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Distance running and finishing books

I’ve spent the last year fixated on how similar writing books is to distance running. If you treat the task as a singular thing, it can be overwhelming, whereas if you chunk it up into manageable units it becomes entirely doable. If you go by chapter-by-chapter there comes a point at which you suddenly realise you’re almost done. If you break up a race into particular phases (which increasingly for me are defined by when I take the energy gels) something huge starts to feel entirely manageable. The sense of what you can do expands through this dynamic as you get more practiced at doing it. If you just keep showing up consistently, it’s almost magical how something happens which you once wouldn’t have been able to imagine.

Now that I’m finishing my latest book while also getting close to marathon distance, I realise there’s a difference as well. There’s often a feeling of elation I get towards the end of a long run, particularly for a race. A sense of being entirely in flow, lost in a rhythm that entirely decenters the continual stream of stuff that litters my internal conversation. There’s a joy to getting lost in the process, surrendering to it. I’m reliably forcing myself to stop because I need my dodgy ankle to get used to the distance, rather than because I want to stop. I’ve only once come close to the point where I had to stop and that was a competitive half marathon in torrential rain, when I’d fucked up by going too quickly in the first few miles on a course that was far too hilly for my tastes. Otherwise I don’t want to stop.

Whereas with the end of a book I want so much to stop. I want it to be over. The pleasure of the process has long since passed. I’m being forced to do it. I know that if I don’t do it the thing I’ve spent so long on will never be read by the people I want to read it. But it’s a slog. Not in the life affirming sense of the half marathon in the rain (I’ve rarely felt more physically uncomfortable nor more viscerally alive than I did when the picture below was taken) but in the “CAN I NOT JUST STOP NOW PLEASE?” sense. This post is a desperate plea to myself to keep going because I’m actually about 4 hours of work away from finishing this ✊

(By me and Milan Sturmer)

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