Going Long. Too Long.

We runners love to set goals. Drop a few pounds; shave a few minutes off a PR, improve our finishing kick. We set expectations, and then we go out and exceed them. Except for those rare occasions when we don’t.

A couple of years ago, I decided to run 4000 kilometres. Why 4000? I’m not sure. It felt like a big, braggable number. And it was just slightly beyond my comfort zone. Previously, the most I’d ever run in a year was 3500 kilometres.

A few facts about running 4000 kilometres:

In order to cover 4000 kilometres in a year, you must run 11k each and every day.

If you take a day off, you’ll need to run 22k on some subsequent day to make it up.

If you get sick, and miss a week of running, you’re on the hook for eighty clicks.

It quickly became clear that my whimsical little goal would require some careful planning. I’d need to pay attention to diet, sleep, hydration, injury prevention, stretching, recovery, supplements, etc. In short, I would need to become the most BORING person on the face of the planet.

I’m sorry to report, that’s exactly what happened.

I suffered injuries, I got sick, and I spent the entire year obsessively totaling my mileage. As the months went by, I became more and more depressed. I didn’t understand what was happening to me at the time, but I do now. I spent the whole year staring at the odometer instead of the gorgeous scenery I was running past.

“You used to be a peddler of joy,” Shawna said towards the end of the year. “But you’ve turned into a fun vacuum.”

On the last day of the year, December 31st, I was 6 kilometer shy of my goal. I’d run 3994 kilometers in 364 days. In the month of December alone, I’d run 600 kilometers.

It was a sunny and dry day, and there was no physical reason why I shouldn’t have pulled on my gear and dashed off the final 6 km to meet my goal.

And yet, I didn’t.

Why?

Years before, at a marathon, I’d seen a man cross the finish line, check his watch, and then yell – at the top of his lungs – the raunchiest swear word known to humankind. You know the one. I pledged then and there that I would never become that guy; I would never put goals and numbers ahead of my love of the sport.

It was a tough decision to make, and I felt conflicted about it. But later that night I went to a New Year’s party. 10 p.m. came and went, and not only was I still conscious; I was laughing and telling stories, and actually having fun for a change! I was so bubbly, so full of spunk; I didn’t know what to make of myself.

“I can’t believe I’m awake,” I said to Shawna.

“Welcome back to the world,” she replied.

Repeat to Failure

I’ve been upping my mileage lately. I’ve got a 50-mile race coming up in July, and my usual 100-mile “fun run” in September. Let the training begin!

I love the extra hours outside, but I’m having trouble keeping my weight up. Yesterday, in the span of five minutes, three different people expressed concern about my evaporating waistline. They looked startled by my appearance – as if I were a mangy stray who’d left an unwanted deposit on their front lawn.

The trouble is, I can’t eat enough food to keep pace with my caloric output. 60 miles per week = roughly 6000 extra calories burned. That’s a lot of fettuccine alfredo.

My friend Paul tells me I should be cross training more. Paul is a weight lifter, and he keeps promoting this thing called “repeat to failure.”

You wouldn’t think that weight-lifters are the smartest people. Paul, for instance, spends most of his free time grunting and lifting impossibly heavy discs. And yet, weight-lifters have somehow come up with one of the most brilliant concepts of all time.

Repeat to Failure basically means you lift the maximum amount of weight possible – for a limited number of repetitions. Whereas you might normally lift a 20-pound weight fifteen times, with repeat to failure, you’d lift double the weight – but only for five or six reps. The idea is to stress your muscles to the point of collapse while also – and this is the tricky part – avoiding injury.

Yes, there’s pain involved. But, as my friend Paul points out, pain is how you grow.

“Every time I lift a massive weight over my head, I’m literally shredding my back and neck his muscles,” Paul told me. “But later on, scar tissue will grow on top of those damaged muscles. And guess what that scar tissue will turn into? Bigger muscles!”

