avatarNormi Coto, PhD

Summarize

My Marriage of Running and Writing

Am I writer who runs or a runner who writes?

Photo by Sandy Millar on Unsplash

A person once told me that opposites may attract, but if they are to stay happily married, they must be as duplicates in their core values.

I’m the last person to give marriage advice, but there’s a happily married couple thriving in my life, and I dare say, they are an Instagram-worthy power couple. Each better individually for having the other.

Running, with all its sweat, heavy breathing, and shoe fetishes, is inextricably devoted to and married to my writing, with all its moods, blank pages, and musings.

Only when I am doing both writing and running do I feel right — connected to something more than me and invigorated for the day, indeed, for life. Consequently, when one or the other is absent or elusive, I plod through my day, distracted and restless — not unlike a lover pining for their other half.

A reciprocity lives between running and writing I can no longer deny. Running fuels my writing, and writing, especially about running, tames and tempers my runs.

Running has both improved and informed my writing and my writing process. I’m not unique. Writers often pen tributes to their running. Here are two favorites:

“Both running and writing are highly addictive activities; both are, for me, inextricably bound up with consciousness. I can’t recall a time when I wasn’t running, and I can’t recall a time when I wasn’t writing” Joyce Carol Oates

“In long-distance running the only opponent you have to beat is yourself, the way you used to be.”― Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

Running, of course, begins with walking, and walking has a long history of supporting writers.

As an English major, I used to imagine myself ambling alongside William Wordsworth through England’s villages and moors or hiking through a New England autumn with Henry David Thoreau.

However, let’s set the romance of walking with poet/writers aside for a moment and examine the science endorsing their wanderings.

One study found that walking, especially walking outside, led participants to more creative thinking. They also scored higher on tests measuring convergent thinking, analyzing for one solution, such as the kind of thinking you do on a multiple choice test.

Fortunately, and not surprisingly, studies on running point to similar results.

In one study, runners’ brain activity was measured after running on a treadmill and then after running outside. Sorry, treadmill enthusiasts, but outside running triggered the regions of the brain responsible for creative thinking to light up.

Another study concludes that what is “good for the heart is good for the brain.” All of us, writers or not, want optimal brain health, and the scientists point to running as benefiting “neurogenesis, increased brain volume, and improved cognitive function.”

Perhaps it’s the good mood running puts us in that leads to heightened creativity.

Studies, such as this one out of Bosnia, promote running as a therapeutic treatment for depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem. However, the study does note that the “dosage” of running needs further study. We simply don’t know, scientifically, how much or how often one needs to run to feel good.

The reassurance that running is good for my brain, and therefore, essential for my creative juices to flow — quite literally — is satisfying, no doubt, but its the similarities that running and writing share — or those core values — that I believe make them a married couple dancing through my life.

Both require self-discipline

Although earlier I suggested I can’t live without running or writing, this doesn’t mean they don’t require some motivation.

A body at rest will stay at rest, after all. It’s the law.

For both endeavors, I must position habit prompts, such as setting out my clothes for a run ahead of time or stacking my research books on my desk. I must keep writing blocks and running plans sacred, thwarting other distractions from infiltrating those times.

I mostly succeed.

Both require saying no to other things.

When you commit to running or writing, you must say no to something else. As a result, they bleed into other areas of life, and before you realize it, a lifestyle has emerged.

I write early in the morning, sometimes as early as 3:30 a.m. if an article is insistently stabbing at me, which means I say no to late night binge television. Likewise, my daily run in the afternoon means saying no to happy hours, evening news, and after work errands.

Both require scheduling

If you don’t block time for writing and running, they won’t happen.

You have to make the time by adding it to the schedule. Training plans are important for a number of reasons, such as monitoring progression, but they also support a runner’s scheduling. “Here. We’ve done the planning. You just need to plug this into your day.”

The equivalent training schedule for a writer is knowing what you’ll write before the session begins. Hemingway famously ended a day’s work mid-sentence, so he could pick up there again the following day.

