Things I Learned About Writing By Training for a Marathon

My running medals Christmas Tree

I became a distance runner in 2010, relatively late in my life, as I was turning thirty-seven stupid. I had never been interested in running before that time, but somehow found myself sucked into the sport. I think it was mostly because running gave me a chance to be alone – a rare commodity for a mom who was homeschooling four young children at the time.

I definitely list distance running as one of the contributing factors to me becoming a published author. Running gave all those little voices and stories in my head the chance to really be heard.

Because, believe me, you will think about just about anything to take your mind off the physical agony that comes during a 15- or 20-mile run.  Including plotting an entire novel. 

Since 2010, I’ve run two marathons, a dozen or so half-marathons, and seven Ragnar Relays (200-miles, split between 12 people over 2 days -- read about those here). I even have this beautiful Christmas tree with some of my running medals.

Our Ultra team this weekend: Fast Girls Have Good Times. Read about us here.

But I have gone beyond stupid in what I’m doing this weekend: A Ragnar Relay Ultra. So instead of splitting 200 miles between 12 of us, we’re splitting the 200 miles between only SIX of us. So I’ll be running 30+ miles over 24 hours – the most miles I’ve ever run in one 24 hour period.

Last week as I trudged through more long runs in preparation for the race, worried that I should be at home writing instead of out there running, I came up with this: 

Top 5.5 Things I’ve Learned About Writing By Training for a Marathon

Running lesson #5: The runs you did yesterday and last week were great. Congratulations. But now they’re over and all that really matters is the run you’re doing today. Writing lesson: Same is true. You wrote a book? Congrats! But what are you working on now? I can’t rest on my laurels.

Running lesson #4: Non-running people will ask you about your marathon training, but they really don’t want to hear about it. Trust me on this: tell a non-runner you ran 2 miles this morning and they think you’re a rock star. Tell them you ran 12 miles this morning and they think you’re psychotic.  Writing lesson: People (even other writers) will ask you about your novel, but don’t really want to know more than two sentences. Have those sentences ready, then move on. You’re not the droids they’re looking for.

Running lesson #3: Do something you thought was impossible.  Last January I decided I was going to try to out-run a friend during a marathon in which we were both racing. Yeah sure, he was younger, stronger and faster than me, but he was recovering from an injury so I thought I might have a chance. I won’t keep you in suspense: I didn’t beat him. BUT, for the first time ever I ran a half-marathon length in under 2 hours. This was a HUGE accomplishment for me; a feat I had deemed impossible and had refused to even try. But it wasn’t impossible, I just needed proper motivation to leave every little bit of myself out there on the course. Writing lesson: What am I not trying to do because I’m calling it “impossible”? Time to stop being scared and Do. It.  Find the motivation to leave every bit of myself out there, not spend effort preparing excuses in case I fail.

The .5 Running lesson: Consider this a bonus. After long runs, you will have chafing in places you never dreamed was possible. It will make you cry. You will curse your mother for ever having given birth to you. Writing lesson: Um…yeah, no real lesson here. That’s why most writers aren’t distance runners. Heck, that’s why most everybody in the world isn’t a distance runner. 

Running lesson #2: All forward motion is progress, even if it’s slow. Slow is better than not moving at all.Writing lesson: All forward motion is progress.  Write 50 words, that’s a paragraph. Write 250 words, that’s a page. Write 300 pages, that’s a manuscript. Write every day.

Running lesson #1: Distance running going to hurt. Accept that. When you push yourself, it hurts. Writing lesson: You’re going to want to quit. Don’t. To borrow from A League of Their Own: “It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. The hard is what makes it great.”  Embrace the hard. Or at least learn to live with it.

Perhaps I’ll glean even more wisdom about writing as I run my 30+ miles this weekend.  I’ll definitely glean some about chafing.

The Ugly Truth About Friendship, Mud and Ice

This weekend I’m getting together with two of my best friends. I’ve talked about Meg before, and I love Shelby just as much. We live halfway across the country from each other, so we don’t get to see one another as often as we’d like. Therefore we planned this girls’ weekend a few months ago.

