d moved to California, attended art school, and was surrounded by them. Or, at least I was surrounded by other people like me who dressed the part of what we imagined poet to look like. We wore all black and held unspoken competitions to see who had read the most obscure texts. We spent most of our time drinking cheap whiskey and even cheaper beer, smoking cigarettes, and snorting powder that made our minds race so we could dissect the art of language late into the night. We did not get much writing done.
So, ten years later, how does a pack-a-day poet end up as a fiction writer and endurance runner? Well, to start, I became a wife and stepmother. This new identity marked the end of tobacco-stained fingertips and bi-weekly hangovers. Very un-poet like. At first, I felt a sense of crisis as though some authentic side of my writer-self had died. But then, something else happened. I began to write. Like really write. To my own surprise, it wasn’t poetry, but a novel, that consumed my writing time (my first, and one which remains in my desk drawer untouched since I turned it in as my undergraduate thesis). It was important nonetheless because it, and starting a family, marked a transitional moment in both my personal and artistic life. Creating both didn’t require any particular outfit or manufactured identity. They simply required that I showed up and put in the work.
Then came the running. Apart from my years absorbed in the world of poet persona, which certainly did not include ponytails and sports bras, I have always been a runner in some capacity. In 2016, I started the MFA program in Fiction at San Francisco State University. Just over a year later I wrote the first pages that would soon become the basis for my thesis, a novel I am currently revising. When I wasn’t teaching or spending time with my family, I was spending hours (sometimes whole days) locked away in my downstairs studio writing. Most of writing happens in solitary and takes place at your fingertips and within your own mind. In the early stages of writing the novel, I had all this energy, and even after hours of writing I would feel my body buzzing as though I’d consumed dozens of cups of coffee instead of my single, daily morning cup. I needed a physical outlet. An activity to shake myself away from the fictional world and back into the real one where I had to exist as a parent and partner and teacher. So, I started running.
In Mary Oliver’s essay Of Power and Time[1], she writes, “Creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration, without interruptions. It needs the whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching until it comes to that certainty which it aspires to, but does not necessarily have at once. Privacy, then. A place apart.” It was true that I needed both the confines of my small writing studio at the early hours before my family woke and the day began, but I also needed the sky. I needed fresh air and what only miles of pavement or trail provided me. A quiet place to think. To wander.
When I first started running again, I hadn’t anticipated that I would eventually run a marathon. It began with a couple miles every day or so to get away from my desk. I often went right before or after I wrote. I used it as a time to review the events of my personal life, store them away, and begin thinking about the world of my characters (or opposite order if I ran after a morning of writing). Then a friend of mine asked if I’d be interested in running a half-marathon with him in the spring. I’d completed one before, but it had been almost a decade prior. I was working full-time, in grad school, writing a novel, and definitely didn’t have extra time to be running for hours of the week. So, what the hell, why not, I said. I had no idea how influential that yes would turn out to be for my writing practice.
Training took place early in the morning. Long runs were 1-2 hours and gave me uninterrupted time to think through whatever chapter or scene I was struggling with. I sometimes felt as though the first draft took place in my head while running before I ever transferred the words to the page. If I wasn’t mentally drafting scenes, then I was working out issues in my personal life so that by the time I sat down to the page I wasn’t carrying a heavy load of emotional debris. The training helped solidify my writing routines. In order to do both on top of the normal demands of my regular life, I had to economize my time. After crossing the finish line of that first race, I was hooked. I signed up for another one that year and one more the following spring. And then, I signed up for the real deal. My first full marathon. 26.2 miles. Hours of running. Hours of training. Hours to myself to mentally sweat and grind through the novel or whatever life had thrown at me that week.
Running for 26.2 miles, especially with a goal time in mind, isn’t easy, but neither is writing a novel. During training, I began to look at the two as intrinsic to one another. Finishing a marathon, and more importantly, training for a marathon taught me a lot about myself and about writing.
The following are some of the most essential things that running a marathon taught me about writing a novel.
It will hurt
Like a lot. There may be more moments when you want to give up than you want to keep going. This is especially true because no one else is inflicting this pain on you but yourself. You can stop at any time you want and begin walking.
Patience is not just a virtue, but a way of life
One of the reasons that I chose to continue endurance running in the first place is because it was a physical reminder that hard things do not happen overnight. They take consistency and patience. I could not run a marathon without training any more than I could write a book without daily practice.
Daily Practice is Key
In his memoir, Haruki Murakami says, “Most of what I know about writing I’ve learned through running every day. These are practical, physical lessons. How much can I push myself? How much rest is appropriate – and how much is too much?”[2] I do not run every day, nor do I write every day. But I attempt to do both more days than not so my muscles, those that I use for writing and those that I use for running, do not atrophy. Consistent practice makes the work easier. There is less space between for the task to become bigger than it actually is.
Rest Days are vital
Now, this is one that usually takes me some reminding. By nature, I am not apt to take breaks and rest. I tend to be incredibly hard on myself if I feel I need a rest and often struggle to take a breather for fear of appearing lazy or losing momentum. As my husband regularly reminds me, a day off will not undo all your training. It takes living, being present in the real world, to help you see it more clearly. Your body and mind will thank you for it. You will perform better when you return from the rest.
[1] Oliver, Mary. “Of Power and Time.” Upstream, Selected Essays, Penguin Books, 2016. pp.23.
[2] Murakami, Haruki. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. Vintage, 2008.
About Shelby Hinte
Shelby Hinte is a writer and educator living in the Bay Area. She received her MFA in Fiction from San Francisco State University where she was the recipient of the 2019 Distinguished Graduate award. She has been a contributing food and beverage writer for Edible Santa Fe. Her fiction has appeared in Vagabond Lit, Witness Magazine, Hobart, Quiet Lightning's Sparkle + Blink, decomP magazinE, and elsewhere. She is currently at work on a novel about women and vortexes in the desert.
