First things first: NEXT WEEK, June 16, I have the great good fortune of being in conversation with the wonderful, lovely Sonia Feldman about her novel Girl’s Girl at Books Are Magic in Brooklyn. Come out! Cheer for Sonia! She was once upon a time my student and I will likely cry but I promise she is very wise and it will be lots of fun. if you are not in Brooklyn, Girl’s Girl is available where books are sold!
(Harry is not in this post; i just like including photos of him)
My favorite running influencer, @runnningcoachmegan, is really into polarized training. 34% I do not love @runningcoachmegan. This is likely 67% because she reminds me of myself. She’s intense, bordering on abrasive. She likes to say (I do not like to say this) I’m going to get so much hate for this, and then proceed to give what is often pretty innocuous advice. She goes on Strava (I have never been on Strava and do not intend to; it seems to be like Instagram except you post your runs, the distances and pace and then post it for your “followers”?). @runningcoachmegan looks at random people’s times and distances and then reaches out to them and tells them what they’re doing wrong.
Hypothetically, if I could see how much time my students were spending every day inside their drafts, would I intervene? (my body’s immediate response to this idea was, absolutely not).
But @runningcoachmegan is also in her forties, a mom of three, and has broken three hours in the marathon: the algorithm has decided I should listen to her and I have tried some nights when I can’t sleep (of course @runningcoachmegan says, particularly, for us, ladies over forty, regular, consistent sleep is a necessity).
Something else @runningcoachmegan is very aggressive about is polarized training, meaning, your easy runs should feel easy. Your hard runs should feel hard. Three guesses which of these I struggle with.
My app, with whom I’m on a break, recommends my easy runs be 7:50/mile or slower. I’ve never used a heart rate monitor (@runningcoachmegan would be horrified by this), but I imagine that my app thinks, based on its vague knowledge of my speed more broadly, that 7:50/mile or slower is a relatively easeful pace. These runs, says @runningcoachmegan, are the key to successful marathon training. Your body has to rest sufficiently to hit the speeds you need to hit on speed days.
I cannot, do not ever, do my easy runs at the assigned pace.
I have no idea @runningcoachmegan’s qualifications, but she’s not the only person I’ve heard say this about how the easy runs should feel easy. I’m trying to be more elastic and expansive in my thinking and my training, and I’ve been trying more to do this (can you tell I’ve also been doing Yoga with Adriene, who always brings out my mushiest, most self-help adjacent impulses?). I’m only doing easy runs right now.
Someone asked last time how I know my pace if I don’t wear a watch and I’m not sure how to answer that question. I’ve been running close to every day for thirty years. In my body, if I’m running a 6:30/mile I just sort of know. It feels hard but sustainable. It has something to do with the tenor of the pain (that isn’t really pain but just a pushing, pressing, underlying sense that maybe we should stop this). My body would prefer I slow down when I’m running a 6:30/mile, but mostly not like, I have to immediately stop. Underneath the desire to stop is the sort of thrill that I am pushing, trying, the sense that, this is hard but conquerable and that part of it feels great.
What my body finds both pleasing and more sustainable is 7:18-ish. This is, for me, not easy but not hard. I want to keep going but also that underlying thrill of I am working hard. Slower than that I get anxious. 7:50-ish I know is 7:50-ish because it feels plodding, my mind wanders, I’m desperate to go faster, speed up, stretch my legs out, but have to lean back, ease off. In the park, people pass me, and (here, again, a revelation) I do not like to be passed.
My favorite detail in Adelle Waldman’s The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P, a book I generally found charming, is how perfectly specific Nathaniel’s mile times are, that he recounts them to us as he runs (I think) through Prospect Park. I don’t remember them exactly. They’re all well over eight minutes, in my head. I lost the book and just tried to look it up online as if somehow people are out there on the internet more than a decade after the book came out discussing this made up character’s made up mile times, but, appallingly, I am perhaps the only person still thinking about this.
There is no such thing as a slow mile time, say other of the influencers, (@runningcoachmegan would likely never say this), and of course, in my heart, I know that this is true. But, if you are a young man, trying to impress people, sharp and funny and all these other things, there is something particularly delicious to me about this (pretend) man documenting a bunch of 8-ish minute miles.
