Form

July

I haven’t run since May – a combination of busy schedule and clammy weather has put me off – but yesterday I decided it was time to get back in my running shoes. I may have been inspired by my crazy partner, who completed the 100-kilometre Race to the Stones trail along the Ridgeway at the weekend in thirty-degree heat. How hard can it be to take a little two-kilometre trot around the village of a Thursday afternoon?

Quite hard, it turns out. My legs felt heavy and my lungs not big enough. I had to keep slowing to a walk and wiping the sweat from my eyes. I kept telling myself that the quicker I went, the sooner it would be over, and tried not to think what it would be like to keep going for another 98K and fifteen odd hours.

As a lapsed runner, I have lost my form. I no longer understand instinctively how to hold my body loosely and land on my feet so that I optimise speed and comfort. There are whole dissertations written about cadence and heel strike and lumbo-pelvic-hip complex but all I know is that I am out of practice as a runner and everything feels harder than it should.

I am also out of practice of writing. Although I commit weekly to creating The Writing Path, I have fallen behind on other projects. I’m nervous that when I pick these up again, I’ll find the experience as painful and awkward as going for a jog around the block. We often talk about writing as a practice, a disciplined process that needs to be performed regularly, as if we’re in training for a literary marathon – does this mean our writing muscles atrophy when they are not regularly used? Will I return to my novel weak and out of condition? Will all my usual elements of style, voice, flow have drained away through lack of engagement?

My partner tells me the key to tackling a long-distance trail run is energy management. Form, in this sense, is the perfect culmination of fitness and recovery. On event day, participants of the Race to the Stones needed to have trained hard enough that they had the strength, technique and stamina to make it all the way to Avebury Stone Circle.* But they also needed to have rested in the days and weeks leading up to the event in order to restore their muscles and build their reserves for the long, demanding trek ahead of them.

So I’m thinking of my writing form differently. Yes, I’m out of practice, but perhaps I’ve simply been conserving energy, letting the fibres and sinews of my imagination reconnect and toughen up. Perhaps I’m in peak condition to get to the finish line.

This weekend I aim to test this theory with a burst of creative endurance. My partner explains that the other trick to finishing an ultramarathon is intense snacking, and this too feels like an inspiration.

* In fact, the race ends, rather miserably, by taking the runners up to the stones and then making them double-back and go a further two kilometres and cross the finish line in a nearby farmyard.

Look at the form on this one!