WHY WRITERS RUN: Racking up mile after mile is difficult, mind-expanding, and hypnotic ...
Racking up mile after mile is difficult, mind-expanding, and hypnotic—just like putting words down on a page.
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/11/why-writers-run/415146/
"From Homer’s The Iliad to A.E. Housman’s poem about an athlete dying young, there’s no shortage of literary depictions of running. “Move, as the limbs / of a runner do,” writes W.H. Auden. “In orbit go / Round an endless track.” There’s also a long tradition of writers leaving their pens or screens behind to stride along roads, tracks, and trails. Jonathan Swift, according to Samuel Johnson, would “run half a mile up and down a hill every two hours” during his 20s. Louisa May Alcott ran since her youth: “I always thought I must have been a deer or a horse in some former state,” she wrote in her journal, “because it was such a joy to run.” Despite this correlation, The New Yorker’s Kathryn Schulz recently lamented how few books capture the mindset of the runner in descriptive terms, citing Thomas Gardner’s new collection of essays Poverty Creek Journal as the best exception.
Freedom, consciousness, and wildness: Running offers writers escape with purpose. When confronted with “structural problems” in her writing as the result of a “long, snarled, frustrating and sometimes despairing morning of work,” Joyce Carol Oates would ease her writing blocks with afternoon runs. For Oates and many other writers, running is process and proves especially useful for the type of cloistered, intensive work they do. But in many ways running is a natural extension of writing. The steady accumulation of miles mirrors the accumulation of pages, and both forms of regimented exertion can yield a sense of completion and joy. Through running, writers deepen their ability to focus on a single, engrossing task and enter a new state of mind entirely—word after word, mile after mile.
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Why do writers so often love to run? Running affords the freedom of distance, coupled with the literary appeal of solitude. There’s a meditative cadence to the union of measured breaths and metered strides. Writers and runners both operate on linear planes, and the running writer soon realizes the relationship between art and sport is a mutually beneficial one. The novelist Haruki Murakami, a former Tokyo jazz-bar manager who would smoke 60 cigarettes a day, started running to get healthy and lose weight. His third novel had just been published, but he felt his “real existence as a serious writer [began] on the day that I first went jogging.” Continual running gave him the certainty that he could “make it to the finishing line.”
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After my college running days ended, I chose sprints over distance, gained some pounds, and looked more like a fullback than a half-miler. Yet I missed those long, aimless runs, when the act of running was one of discovery, not dictated by the set distance of a track. I now run down open rural roads, and, against good sense, straddle the center yellow lines that yarn to the horizon. Since I’ve returned to distance running, I’ve changed the way I think about writing. Writing exists in that odd mental space between imagination and intellect, between the organic and the planned. Runners must learn to accept the same paradoxes, to realize that each individual run has its own narrative, with twists and turns and strains.
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I like this read. I hope you do, too!
= new reply since forum marked as read
just experience the feeling of peace of being alone and ..... free. Horses run for the pure joy of it - I completely understand why.
I enjoyed that read. 