And by “girls’ weekend” I’m talking about: shocking ourselves with 10,000 volt wires, scrambling over 8 foot walls, leaping through fire, crawling under barbed wire, and scurrying our way through underground tunnels.

Forget the spa. This girls’ weekend we’re competing in a Tough Mudder obstacle challenge. In case you don't know what that is, I'll give you a taste:

My muddy buddies

Shelby, Megan and I have all done Tough Mudders before. And tough is definitely a good word for this course. Along with: crazy, dumb, ridiculous, ludicrous, terrifying, painful. It's full-on stupid, without a doubt.

We love it.

Me getting over an 8ft wall

Like the sign says, you have to sign a death waiver before participating, a fact that was celebrated far more before someone actually died doing a Tough Mudder last weekend. (Although honestly, with all the shenanigans going on in a Tough Mudder, having a death rate of only 1 in 750,000 really isn’t that bad, I guess.)

Extreme races like this teach you things about yourself: how strong you are, how much you can accomplish. But sometimes it teaches you things about yourself you don’t want to know.

For example: my friend Meg (who is about 5’3 and has around 0% body fat) is always cold. When my house is a nice balmy 78 degrees, she’s wrapping herself in a blanket. At our first Tough Mudder in 2011, we came up to an obstacle that was called the “Chernobyl Jacuzzi.” It was vat filled with really gross slime-looking liquid with stuff floating around in it.

We didn’t know anything. We thought the obstacle was going to be wading through some nasty slime. Gross, but relatively harmless, compared to, say, the 10,000 volt wires also on the course. So we got up on the edge, giggling about how disgusting that liquid looked.

Bless our little hearts.

We jumped into the vat, totally unaware of what we were getting into. Literally.

That stuff floating around, it was ICE. The whole thing was filled with ice. Filled. With. Ice. And then some sick, sadistic SOB put a board in the middle of it with barbed-wire across the top, so you’re forced to dip your head under the water. They’ve since renamed the obstacle “The Arctic Enema.” Fitting. It was the coldest thing I’ve ever felt in my life.

Chernobyl Jacuzzi - yeah, that's ice.

You can imagine how poor little Meggie, who’s cold when it’s 78 degrees, felt about that sort of iciness. Her body was in such shock from the cold that by the time she had gotten under the midway wall and to the other side of the vat, she couldn’t make her muscles move enough to get her out. She was stuck in there, freezing.

And where was I? As soon as my body touched that icy water, I zoomed through it, under the wall and had used my super-long legs to jump out the other side in a matter of seconds. For a fleeting moment I had a thought…

I should help Megan. She doesn’t do well with cold…

But my body did not care what my brain was saying. It was getting us out of that ice as soon as possible. Too bad, best friend. Hope you make it.

The hard lesson I learned about myself that day: I will sacrifice you to save me.

That’s a very ugly truth and I would’ve argued it impossible right up to the moment that I left my best friend freezing in a pool of slime-colored ice. While I watched from the side, unable to make myself do anything to help her.

Fortunately, there were a couple of big ol’ guys at the end of the vat. They plucked Meg out of the icy death and we both lived to run the rest of the race. My part in abandoning her happened so fast, she didn’t even realize it had happened at all. Even if she had, she would’ve forgiven me in a heartbeat. That’s just the type of person she is.

This weekend I have a chance at a do-over. I have promised not to leave Megan and Shelby behind in the ice. This time I know I will do better.  I hope.

Maybe next year we’ll just go to the spa.

Nah.

Ooops, I Did It Again - The Marine Corps Marathon

Remember that time I didn’t really want to sign up for the Marine Corps Marathon but did it anyway?

Yeah, that would be today.

Some of you may remember this statement I made on Facebook back in January, about an hour after my Disney Marathon was over:

Umm, I left out the comments under that status update in which every person I know called me a liar. Cause what do they know?

I hadn’t planned to sign up for the Marine Corps Marathon (MCM) when I woke up this morning, although the MCM is great. It’s nick-named “The People’s Marathon” (because it’s open to all runners; requiring no qualifying times), is well-known for supportive crowds, and runs through the heart of our Nation’s Capital. Some gorgeous running scenery, that.

