A Puppy Off its Leash

This spring is giving me whiplash.

Three days ago I went running in a blizzard. But one weekend before that, the hillsides were ablaze with blossoms.

I took the opportunity to go hiking on the Bruce Trail with friends. White and wine-coloured Trilliums opened as we walked.

These flowers would perish of frostbite exactly one week later, but they looked very beautiful at the time.

My friends were in an easy-as-a-Sunday-mornin’ mood, and took lots of time to admire the scenery.

Look out, I’m a snake, you cultured peoples!

The trail wove up and down the scarp face. Every so often, we’d come upon a delicious downhill section. I’d leave my friends behind, and slalom down the trail, my legs twirling like pinwheels. When I got to the bottom of the ravine I’d turn around and jog back up to meet my friends again. I felt sheepish, like a puppy who’s escaped its leash but still wants to be loved by its masters. My friends barely even noticed I’d gone.

After a couple of hours we came to a gurgling stream. It meandered through the grassy meadow like lazy cursive, swooping around apple trees and ancient slabs of limestone. The water glinted like diamonds in the sunlight, and when you looked down into it, you could see fat black tadpoles shooting back and forth.

It was an idyllic place, surrounded by hills on all sides. It reminded me of an illustration from one of my all-time favourite children’s books, Stan and Jan Berenstain’s The Bears Picnic.

It’s the book where Ma and Pa Bear set off with their son in search of the perfect picnic spot. They pass through forests, over mountains, and through cozy glades in pursuit of the perfect picnic spot. They endure bugs and monsoons and nearly get killed by a train and almost fall off a mountain.

Come to think of it, their adventure is eerily similar to my novel, Ultra. Except, like, the main characters are cartoon bears.

When we got home after the hike we ate our own picnic of scones and salted pecans and Brie cheese and Oolong tea which raised our spirits nicely. Six hours had passed since we’d set out on the trail. It felt like ten minutes. The best days always do.

Note – you can find that gorgeous creek and meadow at kilometer 58.8 of the Beaver Valley section of the Bruce Trail. It’s on map 26 of the Trail guide; just a few clicks southeast of Eugenia Falls.

Or, if you’re feeling lazy, you can have almost the same experience just by reading this book:

In Every Race There is a Surprise, Part 2

I love running 100 mile races. And one of my favourites takes place this month.

The Sulphur Springs Trail Run is held in the Dundas Valley Conservation Area in Southern Ontario. The race follows a series of hard-pack trails that weave in and out of steep gorges carved thousands of years ago by retreating glaciers. Over the course of the 20-kilometer loop (which you run 8 times), you pass through dense Carolinian forests and wildflower-strewn meadows.

Gorgeous

To answer your question, yes, there’s a bit of hill-climbing. Over the course of the 100 miles, you have to gut your way up 4600 metres of elevation. That’s like 8 CN towers stacked on top of each other.

Sadly, I won’t be running the race this year. Instead, I’ll be working this mind-blowingly awesome music festival. It’s a decent trade-off, but I’ll still be thinking about Sulphur Springs while I’m rocking out. I’ve said before that every 100-mile race holds a surprise of some sort, and I’ve had more than my share in that particular race…

For instance. Five years ago I was toeing the starting line with a hundred or so other runners. It was late May, and it was six in the morning, and most of us were wearing headlamps.

Most – but not all.

“3…2…1…GO!” shouted the race director.

“Yaaaaaaaaa!” we runners yelled, charging heroically into the darkness.

We ran for maybe 30 seconds, down a gravel road toward the trailhead. Everyone jostled for position as the road got narrower, and soon we were funneling into a straight line.

Did I mention that it was dark? That we were moving fast?

Soddenly, right in front of me, someone shouted: “Look out! Look out! Look out!”

The offending posts

Four metal posts were sticking out of the ground. They were two-and-a-half feet high. Castration height.

“Look out! Look out! Look out!”

The crowd parted, and I slipped safely between the posts. The guy beside me wasn’t so lucky, and went down with a horror-movie scream.

IN EVERY RACE THERE IS A SURPRISE.

Poor guy. He’d run all of 200 metres.