Repeat to Failure strikes me as a wonderful metaphor for life. Why tread on familiar ground, over and over? We only grow by pushing ourselves beyond our comfort zones. And the moment of our greatest failure can lead us to the threshold of our greatest success.

This is true whether you’re a weight-lifter, or a runner, or a writer, or a knitter, or a photographer, or a snake charmer or a Minecraft player. We only get better by taking on bigger and heavier challenges. And as much as the failures hurt, they almost always make us stronger.

Failures aren’t failures. They’re stepping stones to success.

Why Writing is Harder than Running

~~Writing a novel~~ is a form of madness.

No. Trying to get a novel published is a form of madness.

I won’t bore you with the manifold heartbreaks that befell me in the months before I finally got the call from my agent-to-be. But I will share one example of the profound self-doubt I experienced as I rewrote my novel for the umpteenth time.

It was the spring of 2011. I’d spent two years writing and re-writing my pretty-skimpy looking 40,000 word book, and then three months pitching it to prospective agents.

I sent out 50 queries, and got 49 rejections. Then, one day – THANK YOU LORD!!! – I got a phone call from the 212 area code.

New York, I thought. This is it – the call.

And it was the call. But the literary agent was quite clear with me: he wanted a few changes before he could offer me representation.

His suggestions were excellent, and I had no doubt that every single one of them would improve the book. The only problem was, I actually had to write those changes in. Which meant yet another rewrite – under a strict two-month deadline.

It was, to say the least, a difficult 8 weeks. Here’s what I wrote in my journal on the 21st of May, 2011:

This novel is stupid, awful, I hate it, I can’t write, I’m a terrible writer. I hate myself. I’m the most boring person on the face of the planet! Every day I get up at 5 a.m., write until 8, run to work, run back home, then write from 7 p.m until midnight. Weekends I do nothing but write. This has been going on for six weeks now.

Am I close to being finished? I HAVE NO FREAKING CLUE! Is the thing any good? I HAVE NO FREAKING IDEA!

Am I happy? NO I’M NOT HAPPY! I’m pretty freaking UNHAPPY! I hate this. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done. The opportunities for rejection seem endless. And yet I toil on, annoying everyone who loves me (and that ain’t many!)

“This is your 100 mile race, Dave,” Shawna told me. “This is the tornado that Quinn faces at the end of your book. Everything is telling him to quit, but he doesn’t.”

That’s right, I thought – Quinn doesn’t quit. He beats the odds and crosses the finish line.

But here’s the difference between a fictional character running an ultra-marathon and an all-too-real human being writing a novel: in a running race, all you need to do is cross the finish line. Do that, and you’re a success. You get a cheer and a finisher’s medal.

Write a novel, on the other hand, and you still have many races left to run. You still have to find an agent. You still have to get published. And then you have to pray that you’ll actually sell some books.

If you fail to do any one of those things, then YOU FAIL! There are no finishers’ medals for novelists. Maybe there should be.

A few weeks after I wrote those piteous words, I finished the rewrite of the book, and sent it back to the literary agent. A couple of weeks dragged by, and I didn’t hear anything back. Then, on June 17th, I wrote this:

The agent acknowledged receipt of my manuscript today. He wrote: “We have it. Thanks David.”

I read and re-read that e-mail over, trying to glean some information from it. “We have it. Thanks David.” Hmmm. What did that mean?

First I thought – he hasn’t read the manuscript yet. Or if he has, he hasn’t yet gathered the opinions of his trusted advisers. Or, maybe something worse is going on, I thought. Maybe his marriage is failing and he’s folding his agency and he doesn’t have the heart to tell me how distraught he is.

Or more likely, I thought, he’s read my manuscript and he hates it, and now he wants to punish me for wasting his valuable time with my lame writing.

“We have it. Thanks David.”

What does that mean?

Writing is suffering, just as running is suffering. But in both instances, the pain is quickly forgotten, and plans are soon hatched for the next enterprise.

