A few months ago, a beloved former student offered to get me a bib for the New York marathon. I last ran it in 2017. It is my favorite race. Now, brace yourself because this will be shocking: I can get obsessive, scarily competitive when I train for and run a marathon. I think I once wrote here about falling pretty spectacularly in the pouring rain and pitch black at 430 in the morning training for another marathon; finishing my workout, before coming home to realize I’d lost a good portion of the skin on both my thumbs and my left elbow, the palms of both my hands.
I go stretches, often years, not wearing a watch, trying very hard not to think too much about how much or little I run each week, to keep it a space where I feel pleasure, let my mind wander. I try very hard not to make it a space where I constantly take account, obsess. Sometimes small children are running in the park, and I have to sprint a bit more quickly just to show them I am faster. It’s a place where I feel strong and I like that feeling quite a lot.
But then that strong-feeling is, of course, one of the many reasons I love training. The effect is intense; the rewards gradual but real and felt. It hurts often. Sometimes you throw up. You’re in your body, feel its limits, strength, the ache of all that work. There is so much fizz and fuzz in daily life but sprinting, the fourth, for instance, of six one-mile sprints in 90-degree heat has an incredible ability to shut down whatever might be whirring, churning in your brain.
My student very kindly, generously offered to get me the bib but then I hadn’t heard from her. It was such a kind offer. She’s a busy grownup. I didn’t want to overreach. But time was passing, and I needed to start training. Without reaching out to her I downloaded a new running app, started amping up my miles and my speed. Are you signed up for the marathon or not, my husband said, when I came home from a particularly brutal 12 miles.
I like to run, I said, maybe I’ll just train indefinitely.
It’s my ontological marathon, I said to my friend the next day on the phone.
I often think of the ways running is a metaphor for everything, but maybe a better way to say that is the practice of running, a practice I’ve engaged in, thought about, wrestled with and been compulsively addicted to for coming up on thirty years, is almost always instructive, it essentializes in its clarity and structure something that in the rest of our lives can feel murky, elastic, much less clear.
Last summer I had two notebooks, one was titled The Small Book and one was titled The Big Book. I had this idea that I wanted to see, in The Small Book, what the smallest possible amount of time and space could show me about what life might be—think, maybe, Giacometti, getting rid of the tree to see the leaf, the body to see the head, etc.,; Woolf said there was nothing Cézanne couldn’t say with an apple; and also, I was thinking, in The Big Book, about scope and scale—what you had to cover large swathes of time to see and understand—think Joan Mitchell triptychs and quadriptychs, walking up close to them, stepping back, then closer, on and on.
I was interested in ambition, a word about which I’ve always felt profoundly complicated, how maybe I, how maybe lots of us, have focused on the small not only because I love it (I do love it) but because the world has taught me it’s all I’m capable of. I was interested in breaking out of whatever had come to feel like was my and my work’s place (an indeterminate idea but that’s what it felt like in my head).
I’ve spent most of this year working on what I had vaguely thought of as The Big Book. (it got a title a long time ago; now, calling it The Big Book, feels ridiculous, but there we are). But then, I had a long talk with my friend this week and realized The Big Book might also have The Small Book inside it, that in returning to everything I’ve thought and learned about the granular, the domestic, interpersonal, I might find the bits I need to get it to the end.
I realized too one of the things that was impeding my seeing through to what the book needed was something that I’ve said a thousand times to students, that it’s still only a book, that all books are so much smaller than the life we’re trying to fit in. This is also, of course, how you finally make it better, to focus fully your attention on the book it is, instead of all the other books you at various points thought it might be. It shifts what might have felt a long time like a bunch of sketches into the rich and layered space of paint.
The idea of training for a marathon indefinitely is thrilling to me in about a thousand different ways and also it’s absurd. Bodies age and do, in fact, have limits (even typing that makes me a little bit insane). I once had all sorts of grand delusions about what I might accomplish running, but, even with my watch turned back on, training started, I’m still middle-aged. One of my favorite things about running now as opposed to running when I started is that the thing that I loved most used to be winning. Now my favorite part is by myself and quiet, sweating, no one talking to me, that emptied brain and worn out body feeling that comes from working hard.
I finally last week reached out to my student, and, again, kind and lovely, got confirmation this week that I get to run the race. I felt elated, obviously, also a little scared. What if I get hurt and don’t do it? What if I do it and its terrible, my slowest yet? Where is the danger, risk, I wrote this morning while the kids were sleeping in my little novel notebook. Books need reach and push, ambition, but you should also feel, in moments, a more granular and terrifying thrum of yearning, ache inside your belly and your brain. It should feel risky, high stakes, even as—partially because—it’s also likely smaller than you hoped.