The Novel and the Marathon

Writing a novel and running a marathon. These two feats have nothing in common, right? Wrong. At different times of life I have looked at both of these as aspirational goals. I didn’t get too close to achieving one of them, but in the process of completing the other, I developed an understanding of their similarities.

Both of these tests of human endeavour and stamina require training, planning and discipline. There are times when all of this is easy; when inspiration first strikes, it is easy to start those training sessions on the road, or to start planning out your plot and characters. As time passes, getting out of bed early to run for an hour in the rain is nowhere near as easy. Devoting hours to ploughing through research documentation, ensuring a tiny detail is accurately expressed in your manuscript is painstaking and for a seemingly insignificant result. At these points, continuing is a challenge, and it is willpower that will get you to your goal.

For many people, the completion of either a novel or a marathon is the achievement. The books sold, or time taken to reach the finish line is secondary for many people. That said, nobody wants to be crawling over the line and nobody wants to publish a book that has no impact. Completing the goal is something to be proud of, but the pride is only felt if you have done your best. I hope to achieve this with the publication of my first novel, and to continually improve so that those which follow can continue to impact people.

Self-doubt plays a huge role in the pursuit of either goal. The closest I got to a marathon, was running in a 12km fun run nearly a decade ago. Three months earlier I couldn’t run a kilometre. For the first month of training, nothing much improved. Every time I started running, a few minutes in, the voices began. ‘You can’t do this, it’s beyond you.’ I believed that, and stopped. One day I managed to change my reaction to those words. When I heard stop, I used it as inspiration to keep going. It didn’t matter how much it hurt, I was going to prove those voices wrong. The fact that they were imaginary and in my head was irrelevant. The inspiration worked and I produced a new best. More importantly, I unlocked the key to achieving the goal. Though a test of the body, it had proven to be an even greater test of the mind. Once the 12km run was done, I stopped running for a long time. Every time I’ve begun again, that key is firmly locked, and the voices keep stopping me. I have proven it can be done, so when time is on my side, who knows.

Self-doubt exists constantly when I write. Every idea I have seems perfect, but once complete, it feels such a long way from what I had envisaged. There is always a moment of inspiration that begins a quest to write something, whether it is a post on this website, a short story, a novel or a personal piece. In most cases the idea enters my head as a flash of inspiration and I think I have the greatest imaginable concept. By the time I begin, it already seems flawed. With each step in the process I suspect that it fails to reach my expectations. So often I have aborted plans within the early stages when the voice of self-doubt gets too loud. Again, I look for a way of overcoming this noise. The best words I have written have been for occasions with a strict deadline. I couldn’t give up on a eulogy; there was a date, a time and a topic that wouldn’t wait. I couldn’t abandon it at first draft. I persisted. I got something down. I edited it. I improved it. I reread it. Eventually, I crafted what wasn’t good enough into something I was proud of. Whether this works every time, I am not sure. I have proven it enough times to believe, persistence might not make perfection, but it can deliver impressive results.

Each novel I write pays tribute to the marathon. I always plan each book out with 42 chapters, a reflection on the 42 kilometres of a marathon. Of course, a marathon’s route is fixed, but a novel changes course from the plan at every intersection. You know the distance you will travel, just not quite which roads you’ll be doing it along. As a result, the 42 chapters may reduce in half, or may double. While each kilometre of the marathon is a finite length, a chapter may have 10,000 words or it may have 10. More often than not though, you’ll see 42 chapters, and it won’t be coincidental.

I still have the thought of running a marathon in the back of my mind. Given the struggle I feel running just one kilometre, I suspect it will never come to fruition. Completing a novel told me that what we can do is only limited by our imagination, so I won’t completely rule it out just yet. If we can dream it, we can believe it and with enough work and persistence, we can eventually achieve it.