Happily, the following year, the starting line was moved to a different area of the park. I have no idea if that was coincidental or not.

* * *

Running a hundred miles is not like running shorter distances. In the 100 mile race, you don’t compete with other people. You compete against yourself. More precisely, you compete against your own mind. You would think that your mind would be on your side in an endurance event. But it is not. Your mind is your worst enemy. Your mind is on the side of your body, and your body wants nothing more than to go home, lie down in a hammock, and eat a bag of barbecue chips.

Oh sure, every now and again, your mind will say something nice to you, like: “The bath you take after this race sure is going to feel good!” Or, “It sure is nice, being outside in the fresh air!” But most of the time your mind says nasty things like: “You’re stupid for trying this; you should drop out and go home.”

That’s what my mind was saying to me a couple of years ago, when I was once again running Sulphur Springs. I’d been running for 80-odd miles and it was the middle of the night and my mind was saying: “You are a stupid bloody fool. Why are you doing this to yourself?”

I’ll never forget finishing my 7th loop. At the turnaround, the volunteer lady gave me a high five and offered me a slice of pizza. I declined, since I still had one final 20-kilometer loop to do. “No you don’t,” she said. “You’ve already done your 8. Just look at the clipboard.”

I stared at the clipboard, and counted the laps. She was right, I’d done 8, not 7 like I thought.

Which meant –

I WAS DONE!!!

Believe me when I tell you – that was the happiest moment of my life.

Of course, later that day, the pain really set in. I had a burning Achilles tendon, and I lost all feeling in six of my toes. My calves and left shin were…hmmm, let me see. What were they exactly? Ah yes, they were a blinding wall of pain. That’s right, that’s what they were.

On the bright side, I was given permission to use the physical disability washroom at work. That handle on the wall beside the toilet was a godsend.

Writing is my AEIOU and Sometimes Y

Note to self: kids are really smart.

Case in point. The other day I got interviewed by a grade 10 student. He needed to dissect a living writer for a class project, and somehow, poor guy, he got saddled with me. We went for a coffee, and then I dragged him into a radio studio (the same studio, I should add, where the fabled literary broadcaster, Eleanor Wachtel, conducts all of her interviews). The student pulled out his iPhone, pressed record, and placed it on the desk between us. He asked me some very good questions – about writing, working in the field of journalism, how much education is needed to get a job in broadcasting, and how to build a career as a fiction writer.

He gave me a real grilling. And then, near the end of our discussion, he asked me this: “Knowing what you know now, if you had to go back and do it all over again, would you still set out to be a fiction writer?”

OMG. He had me. I froze.

As a seasoned interviewer, I usually love moments like this. The moment when a question hits the bulls-eye, and you can see your guest squirming, because he or she has secretly been asking him or herself the exact same question – possibly for years.

If I had to go back and do it again, would I still set out to become a fiction writer? I had to hand it to the student – his random drilling had hit a geyser.

“Do you want me to be completely honest?” I asked.

The student grinned from ear to ear. “Of course,” he said.

No way, I thought to myself, I’d avoid writing like the plague. It’s nothing but an endless road of pain!

Want proof? I wrote my first novella more than 2 decades ago. It never got published. Neither did the two novels I wrote after that. And of the 100+ short stories I composed after that, only a handful made it to print.

NO, DAVE. BE HONEST. 3 GOT PUBLISHED. ONLY 3. And the money I earned from them didn’t even cover the cost of the printer ink and stamps!

If someone had sat me down back in 1990 and done the calculus; if they’d explained how hard I’d have to work, how many hours of sleep I’d lose, how much my arteries would harden, how awkward I’d feel each time a friend asked how my book was coming along… If someone had told me all that two decades ago, would I still have gone into writing? No, probably not. You’d have to be crazy to embrace a career like that.

It’s one of the great mercies of the universe that I didn’t know the odds I was facing when I started out. This isn’t limited to writing. If any of us truly knew how much heartache was in store for us, we’d never do anything. If we knew how hard it would be to maintain relationships, we’d never allow ourselves to fall in love. If my parents had warned me about the skinned knees I’d get while learning to ride a bike, I never would’ve let them take my training wheels off.