Keep putting one foot in front of the other. The finish line is out there. Don’t give up.

Recovery Run

Sometimes it’s a good idea to slow down when you’re running. Surprising things happen – when you take the time to look.

So it was last Saturday – April 20 – and I was on a relaxing, recovery run IN A SNOWSTORM!!! The snow was pounding down, and the country roads were greasy. Totally uninspiring day for a run. But I stuck with it, and did the full 21 kilometer loop around Beals Lake. I didn’t go fast, maybe 7 mph, but the effort felt hard, and my spit tasted like rust. So I took a break.

Beals Lake is long and narrow, with a series of bulbs that, on Google Earth, make it look like a weird necklace. You can’t see it from the roads, and the only way to get a glimpse of it is to trespass onto private property. So I followed an old cart track, hopped over a rusty metal gate, and walked down to the shore. A thick grey mist hung over the pine trees at the water’s edge. A thin crust of ice covered most of the lake, like the skin on mushroom soup after its cooled. I could hear the tinkling of ice cubes in the water.

Then I heard a sploosh. Not a splash, but a sploosh. There’s a difference. Splashes happen when something enters the water. Splooshes mean something is emerging from the water.

Suddenly I saw a beaver. Correction: two beavers. They circled around each other, then dove back under the water.

They re-surfaced a few moments later, fifteen feet to my right. One of the beavers waddled ashore, and began gnawing on a branch.

CRUNCH! CRUNCH! CRUNCH!

The beaver had no idea that I was there! The second beaver dove back under the water, and then re-surfaced somewhere to my left. It too crept onto the shore and began chewing on a branch.

CRUNCH! CRUNCH! CRUNCH! to my left.

CRUNCH! CRUNCH! CRUNCH! to my right.

I stood there, watching them, for close to an hour. When I finally got home, the snow had stopped falling. The Spring Peepers were singing joyfully in the bog. They were so loud, I had to cover my ears.

Mother Nature knows it’s springtime, even if we don’t.

Blindfolded in Boston

Did I mention that I’m not in Boston right now? That I won’t be running the fabled marathon on Monday?

I know; a total drag. But I do have some choice memories of the event.

Back in 2007, along with 30,000 other hardy souls, I ran from Hopkington to downtown Boston through a howling nor-easter. The storm was so violent that they shut the airport down. The downtown hotel where I stayed teetered back and forth in the wind. When I got up in the night to take a pee, there were whitecaps in the toilet bowl!

We had better weather in 2008. I ran that year with my buddy Kai, who is blind. He’d asked me to be his “seeing-eye runner,” but I don’t think I did a very good job. Thanks to me, he nearly did a face-plant on the infamous “Three Mile Island.”

“Buddy!” I shouted. “Veer left! Veer left!”

Three Mile Island is a cement protrusion in the middle of Route 135 near Ashland. If you’re running in the middle of the pack, or drafting behind another competitor, it’s easy to miss the warning signs and pilons. Half the runners go right and the other half go left. If you’re not careful, you’ll smack into the cement wall.

“Kai!” I screamed. “LOOK OUT!”

I grabbed his sleeve and yanked him out of harm’s way.

“What was that?” Kai asked.

“An early death,” I said.

When Kai was still a teenager, macular degeneration robbed him of ninety percent of his central vision. Mercifully, the disease left his peripheral vision intact. And it’s those twin curtains of sight that allow Kai to run with some degree of confidence – to deke left and right, and to find the gaps between other runners.

“I actually feel pretty comfortable running in a pack,” Kai told me. “I can see the contours of people ahead of me. So all I have to do is find my opening and keep up with the crowd.”

Although he chose me to be his guide, Kai had no particular interest in being tethered to me by a rope. Nor was he interested in pinning a bright yellow BLIND RUNNER sign to the back of his jersey. “Thousands of cute Wellesley girls, and you want me to advertise that I’ve got a disability?” he said.

