Martin Dugard's Blog, page 5

SUNDAY MORNING

Sitting here at the kitchen table on a Sunday morning. Sadie at my side with her tennis ball, hoping I will throw it across the room even though she knows Calene isn't a fan of fetch in the house. NFL Countdown on TV. Set my fantasy lineup. Feeling great about how the girls team ran at prelims yesterday and scheming a way for them to win the championship next week. All of which is my way of saying it's time for a newsletter instead of a blog. (If you haven’t signed up yet for my Keep Pushing Always newsletter, you can do so here.) Have a great Sunday!

What I’m Reading

I had an hour to kill before Tough Guy Book Club last week. Stopped in at the local Barnes and Noble (not so local, actually. About ten miles from my house). Found myself so overwhelmed to be inside an actual bookstore that I went a little nuts.

Bought three books, two notepads, and, just for the hell of it, a pen. I'm just finishing the first of the books, Malcolm Gladwell's Revenge of the Tipping Point. An interesting read. Also picked up Mark Greaney's Armored for a little action. I haven't read Buzz Bissinger's Friday Night Lights so I bought that one too.

What I’m Watching

So much good television right now. Callie and I just finished Only Murders in the Building. The Old Man and The Diplomat are pure excitement and great writing. The second season of Shrinking is even better than the first. And my sauna place (it's a chain called Perspire) has a big screen in each room. I like to watch comedy while I sit alone and sweat. Adam Sandler and Tom Papa's most recent Netflix specials are hilarious.

What I’m Working On

My fiction piece has the working title of Faster. Explaining much more will drain some of the creative energy but know that I'm having a great time with this.

My next non-fiction project is also a secret. I hope to share more about that soon.

Workout of the Week

Running. My training is slow and the volume is low. But I run on trails so empty I can hear my thoughts. Most days that's just what the doctor is ordering (literally, my doctor is telling me to drop a few pounds). On other days running is just the break I need.

And Finally…

A note from the world of being a caregiver. If someone you know is going through a rough patch or a medical situation, the phrase "let me know if there's anything I can do" is the go-to when you don't know what else to say. Everyone says it. But there's nothing you can do. Maybe leave a cold IPA on the porch, as my neighbors did one night. Other than that, nothing. Instead, say you're sending all love or keeping that person in your prayers. Sounds trite but it resonates.

Have a great week and say a few prayers for my sweetie if it crosses your mind.

SANTA ANAS

Our town backs up to the local mountains. Some cities have houses facing the sea. We have Mother Saddleback staring at our backyards. Fire ravaged the steep areas on the very edges of Rancho Santa Margarita a few months ago, burning all the way to the summit and up the slopes of the valley on the other side for miles. Last Wednesday Santa Ana winds roared through the pass connecting our town with cities on the other side of Saddleback.

These are sustained gusts that push west from desert to the Pacific at anywhere from twenty to fifty miles an hour. When you combine those winds with all the ash from the forest fires that still covers Saddleback you get a thick black cloud of soot that blows hard down the valley and coats everything — cars, patios, roads, lungs, and on. It looks like a thick black fog.

That's the scene I woke up to Wednesday morning. The canyon behind our house was a wall of ash and soot. This matched my mood from the election results so it didn't seem all that remarkable — just another harbinger of things going horribly askew. I couldn't go for a run. We had to cancel practice because the air was so wretched. My backyard still needs a good power washing. Sadie the Lab tracked that dirt all over the house and left her footprints on the beige outdoor couch. When I went to light the barbecue last night a fine layer of grit had permeated beneath the hood and needed to be removed before I could use the grill.

Through every moment like these, I try to keep to my routine. So it is that I set aside the election and the winds and spent a few hours on my fiction project and then a few more going through the copy editor's comments for Taking Midway.

These are fun. She goes through each detail in the book, sentence by sentence, then sends back the complete manuscript with comments and corrections. It's all very civil. Things like "au: change OK to correct dangling modifying phrase?" I am "au" — author.

There are many other little details to address, so much so that three hours of addressing the queries got me through only forty pages of a 310-page book. And that comment about dangling modifying phrases was repeated so many times that I realized two things: I do that a lot when I write; and, I have no idea what a dangling modifying phrase is. When all the whiz kids were diagramming sentences and learning to recognize gerunds and participles, this guy was not paying attention in the slightest. I have no idea how I passed high school English.

I should add that I have a thing for copy editors. I believe them to be individuals of great genius.

