What running taught me about writing

Photo by Alessio Soggetti on Unsplash

Growing up, my parents signed me up for every sport imaginable. Soccer, baseball, basketball, and many more. Sufficed to say, I was pretty bad at all of them. I’m not coordinated and I rarely paid attention when grownups explained the rules.

The problem was I had a lot of energy. So although I wasn’t good at any of these sports (one could even say I was downright “bad”), I loved to move and my parents needed me to get my energy out.

Finally, when I was 10 they signed me up for Track & Field through our Parks & Recreation program. There were no rules past “run fast” and I didn’t have to catch anything. I loved it.

Now, I wasn’t necessarily good at Track either, but I at least wasn’t “bad.” And that led to encouragement, which led to confidence, which led to motivation, etc.

BTW if you’re curious, encouragement is one of the best things you can do for kids if they are trying sports! There is a lot of research behind this, parents.

In middle school, I started running Cross Country in the fall and Track in the spring. I grew up in a pretty small town in Maine, so we didn’t have a winter program… plus, there was a lot of snow and who wants to deal with that?

I was getting better but at the bigger meets, I was swallowed into the mass of kids and finished in mediocre places in the middle of the pack. I thought I was doing everything right, never missing a practice, and I was starting to get frustrated I wasn’t improving.

It would be a few years before I accidentally cracked the code.

In that small Maine town, I worked at a fish market in the summers where I would help unload lobster crates and pick lobster meat. It was literally the most “Maine” you could get and I did it every summer from when I was 14 to 19.

Side note: I met two presidents through this job as the market was up the street from George Bush’s home. At 15, I met a sitting president and he gave me presidential M&M’s.

A box of “presidential M&M’s” with George W. Bush’s signature

When I was 16, I started riding my bike to work. If you asked my parents about it, they would say “he waited until he got his license to finally start riding his bike.” Sorry…

It was 6 miles there and 6 miles back, which isn’t a ton on a bike but considering I was there 6 days a week, those miles added up. And considering there were some considerable hills and I was fighting the treads on my mountain bike, that mileage added up.

On July 4th of that year, I went to a local 5k road race. I’d run it the past few summers — it follows the coast of Goose Rocks Beach. It was a big race (for a small town) typically around 800 people. In years past, I had consistently been in that “mediocre” spot in the middle of that mass of people.

And that’s what I had expected that year too. But without even putting in much effort, I ran under 17 minutes for the first time and finished in the top 10! At 16, I was blown away and I knew that those consistent bike rides had been key.

I kept riding my bike and even started taking the long way home for the next couple of summers.

I don’t have to go into my whole running career after that. My senior year I qualified at the state level to race in “Region 1” (my first time going to New York City). There, I qualified for nationals in San Antonio (and was very out classed). Before I knew it, I was in a Division 1 program in college, running races in California, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, Canada, and more.

What does this have to do with writing?

What I learned from that whole experience is that “consistency leads to success.” Those bike rides were not hard by any measure. It was the fact that I did those “not hard” bike rides consistently over time that led to results.

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

I did the same thing with my career when I started to learn how to program (I got a degree in English…). I consistently practiced and learned over the span of a couple of years and that led to eventual success.

The same can be applied to my writing. I had no idea what I was doing when I set out to write a fantasy novel. I didn’t know how to outline or structure acts, but I kept consistently working at it over many years.

A lot of “not hard” writing sessions have led to a completed manuscript of a 185,000-word novel, another 90,000-word novel, and many short stories. It’s led to this blog and nearly 600 followers on Instagram where I literally just post pictures of books.

Now, are these masterpieces? Or published? No… but I do think finishing long manuscripts is farther than most people get and that should be celebrated.

I’m sure everyone has heard that advice of “just write” or “just do x” but what they don’t typically say is “just write… consistently for a long time.” It can be so easy to not see progress in the short term, but I’ve learned that it usually takes a year or two to see results — both in fitness and writing.

For every person you see succeeding, there are usually years of work and experience behind their work that you don’t see (something I have to keep reminding myself as I read so much great stuff here on Medium!)

Running always made sense to me: you get out what you put in. The more you do it, the better you get and there aren’t many shortcuts. Writing is much the same.

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