I still hadn’t answered the student’s question. Sensing my difficulty, he shifted gears. “How about this,” he said at last, “what has writing given you?”

The question was a relief, and I was flooded with good memories. I started rhyming off the list: writing gave me a purpose in life, it gave me the career I now enjoy, it helps pay my mortgage, it stills my mind during stressful times.

Writing is my sun and my moon. It is my breakfast, lunch and dinner. It is my AEIOU and sometimes Y.

And in spite of all those rejections I mentioned earlier, writing eventually did make my dream come true.

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.

Coming Soon – My New Novel About Running

The 100 mile race is a harsh and hostile immensity, and to take it on is to enter a war.

ULTRA is the story of Quinn’s war. A war against fatigue, despair, dehydration, wild animals, hallucinations, and a dangerous family secret.

It’ll be published by Scholastic in September.

Boredom is Good for You

It’s a dream come true, having a novel published. Ever since I was a kid, I knew that I wanted to write.

But listen: It never would have happened if I hadn’t spent years being bored.

For instance. When I was nine years old, I started cranking out a weekly newspaper. It had a circulation of 5: my mom, my dad, my two brothers and me. It looked like this:

Why did I write this weekly rag? Because I was bored! We didn’t have a computer or the internet back then, so I had to write the whole thing out by hand.

Not many news stories happened inside our house, so I had to make most of them up.

There was a big cloud of smoke and the robbers were gone!!!!!

In addition to being a budding journalist, I also wanted to work in radio. One Christmas, Santa Claus brought me a toy record player. I immediately constructed a make-believe radio station in our basement. I named the station C.H.O.W., and to my family’s immense pleasure I spun a lot of records by Supertramp, the Bee Gees, the Electric Light Orchestra, and yes, the Carpenters.

I set the radio station up beneath the hot air vent, so that the music would carry all through the house. I had to yell so everyone could hear me introducing the songs.

That changed when I got another present for my birthday:

Mr. Microphone turned me into a REAL broadcaster. The signal carried ten metres in all directions, so you could hear me as far away as Mom and Dad’s bedroom (if you tuned your radio to 90.1 FM)! I hosted a weekly chart show, and semi-regular newscasts in which I read the made-up news stories I’d written in the Weekend Household Paper.

Why am I telling you this? Because sometimes you may feel bored. I hope you do, because BOREDOM IS THE BEST THING EVER! If I hadn’t been bored as a kid, I never would have written that newspaper, or set up that radio station. And if I hadn’t done that, I might not be an author or a radio producer today.

So don’t be afraid of getting bored. Instead, use that boredom to figure out what it is you love to do. If you’re lucky, later on, you won’t have to chase after your dream career. Instead, maybe it’ll come chasing after you.

The Three Most Amazing Things I Ever Saw

Thirteen years ago, I saw an incredible thing. A chipmunk swimming across a river.

I thought that chipmunk was so amazing, I put her in my novel. You can do that sort of thing if you’re lucky enough to write books.

The second most amazing thing I ever saw was a silver rainbow. What is a silver rainbow? GLAD YOU ASKED!

As you know, normal rainbows occur when the sun shines during a rainstorm. Silver rainbows are the same, only they happen at night. A full moon comes out from between the clouds, and throws its ghostly light through the curtain of rain.

I thought it was so beautiful and strange, I put that silver rainbow into my novel too. You can read all about it when the book comes out in September.

The third most amazing thing I ever saw was a tornado. Actually, I didn’t see the tornado. Like the silver rainbow, it came at night, when it was too dark to see much of anything. But I heard it alright.

I was visiting my family’s cabin, which overlooks a long, narrow lake in central Ontario. The whole family was there, and we were wide awake and terrified. The tornado raced up the lake with a papery sound. As it came closer, it began to scream. Finally, like a bulldozer, it crashed into the forest beside the cabin. The trees thrashed, yanking at their roots. Branches smashed against the windows like ice cubes in a blender.

I put that tornado into my novel too. I even drew a picture of it.

I’m not a great artist, but you get the idea. That’s the main character in my book, trying to outrun the tornado.

Everything else in my novel is completely made up, but that chipmunk, that tornado, and the silver rainbow are totally real.

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.