Then, when we were able once again, I found solace in designing workouts for my team. There will be no October Surprise for my boys team but my girls are lights out. Afternoon practice is so incredibly wonderful to witness each day.

All of this is my way of saying it's been a week. Just one big Santa Ana wind to be endured.

But as Tom Petty sang, "The weak grow strong, the strong carry on," or something very similar to that.

So push forward, always forward, one dangling modifying phrase at a time.

ELECTION DAY

A funny thing happened when I worked on Confronting the Presidents. I learned we have always been a divided nation. Whether over religious freedom, states rights, slavery, monetary policy, or race (among many others), America has always had one side violently (literally) opposed to another. It's how we roll. The book takes us from George Washington to Joe Biden in chronological order, so it was easy to track each rift as it grew and exploded and was either solved or suppressed. I'm not saying this to condemn the radical divisions in the country right now, though I certainly believe this is the craziest political time in our history by far. I'm just saying that we're decent people. We find a way.

If you read my essays at the end of Presidents you know my politics. My co-author encouraged me to write my personal opinion of the last two presidents. I was honest. It was nice to put it out there. This is the first time in the fifteen years we worked together that politics was ever mentioned. True fact. History was always first and foremost. So I think he was more than a little surprised by what I had to say. My words were honest and above all cathartic. Political discourse is foundational to our nation. There was no condemnation of my point of view.

I'm an historian. I look at elections through the prism of one who is analyzing not just what is going on in America now, but all that has come before, leading us to this day. I have voted for candidates from both parties in the past, based on that historic viewpoint. My belief is that we should always vote for what's best for America. That means more than an individual or a party. I can tell you, for instance, that John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan were more alike than not. Above all, they were civil and patriotic, putting the good of the nation over all else.

I have also extensively researched World War II and its roots, particularly the rise of fascism and Adolf Hitler. I'm also fluent in Straussian thinking, which is just as scary as Hitler's belief in the Big Lie and racial purity. Look them up. Those scary monsters are not just century-old history, they're alive and well right now.

I'm not going to tell you how to vote. My own vote, as I've stated, is based on the factual analysis of the historical record, which is an extremely solid indicator of the future. I vote for America, first and foremost. So as the guy who writes the blog every week, and whose history books many of you have enjoyed, I feel it is only honest and right for me to state the candidate whom I feel is aligned with a positive historical outcome for the United States of America:

Kamala Harris for President.

CHANGING TIMES

The whole world is in love with Artificial Intelligence. I don't know all the things AI is capable of accomplishing, but people seem to love is that it makes writing easier. Letters, emails, term papers — no more struggling to find the right word and build a smart sentence. Let AI do it.

You know who doesn't love AI?

Writers.

My good friend John Burns, a man who knows a thing or two about future predictions, speaks of the "coming AI nightmare for writers." We're having a beer on Friday, giving us a chance to speak about this in more depth. I don't spend much time thinking about AI but I do believe it is within the realm of possibility that publishers will cut out the main financial hindrance — writers — and type in a topic so a computer can churn out a book in an instant. No more late deadlines, no more sloppy prose. An instant book, ready to send to the printers. It's not just writers who will suffer if this comes to pass. Editors, copyeditors, fact-checkers…we'll all be out on our ear.

I have two thoughts about this. The first is that I'm sixty-three, not twenty-three. I've got a few more decades of writing left in me. Maybe I can outlast the AI phenom before it really takes over. I fear for the young college student planning on a writing career.

My other thought is this: storytelling is a tale as old as time. I think I just cribbed a line from Beauty and the Beast. I hear Angela Lansbury's voice. Chaucer, Dickens, Twain, Salter. The storytellers keep our era alive long after we're gone. They're irreplaceable. The best stories are personal, hewn from someplace deep in our soul. So while AI may take over the kind of writing I do (how easy to tell a computer, "Write a book about the Battle of Britain"), the unique personal twists myself and other writers give a tale is not easily duplicated.

I can easily visualize Burns reading this and chuckling about my naïveté. But like I said, I'm trying to stay one step ahead. I am positive that computers will someday find a way to mimic my style word-for-word, so I take this as a challenge: I need to push myself and continue changing my voice to make my writing better and harder to duplicate. Maybe do more fiction or memoir, because those stories are personal and unique to my life.

To play devil's advocate, I could just give in to AI. Tell the computer to write my books. But where's the fun in that? Literally. Writing can be slow and painful and terrifying, a tightrope without a net. But the rewards in terms of creativity, increased confidence, a growing comfort with taking chances, and satisfaction bordering on the sexual when the job is done well transcend the act of writing. Even if AI could give hand jobs it wouldn't be worth selling my soul. I need to put my own words on the page. It's all about the process.