We all know Nathaniels. They are the sorts of boys who seem not to even comprehend they’re just people, because they went to Harvard, or, like, because even though they weren’t particularly attractive to women in the wider pool of being human, in the specific pool of being a human who wants to be a writer, who’s at a fancy college, they’ve acquired an outsized sense of their own attractiveness. Their egos are enviable (though also, when they get to their forties, more embarrassing). Their arrogance can often be mistaken for talent.
Running, they are proudly plodding, chuffed they’re out there, mentioning casually at the bar on a Sunday, that 5k they just hopped in. They wear sweatbands on their heads, and I sprint past them and am glad for it. For many years—and I’m not sure I’ll ever again have access to pleasure this pure—I sprint past them with a double running stroller, my two children cheering, laughing, kicking their legs as we did.
And here, of course, is the blow, for me, who wants to be sort of shitty to the Nathaniels; they have egos in grad school, at bars, at book parties; my ego often hides, but I let her rage in Prospect Park. There are so many things I’ve done and do that I’m not proud of, but pushing till I puke, ie, working constantly, obsessively, sleeping less than everybody, to try to be better, is a thing I let myself sometimes feel chuffed about.
As previously discussed, I am 78% of the time that 80 pound thirteen-year-old, pressed against the wall of the high school building as the senior kids run by and cheer, ridiculous and scared and small. I imagine, actually, that this is 48% what most Nathaniels are. But, running, for me, is not unlike a book party for a Nathaniel: in that particular pond, I have a little power. It feels good to show it off.
Polarized training, though, says @runningcoachmegan, ie, public plodding: is working to be better, getting even more powerful. But it’s working to be better by easing the fuck off.
I think a lot about why people don’t finish novels. Because I teach this class to try to help people finish novels. Because so many of my students are such wonderful writers, hardworking, diligent, smart. And something I believe and stand by is that to finish a novel, you have to spend at least some of the writing time being and feeling bad at it. Your ego can and will suffer. You have to be uncomfortable, ease off, let people in sweatbands pass you, be embarrassed, plod.
For a long time, this was the sort of writer that I felt I was and always would be, a plodder, an 8-ish minute miler, not least because the Nathaniels of the world have always sort of hated me (could it be, because I often don’t like them, and/or because, like @runningcoachmegan, we see, in one another, the worst parts of ourselves?).
My sentences and thinking felt neither sleek nor fast nor good enough for the Nathaniels. The people they thought were sleek and fast and good were so different from me—like I thought I had to somehow morph from elephant into cheetah. And I’d sit there furious, petulant, stomping my huge, heavy feet.
But then, as elephant, I could just quietly keep working. My ego was a tiny speck of nothing (and it’s not fair, of course, to blame this on the Nathaniels; let’s blame lots of things, systems and structures, also just my constitution, being some dumb kid from Florida who mostly read James Patterson and watched Lifetime movies growing up), so I just put my head down and I wrote what seemed most interesting to me. I wrote so many sentences that were legitimately awful, clunky, never ending. Non-sensical, except I loved the rhythm or the sound.
They started to make more sense. I kept plodding. I got very good at editing.
@runningcoachmegan says another essential part of training for a marathon is getting used to failure. Make it your best friend, @runningcoachmegan says. One of my favorite things about running is how often it doesn’t matter your ego, what you want or hope you could be. Your body just calls bullshit. You were too busy trying to pass some guy who didn’t even know you passed him on a random Tuesday and couldn’t just suck it up and stay at easeful, so then you were too slow when you needed to go faster, so you’re not fast enough now.
This is also largely true of writing books. You can’t bluster your way through them. Well, you can, I’ve read some of those novels, but the bluster will be obvious and hollow and make certain of your readers feel empty and sad.
But to make something as @runningcoachmegan would say, worthy of the pursuit, I’d say it calls for plodding. It calls for sucking, being easeful, messy, afraid and uncertain, as often as it calls for pushing till you puke.