Knowing what you will write ahead of time and coming to the writing at the same time every day are two simple, but not easy, ways to lure the creative muses to visit your writing sessions.

Both foster flow states

Perhaps the biggest similarity between running and writing is their abilities to induce a flow state.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the psychologist who popularized flow, explains flow as a highly focused state. Most commonly, we know it as being so focused we lose track of time. Detailing Csikszentmihalyi’s work is outside the scope of this article, but suffice it to say that both writing and running meet all nine of his flow state characteristics.

We can also attribute flow to the mindfulness or meditative leanings of both writing and running. While it is possible to complete a run or writing session without any mindfulness and still benefit from the session, allowing for mindful time only intensifies both activities.

Both running and writing favor a present mindset. For instance, when running, mindfulness allows us to become aware and accept pain, learning, in turn, to separate from it. Read here if you need more reasons to add meditation to your sessions or to turn your activities into meditations.

Both leave you with a product

To sustain both running and writing for the long term, we need to love the process — the act of putting miles in or putting pen to paper. As a bonus, both leave us with a product for our focused work.

Writing produces our blogs, novels, poems, and proposals. Running produces a healthy body and mind, and if you race, then medals, times, and possibly awards. If you use Strava or other GPS apps, then you’ve created a digital body of distances, perhaps in the form of pictures.

Both satisfy the introvert and the extrovert within

Runners and writers are solitary creatures.

You’ll have long runs where it’s just you in your head for hours. Likewise, the lonely writer buried beneath papers in her office nook is not a myth. In fact, many of us introverts turn to running or writing because of this solitude.

We bask in the time alone. The seclusion is restorative, gratifying, and energizing. It’s our escape.

On the flip side, running and writing communities are some of the most vibrant and sustaining ones around. Millions of runners connect online via Strava, Medium, Twitter, and Facebook.

Every city and town has running groups meeting up at tracks, for trail runs, and more importantly, over a celebratory coffee or beer after a workout. Of course, it’s hard to beat the camaraderie runners share at races.

What other sport do you have a participant complete the race and turn back for more to support another participant? Happens often in running.

While writers have no equivalent to a color run or tough mudder run, writers do find other writers in their more subtle way.

We meet online to write in Zoom sessions, for instance. Every graduate student has attended a write-in to get that dissertation done among other suffering researchers. We meet at coffee houses to write together, share our writing, and support each other. In fact, every good television series thrives when their writers band together behind the mission of the show.

Both retain a childlike mindset

I still remember the first day of learning to write cursive. Sister Gloria asked us to tilt our papers to the left and begin forming our first letter with her as our guide.

I cried.

It felt all wrong. Sister Gloria, seeing the tears welling up in my eyes, quickly came to me and realized I needed to turn my paper to the right, the way a left-handed writer must write.

I’m certain I heard the angels sing at that moment. I loved writing. I loved the feel of that pencil making (what I thought) were graceful little a’s.

Likewise, I, like most of my readers, certainly remember running everywhere as a child, often barefoot. Racing friends to the next fire hydrant was exhilarating. Endless summer afternoons of kick-the-can and hide-and-seek meant hours of running with only a water hose for hydration.

These moments of unbridled joy live within every writer and runner, and they bubble up at the most unexpected and magical moments.

Out on a quiet run, we may feel well-rested legs beneath us and smile as we pick up the pace with ease. Or, we may set aside the laptop, curl up on the couch with pen and journal and revel in the pen capturing what eluded the keyboard.

I’ve missed only one thing to carry out my metaphor. If running and writing are to be a married couple of opposites — one more physical and one more cerebral — that thrive in my life because of their shared core values, then I’ve forgotten to mention what ultimately binds them together: love.

Nothing, not our hobbies or jobs or passions, can thrive without love. Cultivate love and any marriage, even one functioning in a metaphor, can last and flourish.

Thank you for reading. Let me know in the responses about your own married passions.

As always,

Run and be brave!

Running
Writing
Writing Life
Flow
Mindfulness
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