So we ran side by side. Kai was worried about slowing me down, but I assured him that I wasn’t looking for a PR. “I’ve run lots of marathons for speed,” I told him. “I’m looking forward to actually seeing this race.”

So there we were, two best friends, clipping along at a 3:50 pace.

“Who’s that singing?” Kai asked me at the 10-mile mark. We could hear a karaoke version of Cracklin’ Rosie.

“There’s a Neil Diamond impersonator standing on the roof of his El Dorado,” I said. “He’s dressed in leather pants, and he’s doing the Macarena.”

Ten minutes later we heard intoxicated screaming.

“What’s that?” said Kai.

“Hundreds of drunken dudes,” I said. “Hot girls are lobbing beer cans to the runners.”

“Can you grab us some?”

“Too late,” I said.

As we ran, it occurred to me that this was my true role as Kai’s guide: to animate the lunacy of the race for him. After all, running Boston is only half the fun. Watching the crazy people on the sidelines is almost as good.

At Citgo Hill spectators yelled “One more mile!”

Before Boston, I’d run a hundred marathons for time, but in retrospect, I’d done those exclusively for myself. This was the first race where my eyes were fully open. Ironic that Kai would be the one to give me that gift.

There is a photograph of the two of us completing the race together. Our arms are raised, and we appear to be laughing.

“Where’s the finish line?” Kai said.

“Right behind you,” I said.

Real-Life Superheroes, part 6

Whether you’re a runner looking for inspiration, or a writer looking for a story, this post may just help you out…

The Boston Marathon takes place on Monday. I won’t be running it this year, which breaks my heart. That race is more fun than…jeez…a barrel of monkeys? A trampoline of hamsters? A terrarium of Bearded Dragons?

It’s crazy fun, that’s what it is.

My favourite Boston memory? Hmmm, let’s see…

One time I found myself running alongside a heavyset man. He was running at a fast clip, which was amazing, considering that he was pushing a weird wheelchair/stroller contraption. A young man was reclined in the stroller, and he was grinning at the huge crowds that had gathered on both sides of the road. Everyone went ballistic as these two guys passed by. It was like they were rock stars or something.

That was six years ago. It’s one of the great regrets of my life that I HAD NO IDEA who Rick and Dick Hoyt were. But I know who they are now. As do millions and millions of others.

They aren’t rock stars, of course. They’re something much better. They’re a father and a son, and more importantly – A TEAM. And they’re a reminder of the good that any of us can do in this world:

Believe me, it’s worth the plane fare to Boston – just to cheer these two heroes on.

Trading Diamonds for Stones

A few years ago, when I was stuck in an office job I didn’t like, I found myself staring out the window. It was a gorgeous, sunny day, and I felt like a panther inside a cage.

A colleague came up beside me. “Today is a diamond,” he said. “Workdays are stones. You and me, we’re trading diamonds for stones.”

It was a depressing thought, and I determined to get out of that job and change my life for the better. The trouble was, I didn’t know what I wanted to do.

A friend of mine came up with a good idea. He sat me down with a piece of paper and a pen, and told me to write down the best experiences of my life.

In no particular order, here’s what I wrote:

Sailing with my brother on Lake Kennisis in the summer of 1986, when a hurricane blew in and we nearly shipwrecked.
Tobogganing in Edmonton, with my nieces and nephews, IN MINUS 50 DEGREE WEATHER!
Running my first 100 mile race.
Sitting on the dock with my mom one summer night, while the Northern Lights tarted up the skies.
Skiing down Whistler Mountain with my visually-impaired friend.
Hiking through a forest with Shawna and running into that big-ass BEAR.
Canoe tripping with my dad, in lakes so clean you could drink straight out of them.
Getting the phone call from my agent that my novel had sold.

I handed the list to my friend. His face lit up instantly. “Good job,” he said. “Now what do all of those things share in common?”

