Why keep going when you could just stop?

Running and writing are hard. I manage to do one and not the other.

Parkrun result: 25.55 at Crystal Palace, rainy and windy, 11 degrees C

Words written: 0

Why keep going when you could just stop? I thought that the handful of times I ran in the 2010s and either stopped or just walked. Since taking up running in earnest in 2020, I’ve thought it only twice: once while running up yet another hill during my half marathon in October and again during Parkrun on Saturday. It was my first Parkrun since the half marathon. I’d taken time off, gotten ill, somehow stayed ill for a fortnight, and so was facing the hilliest 5k course unprepared. And it starts uphill. So with nearly the whole distance ahead of me, I was slogging up Crystal Palace Park’s muddy inclines and already losing the will to do it. And to think this was the run that was meant to inaugurate my new regimen. I’d told myself that, each week, I was going to run several times and write at least 500 words but, as I began to climb the path around the lake and the old Crystal Palace Bowl concert venue, I just thought: why bother?

I’ve wanted to write a book – to publish something acclaimed, prize-winning - since long before I ever ran. But the prizes of running have so far eluded me.  No three-hour marathons – no marathons at all in fact – no sub 20-minute 5Ks and only medals awarded for participation. But I’ve kept doing it. I was seduced by a running app, which taught me to always leave the house three times a week, start small and go gradually farther. It gave me a routine before it gave me a challenge. It meant running embedded itself in my life before it got hard. I’ve run ever since.

So on Saturday I dragged myself to Crystal Palace Park, in the cold, to run up a hill. But I hadn’t dragged myself to the library; to pour over old, otherwise-unbothered volumes, trying to research the man I want to write about. Zero words this week. Zero books opened. Why bother? You’re running in the cold and wind just behind a man pushing a baby in a pram, who, to be clear, is in front of you. As you’ve consistently demonstrated recently, you won’t die if you don’t try to write a book, so why do you have to try and run?

I didn’t listen to this voice on Saturday because I’d managed to ignore it before. In the last miles of October’s half marathon, my calves were on fire as I went up and down hills in the Hertfordshire countryside which, having glanced at the 2D map of the course, I’d previously thought to be flat. Other runners were outpacing me by walking uphill and running downhill. You could walk too if only you didn’t care about running it in sub 1.50! I don’t know why I ignored the voice that time. Maybe because I’d trained for 12 weeks. Maybe because I’d run almost 700 miles in the year to that point. I ran the remaining three miles and finished in 1.49. On Saturday, I had the mental ammunition to fight the voice off.

I kept going up the hill, relying on my technique of never looking ahead but looking down to just the ground in front of my feet, counting to 30 over and over again, rather than looking up and seeing how far away the crest is. The first half of the course is awful. But the second half is something glorious. You cross the very top of the hill – running really teaches you exactly where the very top of a hill is – and know it’s now literally all downhill. I’ve never been good at controlling my speed. But, crossing that point, I hit the highest gear I could find and felt like I was gliding along asphalt and soggy leaves. I remember one thing about the people alongside me: the man with the pram wasn’t one of them. I kept going, down the short bit that’s so steep I had to arch my back to not fall over, down the dirt path that was waterlogged and brown after the rain, and then I leant forwards, like an actor taking a bow, as I tried to sprint the last, short uphill stretch. I finished in 25.55. It’s the slowest time since I took Parkrun up again 15 months ago, but it’s faster than any time I ran when I did it a handful of times, in another part of the country, more than a decade ago. That’s my spin on a pretty average run and I’m sticking to it.

This was my third time running this course. “Downhill” wasn’t an abstract concept when I was at my lowest because I’d done it, I’d seen Shangri-La and run it with my own tired legs. The route to a finish line felt a lot farther away the last time I sat in a library and did research for my book, way back in November. The old books’ musty smell gave me flashbacks of sitting in libraries at uni with no clear plan of how to tackle the essay I had to write.

I’ve learned to love the process of running but I’m nowhere near loving the process of writing 80,000 words about a man who died in 1823. And that’s why I can’t see the finish line. 

So I’m going to try and learn to love writing the book as a process. I went for lots of short runs before I did long runs. I can’t write three short books next week to train myself at writing a long one. But I can chop it up into smaller pieces. No more planning to spend the day in the library every two weeks. Next week, I’ll write in three short bursts, just like those three little runs I started off doing in 2020. Three short bursts, regardless of whether they’re the literary equivalent of a sub 20-minute 5K or a collapse at the bottom of a hill.

Time to get good at doing it, before I try to get good at doing it well.

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