And last year registration for the race sold out online in about two hours.

But you may wonder how does one “accidentally” sign up for a marathon?  It’s not a pretty tale…

I see on Facebook that a good running buddy, Heather, had been trying register for the MCM for an hour with no success.

What’s that, Heather? You need someone to help you waste time doing something on a computer? I’m your gal.

So I, along with other of her friends, got online to hit refresh over and over at the overwhelmed race registration site, trying  to get to the screen that would allow us to register Heather for the race.  No luck for nearly an hour.  We were about to give up hope when one of us was able to get into the registration page and sign Heather up.

But… did I stop hitting refresh after Heather had been registered?

We all know the answer to that question.

Basically, I allowed a “please try again” message on a website to goad me into running another marathon. Because all I know is that somewhere between the 3,000 and 4,000^th time I hit refresh it became my life-long goal to run the MCM. My passion in life. The one-thing I was put on this earth to do.  And I knew my time was running out. The marathon would sell-out soon.

Refresh, refresh, refresh. I could not allow a computer registration system to stop me from my life's mission!

I didn’t let myself think about the 20+ mile training runs required for a marathon, or how I had just said to a good friend that I was done with training and competitive running, or that my husband was probably going to leave me when I told him I was running another marathon.

All I could think of was how important this Marine Corps Marathon was to me. Even though I hadn’t even known about it three hours before.

How the story ends: I got through (barely, it sold out just minutes afterwards). I got registered. I will be running another marathon in October. Plus the 500 training miles required in the months leading up to the race.

A day may come when I am not ridiculously stupid, but it is not this day.

Run, Drive, Sleep? Repeat.

Last year right about this time I headed up to Washington DC to run 200 miles with 11 other women I had never met. It was my first Ragnar Relay – one of the twelve-person relay races held all over the country.  My team’s name was “Does this Tutu Make me Look Fast?” And yes, we ran in tutus for the entire race.

(Just FYI, I am 5'9, standing in the middle of the back row -- so the girls to the right of me? At least 6'2. And they ran like the wind.  Like Kenyans floating in the wind. Team Tutu came in third place -- so evidently the tutus did make look fast --  and won the prize for best running costumes.)

Since then I've run other Ragnars. And I'm running four more in the next 12 months. I keep trying to talk my husband into running a Ragnar race with me. I explain it in as accurate and appealing terms as possible: 36 hours cramped in vans amid 11 other sweaty runners, with little sleep, and crappy food; running for long miles in often dark, unfamiliar places, usually alone, where you might get lost.

Shockingly, I haven’t been able to talk him into it yet. Words like juvenile, stupid, asinine, not orphaning our children, get thrown around. Whatever. I don’t listen. It’s obviously just the jealousy talking.

Ragnar recognizes its own ridiculous nature in its slogan: Run. Drive. Sleep? Repeat.

Ahh… Full-On Stupid. That about sums it up.

This weekend I run the DC Ragnar race again. This time with team “Honey Badger Don’t Care”. The race starts in Cumberland, MD and goes through the Appalachian Mountains (cue: dueling banjo) and ends in downtown Washington DC. This time I'm racing mostly with people I know, rather than strangers. But the no sleep, crappy food, and running in the dark will still be the same, I'm sure.

I can’t wait. A full update will come next week. But you can follow my thoughts on the absurd brilliance of it all *live* on twitter: @janiecrouch

My New Motto: “Less Routine, More Stupid.”

Last night I went to see The Bourne Legacy at the midnight showing.  Although I had been anticipating the movie’s release for weeks, I had not planned on going to the midnight show.  After all, I have four kids, two of which had to be up for camp at 7:00am. I knew choosing a midnight show would come at a price and I would be stupid to pay it.

Just call me stupid.

The movie wasn’t that great. I was  pretty disappointed overall. You can see my movie review here at my much more nerdy blog where I co-author: Sweep-the-Leg.com.

Am I exhausted today? Yes. But do I regret it? No.  I threw out the movie gauntlet on Facebook at about 8:30pm last night when I found out there was a midnight showing of Bourne.  Here was the challenge:

Who's up for a midnight showing of Bourne Legacy? Because sleep is for sissies.