I don't want to reach my deathbed regretting the books I did not write. At a time in life where I want to slow down and savor the writing process, I must do so with the awareness that the future is chasing — and coming fast.

SIMPLE PLEASURES

I don't really put a lot of preparation into this space. I like to riff. But yesterday morning I had one of those breakthrough awarenesses that seems tailor-made for blogging. It is this: one of life's great pleasures is being the first to break the toilet paper seal in a newly cleaned porta-pottie on race day. So righteous. So pure. Then to step out into the first moments of a pale morning sunrise and see runners arriving to compete. Washing my hands at one of those portable outdoor soap dispensaries, then wandering off in search of a food truck for a breakfast burrito.

I mean, does it get any better than that?

Well, yes. I was also first in line at the food truck, meaning I got my steak and egg burrito in no time flat. I even bought one for my friend Rick Martinez, a rival coach but one of the all-time good guys. By the time they arrived the line was ten people long, soon to be twenty. Then it was five hours of bs'ing with my coaching friends, walking around the course to cheer on my runners, and basically wandering in the sun on a blustery autumn morning.

Orange County Championships is a midseason meet, so I don't go all-in on the yelling. Just a loud cheer, maybe a directive or two. Six weeks from now at the State Championships I will be far more vocal. Full throated enthusiasm. Desperate to will them home. A man has to know how to pace himself.

Fifteen thousand steps later, meet over and outcome the usual mix of great performances and mystifying setbacks, I drove to Board & Brew for a BLT on sourdough. Added a fried egg to the sandwich for a little extra protein. My neighbors Tim and Bethany, coincidentally, arrived at the same time. A little IPA. Some lovely conversation. Then home to watch college football with Calene. A break to head out on the back porch at sunset and practice my guitar and work on my French with Duolingo (super fun), then a little more TV before bed. Oh, and I slept late this morning.

I find all that spectacular. A day of indulgence and fun. Being a writer is an intense career. I'm my own boss so if I don't work then I don't get paid. I'm very driven, my mind obsessing about plot points, next books, whether or not this new fiction piece has a chance.

(Making up stories feels like such a guilty pleasure after decades of non-fiction. By the way, I don't think my next nonfiction is going to be a Taking book. Expect a big departure).

Add in designing workouts for my runners, being at the track before sunrise for morning workouts, then coming back for the afternoon double. Throw in a little anxiety about the state of our country with this looming election, a complete disgust with coaches who cheat and those who glorify them, and more than a few impulses to call the police on those moronic middle-school kids weaving through traffic pulling wheelies on their e-bikes, and it's nonstop processing of creativity and emotion. A lot of internal chatter.

So to have a day where the simple things line up one after another for twenty-four hours of God-given enjoyment feels pretty amazing. Worth savoring.

Wishing you all can enjoy that simple pleasure of cracking a toilet paper seal in a newly-cleaned porta-pottie sometime very soon.

PEAKING

I'm gambling on the October Surprise.

Every cross country season has two parts: regular season (first nine weeks) and postseason (final three weeks, leading to the State Championship). I've had a pretty good run these past twenty years, making the postseason almost every time with both the boys and girls squads. I love being in Fresno the Saturday after Thanksgiving. The atmosphere is electric, the racing is intense, and I get to see all my coaching buddies. Standing atop the podium is also pretty excellent.

In Southern California, there are two ways to get into the postseason. The first is being ranked in the polls. The second is placing top three in league. This year's girls team is already ranked, so they'll get in.

My dilemma is the boys. They're not ranked and we're projected to finish fourth in league.

I have been telling them since training began back in June that they won't put the fear of God in any of their opponents until the end of October. We graduated last year's entire starting lineup. The top five this year is composed of one senior and four juniors who raced JV last year. From Day One it has been my intent to keep expectations low and goals achievable. I know in my heart they can make the postseason but it's going to take a lot of guts on their part and more than a little ingenuity from me. Finishing top three in league is our only way to get it done.

That ingenuity means gambling on the peaking portion of our training. I think we have a chance. We're not a distant fourth. We're actually pretty close. But rather than peak them for the State Meet as I would in a normal year, we're peaking for league.

That means championships season workouts right now. There's no room for error. They're amazing young men. They like each other. They laugh at my jokes. Most important: they trust me. When I said let's run 60 miles a week, they didn't bat an eye. When I said we need a few weeks at 70 to increase aerobic strength, they agreed. Starting next week, the speed workouts will be extremely fast but also short and sharp. Mileage will come down in ten days.