It took me a while to figure it out. But eventually I saw the common thread. All of those events, with the exception of that last one, took place OUT OF DOORS. It sounds obvious, but it was an incredible revelation to me at the time. If I really wanted to be happy in the future, I needed to find a way of getting outside more often. And ideally, I’d do it with the people I love.

Years have passed since then, and while I still have a job that keeps me chained to a desk a lot of the time, it’s extremely creative, and I’m surrounded by zillions of smart, spunky people.

More importantly, I know what I need to do to keep myself sane. A week spent behind a computer screen can gut me like a fish, but an hour on the running trail puts me right.

So if you feel as though you’re trading diamonds for stones, don’t worry. Most of us have to spend some time in the mine-shaft before we achieve the career we want and deserve. The trick is to figure out how to get more sunlight into our lives in the meantime. Figure that out, and the bars of your cage may well evaporate.

I Love This Video and I Don’t Know Why!

What is going on in this video???

Where did all those dogs come from? Why is the little girl not afraid of them? Did she raise them from the time they were puppies? Is she some kind of dog whisperer?

Why is the girl so happy? Is she maybe a dog herself? Did she make a wish on a magic bone and transform into a human?

Why is she throwing those things in the air? What are those things? They look like blades of grass, but I actually think they’re cheese strings.

Why are the dogs all German Shepherds? Why are there twelve of them? Jesus had twelve disciples; is there some significance about the number?

Could the dogs actually be wizards from the future? Maybe they wanted to deliver a message to the little girl: “Don’t eat too many cheese strings, they’ll make you fat.”

If I had some spare time, I’d write a short story about this video. I’d call it “Cheese String Girl and the Dogs from the Future.” Millions of people would read it, and Disney would make a movie of it, and everyone’s questions about this weird video would be answered. And after the movie was made, you would be asked to keep the twelve German Shepherds. And you’d take good care of them and let them run free in a grassy meadow, and from time to time you’d frolic with them, and feed them cheese strings, and laugh endlessly.

Your Running Playlist, Part 2

I can’t write when music is playing in the background. I need total silence to write.

On the other hand, when I want to run fast, I needs good tunes. And nothing gets my legs pumping faster these days than Zedd:

If I had my own planet I’d make everyone write songs that catchy.

Seriously, when that song’s playing, I run faster than the internet. If it was playing in his ear buds, I bet even the statue of Glenn Gould could win a marathon.

Zedd started playing piano at the age of four. When he turned twelve, he learned to play the drums. For a while there, he wrote a new song every day.

Zedd has done remixes for Lady Gaga, Black Eyed Peas, P. Diddy, Swedish House Mafia and Skrillex. They’re good, but not nearly as good as his fist-pumping, slightly off-kilter originals:

Why Running = Writing

So I wrote this YA novel called ULTRA. It’s about a 12 year-old boy who runs a 100-mile footrace in order to escape a terrible family secret.

Here’s the book in one sentence: “Why face your troubles when you can outrun them?”

Hoo boy! Sounds exciting, doesn’t it? You bet!

Anyway, while writing that book (to be published by Scholastic in September, 2013), I learned that the act of writing a novel and that of running 100 miles are similar in a lot of ways. For instance:

1) Runners don’t need much gear to do their thing. Just a pair of running shoes, a tee-shirt and shorts. Writers don’t need much either. A pen and some paper, a tee-shirt and shorts.

2) In running, there is a starting line, and then, some distance away, a finish line. In writing, there is a blank page, and then, some distance away, a published story.

3) Runners suffer from shinsplints, cramps and blistered toes. Writers suffer from writer’s block, writer’s cramp and blistered fingers.

4) Runners start out strong, and get weaker as they age. Writers are exactly the same, only in reverse.

But do you want to know the most important similarity? In both writing and running, the key to success is PRACTISE. Log enough miles, and you’ll eventually run faster. Fill enough pages, and you’ll eventually write better.

Just keep at it. Write, run, REPEAT.