Parkrun result: 24.37 at Tooting Common, 6 degrees C
Words written: ????
I obsess over the little things.
I start every edition of this newsletter with runtimes, run conditions and number of words written. I run listening to music, not podcasts, because I thought it could free up my concentration and shave 10 seconds off my time. Reflecting on how to write, I wonder how to sit, when to take breaks. I’m like Dave Brailsford, the cycling coach who achieves big results by making lots of “marginal gains” such as athletes bringing their own pillow cases from home instead of relying on hotel ones.
So imagine my horror when I arrived at this week’s Parkrun and realised I’d forgotten to put on my running top and turned up instead in my pyjama top. “Don’t laugh!” I said to my girlfriend when I removed my heavy coat and clocked my error.
What would Brailsford do? He helped Bradley Wiggins win the Tour De France. He’d know how to master a 5K community run. But, after briefly considering running in just my shorts, I resigned myself to running in this long-sleeved, aerodynamically-untested, cotton top. With the run already obviously ruined, I ditched another "marginal gain." I listened to a podcast, not music. So James Holland and Al Murray discussing the Battle of Stalingrad were my soundtrack as I did three laps of Tooting Common. And... it went better than I expected. My time was about what I hoped for and my third best of six runs of this course. I thought music was a marginal gain. Turns out it was a marginal hindrance. Music wasn't slowing me down but it was making me enjoy running less. It left my head too full of thoughts. This podcast forced me to reflect on why the Germans divided their army and the importance of not overstretching supply lines. If there's a metaphor for running in that, I didn't reflect on it. I just kept going, with the podcast taking me out of myself just enough. I didn't stress over how the race was going in the middle of it. I finished the second lap actually looking forward to the last.
I didn't think of marginal gains while writing this week. The story I'm trying to tell is made up of a million tiny pieces, and I've yet to marshal any of them into a narrative. When that's done, I'll think about what pieces can go where, and which can be cut, to tease out the most compelling story there is. I've been reading the first ever biography of my subject, published in his lifetime in 1821 by his friend who was trying to defend him after what he euphemistically calls "controversy." The author tells the reader not to expect emotion or excitement because his subject is a scientist. "We cannot reasonably expect a drama in a philosophy lecture," he writes. I was so taken by this I dived back into my first chapter about my subject's early life – which I'll have to write before I come up with a proposal – and added it in. I trimmed some words and added in his comments about "controversy" to foreshadow what's to come. I lost track of how many new words I'd written, amid re-ordering the old ones.
But maybe that's a detail I can stop obsessing over