Once we get to the postseason, I need to rejigger the training so we'll also be strong at State. I have a plan for that, too. One thing at a time.

I love these guys. I owe it to them to go put together the most amazing training plan possible to get them into the postseason. They've done the work. Nobody deserves anything in sports. It has to be earned.

I have this crazy suspicion the October Surprise is going to happen.

DJ

Django blew out his ACL and the vet says the surgery for an old dog is beyond expensive. So he prescribes pain pills and time, saying the joint will calcify. The doggie day care acknowledges his wound by putting a yellow band around his neck to indicate his limp is an injury. Combined with his normal blue collar it looks like he's wearing the flag of Ukraine around his neck. The place is now synonymous for anxiety, unpredictability, and complete WTF.

When I am forced to board the dogs overnight, DJ freaks out in the kennel, remembering his cross country drive as a rescue. He was three months old. The truck drove straight from Houston with a full load of grown rescues waiting to meet their owners in California. They said he was a Great Pyrenees but he is a sleek supple leopard with the spots and alert barking of a hound. He has grown to become as large as his supposed breed in the last ten years, but without the thick coat. He is known as the "sunbather" at doggie day care, though he has the speed and size to command Alpha status. No one messes with Django. Not even the Huskies.

We're sitting out back together, DJ, me, and Sadie the irrepressible black lab. I'm just back from a couple new hospital days and they spent a night at Wags. We're all a little restless. They want to get fed. The sun is setting. I wrote a chapter in my fiction book today, in a room with Seinfeld and The Office on the television with sound off to make sleeping easier, then raced up the 5 at 80 miles an hour to make it to practice on time. The track lets me breathe. I delight in the time and the myth I am somehow in control.

Every victory in this journey of these hard wins and losses needs to be savored. The mountain lion in the refrigerator. Sun an orange glow over the backyard.

Django is the calmest/most anxious dog I know. But he keeps watch over the backyard, a little plot of his own Ukraine.

As will I.

LAST WEEK

It's cool here on the back porch this morning. I'm wearing a hoodie, like most days, but this time it's for warmth as much as comfort. Sunflowers in the garden make me smile just looking at them. The fountain gurgles that calming sound of running water. Simply enchanting. Why did I take so long replacing the electric pump?

This is what the end of September feels like. Most people live for summer but I'm an autumn guy. In the last week alone, cross country season saw some of the first serious racing, I completely cleared the decks of all writing activity for the first time in three years, and Bruce Springsteen turned seventy-five. This is a time of rejuvenation and possibility. I call it Christmas in autumn. Well, that's what I call cross country season. But it's my term, so I think it's time to make the definition more inclusive.

Also last week, I received my editor's comments on Taking Midway and spent a good deal of time addressing them. I trust Jill's instincts completely and they served as a North Star in taking what was already a solid body of work and giving it more heft.

Calene had some hospital business — also last week — and I sat with her, typing away on my laptop as she slept. Hospitals are an amazing place to write because they're so damned quiet. It just sucks to be there.

For entertainment, I read Calene some of the Amazon reviews of Confronting the Presidents. My co-author and I each wrote an essay to end the book, explaining our thoughts on the last two presidents. We have differing views. The laughs came from people writing in to say how stupid and misguided I am. Never before in the history of Amazon, I am quite sure, has an author so enjoyed being pilloried. Hilarious.

On a more practical side, I finally addressed the pile of dirt that Django has turned my garden into, with his digging and patrolling. I added lots of new flowers, with the focus on drawing more honey bees, hummingbirds, and butterflies. I'm sitting there now. Clears my head to be out here alone. Very inspiring.

I'm in talks with my publisher about the next history book but this hole in my schedule seems a very good time to write that fiction project I've been talking about for years. I'm a little afraid. Fiction is new to me. But I took a lot of storytelling chances with Midway (you'll see — it's not your normal work of naval history) and am emboldened to carry that positive energy into the heavy lifting of making something out of nothing. It starts with rewriting that first chapter I published in this space awhile back. I can do better.

Finally, my cross country team gave me an enormous boost this week. Both boys and girls teams ran monster races on Friday. Nine weeks to State and I think we're looking just fine.We've got a huge training block before our next race and I can't wait to introduce a few new sharpening elements.

