This weekend I ran the York marathon. I've participated in long races before, in much simpler, more ordinary times. During my twenties and early thirties, I trained almost every day, but at the age of thirty-five, I stopped running when I had my colon removed following a short but aggressive bout of ulcerative colitis.
Whether or not such life-changing surgery was the only course of treatment available to me, I feel I will never know, but the surgeon believed my condition constituted an emergency and he acted accordingly, doing his best to put me back together again afterwards, at least physically.
The reconstruction took a further three surgeries and almost two years to complete. I ran a little during recovery periods and when the side-effects of my treatment permitted - a divorce with its ramifications on my financial and living circumstances and two children for whom I was to become a lone parent. I often felt overwhelmed and tired; early menopause brought on by surgery perhaps? The doctor thought depression and, unusually, prescribed counselling.
I was pushing 40, and it felt like my running career, and pretty much everything else in my life, was over. This was change on a scale that felt brutal and conclusive, until the day it didn't and the thinning skin of blame and anger I wrapped around myself had, as the great Kurt Wagner wrote, "slipped, dissolved and loosed". I spent a couple of years doing Pilates to sort out my back problems and experimented with my diet to reduce inflammation in my body, and the day came when I was ready to take up running again. It felt very, very good to put on a pair of trainers for the first time to do more than just nip out to the shops.
Even though I had missed running and was happy to be back in my Ronhill's, as every runner will attest, there are still times when it feels like a chore. These are the mornings when love's fickleness has me believing that the twinge in my calf is an Achilles problem in need of rest. But I get up, put on my shoes, and I tell myself that all I have to do is run for ten minutes, and if there's no improvement after that time, I can stop. At ten minutes I think, why not continue running until the people in the podcast I'm listening to finish their point? By then, I'm almost at 16 minutes; I may as well make it a round twenty / run as far as the next junction / keep going until I pass the dog walker. I bargain my way through a training run until it's done, and I often find myself adopting the same approach to finish a piece of writing.
Last week I wrote a short story for Patreon called The Level Headed Pharmacist. Connecting a couple of the story elements was proving difficult, everything I wrote seemed clunky and had me saying bleurgh out loud, but after two days of writing, I settled on a short paragraph of five sentences. Five sentences in two days are, by any standards, an economical word count, but these are the words that made the difference between a finished story and no story at all. I might just as easily given up, but instead, I used the same bargaining technique to get the story down that got me through the training necessary to complete a marathon.
It begins with ten minutes or the time it takes to drink a cup of coffee. If I can just put one word down on paper and follow it with another, and then another until my cup's empty then at least I will have written something. If what I've written also happens to pull its weight in the story, it gets to stay, at least until the next revision. Eventually, through the power of bargaining, a story takes form, and, if my writing Achilles threatens to hamper my efforts, I put on another pot of coffee. Twitter
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