I didn’t really expect anyone to seriously respond with a yes. Most of my friends are like me: they have spouses, kids, jobs, stuff that makes their mornings come early.   Seeing a movie, even one they really want to see, isn’t worth the price of breaking up their routine.

But I’m trying to get out of having too much routine in my life. My new motto: Less routine, more stupid. (Or as my husband calls it “the full-on stupid”.)  

Who took me up on challenge? One of my writer friends. She’s a young woman in her early 20s, unmarried, kind-of reserved and quiet.  I like her a whole lot.  Our lives are totally different.

Or maybe not really so different if you were to look at the greater scheme;  we’re just at different stages of similar lives.  Either way, we’re alike enough to have stuff in common, but different enough to enjoy each other’s company. Hanging out with her in the middle of the night at a movie theater with a bunch of geeks? Pure fun. 

I’m finding more and more that it is important to have friends whose lives are different, or at least in different places, than my own.  It makes me remember that there is existence outside of my late30s suburbian world of mortgages, kids, minivans, husbands, computers, home improvements, and back-to-school supplies.  Perspectives long forgotten or perhaps not arrived at yet.

                              

So the movie was a bust and today I am exhausted.  That was two hours of unconsciousness I can never get back.  Thank goodness.

The Full-On Stupid

A friend of mine posted this link recently:

My first thought:  Where can I sign up?

Why? Because it’s in Africa. Because it’s a challenge. Because it’s a desert. Because it’s beyond what I’m capable of at the present.

Because it’s stupid.

The event itself is not stupid. On the contrary, it’s an awesome event and Runwell is a fabulous charity.

It’s me, a nearly forty-year-old mother of four, who has never run more than 26.2 miles and doesn’t like the heat, wanting to sign up for a 7-day run half way around the world in the middle of a desert that’s stupid. But if there was any possible way I could do it, I would. And I would hurl myself into the training and planning.

That’s the way of what my husband has somewhat-affectionately termed THE FULL-ON STUPID. And it’s pretty much how I do a lot of things.

There are usually three facets to full-on stupidity: 

1) An event or goal that is somewhat ridiculous,  

2) A plan to achieve said event/goal that is also somewhat ridiculous,  and

3) Some sort of physical, mental and/or emotional pain in the planning, training or event itself.

So, the formula is:

(ridiculous event/goal) x (ridiculous plan to achieve event/goal) x (pain)  =  THE FULL-ON STUPID

But I’m certainly guilty of full-on stupidity quite often.   Things my husband has heard me say in the last six months:



Tough Mudder: 10,000 volt  
wires = definitely stupid



Honey, I’ve decided to do this race called the Tough Mudder that involves running through fire, climbing over 12-foot walls, swimming through ice pits, and sprinting through electrical wires. All I have to do is sign this death-waiver…  = FULL-ON STUPID

Honey, I’ve decided to give up all caffeine. No, I won’t be slowly reducing my caffeine intake so I don’t turn into a complete psycho.  I’m just going to give up all ten cups of coffee a day cold turkey… = FULL-ON STUPID

Honey, I’ve decided to participate in the National Novel Writing Month where you write an ENTIRE novel in one month.  So I’m planning on staying up all night at least a couple times a week all through the month of November…  = FULL-ON STUPID

If I asked my husband to add to the list, he could probably come up with half a dozen more examples immediately.  Of course, he’s also a saint because he realizes how stupid I am and yet still remains married to me.

Why the full-on stupid? Ultimately because: I know I respond best to hard deadlines. I know I’m a strong starter, and that my initial momentum will take me further than most people’s, but after that momentum is gone, whatever hasn’t been accomplished probably isn’t going to. I know I have a low tolerance for boredom and a high ability to multi-task.  And I know have little, if any, talent at pacing myself.

Maybe you're a full-on stupider too. Could we use more moderation and intelligence when planning how to achieve our goals? Well, yeah, if someone wants to put it that way. I guess we are capable of making rational goals and choices. And most of the time we do.

But sometimes tacking things full-on stupid is the only way for me to go. If I didn't, then I’d just be Jane without the Calamity. Where’s the adventure in that?