Thanks for indulging this meditative rambling. The last week was a mixture of many things and I'm still trying to process them all. That hospital time was a mini-dose of trauma for Callie and I. She said my face looked like cortisol. So the fountain, sunflowers, revived dreams, content with Midway, laughter produced by those Amazon reviews, and watching my runners get the job done is quite the remedy.

On to October.

NYT

Confronting the Presidents just hit #1 on The New York Times Best Seller list. That marks my sixteenth time on the list and I think a dozen at the top.

Yet I am conflicted. I mean, I researched and wrote all those books. Then my co-author and I did his edit and put it in his voice, and his name is indeed larger on the cover. So that's why the books sell. My own books tend to bubble just outside the list, selling very well but not cracking the code.

This is not a knock on my co-author. Don't think that for a second. He was kind enough to let me write two essays at the end of Confronting that allowed me to write my first-person take on American politics. That was really cool.

And yet! My name is in the list! When I began writing books all those years ago that would have been a seminal moment, a dream come true. And it is. So I take my half-ownership of Confronting with a bit of pride. It's the biggest book I've ever written. It's just that I'm a writer and writers compete (don't let anyone tell you different). One of these days I'd like to sit atop the list on my own merit.

In the meantime, I'm just going to revel in being a working storyteller, so happy to put words that there are still nights I can't wait to wake up in the morning and attack a manuscript. Seriously.

They say the process is the goal. The day to day. The rumination. The subconscious meandering.

I agree. But after nine months living inside the literary White House, it's nice to see that work rewarded with the NYT list.

ALOHA (PART 2)

Four days on the North Shore is not enough.

I was just getting into vacation mode when it became time to fly home. Took the team to Hawaii for a meet. Callie came along. Race was Saturday afternoon (we did well). This means flying home Sunday, because there's practice Monday afternoon. But four days on the chill and rustic North Shore is better than none. My wife and I didn't do a whole lot other than hike jungle trails and lounge on the sand. But that's the point of a vacation, isn't it?

The flight home was intense, beginning with the passenger who delayed us for an hour because of his fury having something to do with overhead bin space. I've been flying a long time, all over the world, first class and basic economy, but I've never seen people more keyed up about personal space on aircraft than right now. Just insane. I put on my Bose headphones and slept through it all, waking only when the engines powered up for take-off.

I mention relaxation because I wear one of the Oura sleep rings. It tells me REM, deep sleep, restlessness, and a few other bits of data. But what I paid closest attention to before the little island getaway was Heart Rate Variability. HRV. I can't possibly explain it here, but one of the things it measures is the stress placed on your nervous system. It's like a glimpse into what is going on inside the body and how stress is impacting the heart and mind.

For reasons I cannot explain, my HRV was extremely low the week before flying to Hawaii. Low HRV can signal heart issues or some other impending catastrophe. The notation on my readout said "Pay Attention," which concerned me because I was unaware I was so deeply stressed. I blame Taking Midway. Once I finished writing I didn't have much to do with my time other than drive up to the high school and coach, which isn't stressful at all. Quite the opposite.

Anyway, without the distraction of the book my subconscious was free to be anxious about the things I'm not aware of. The usual things, like the future. Ironically, low HRV also became one of them.

Having no other goal to focus on, I made it my mission to raise that HRV in Hawaii. Calene is a magician when it comes to going straight into vacation mode, so I made it a point to do as she did. Instead of reading a book or listening to a podcast in my beach chair, I just watched (and listened to) the waves. Instead of getting bored silly by watching and listening to the waves and restlessly looking for something else to occupy my time, I literally spent five hours doing nothing — on two straight days! I watched what I ate. Didn't overdo the beer. When it got too hot I jumped in the ocean for a swim. Even went along when Calene said she wanted to go to the gym and stretch. May not sound like much, but I don't stretch.

Oh, sure, there was plenty of research. My hotel is right next to Kahuku Point, where the Japanese planes made landfall on December 7. Pillboxes and an old B-17 runway, Pearl Harbor. The same Laysan albatross as Midway. History was all around. And I brought a couple books to satisfy some of my knowledge gaps.

But research isn't stress. It worked. Took a few days, but HRV spiked.

Safely home from paradise, I have come to the realization I'm not 25 anymore. Pushing my body to some sort of limit, whether it be word count or hill repeats for the upcoming Tough Guy 10k, needs me to counterbalance with the de-stress stuff I have long avoided: sitting still, mindful meditation, stretching. In other words, taking care of myself.

I will admit that I am good at taking care of others, which is why I'm a great coach. But who's going to take care of them if I don't take care of me?

Click here for Aloha (Part 1).