I started double-running, doing a 'hard' session in the mornings, usually a fast run, or some speed work or fartlek, or a hill session. The evening run, ideally situated between the hours of 8 and 9 pm, was a 'recovery' run, designed to allow my body to gain fitness while actively healing itself.
On Mondays, I took a day of rest, and therefore on Tuesdays my fitness blossomed. In parallel, my writing blossomed, I wrote poems, short stories, and long blocks of incoherent text that I later deleted (and with a flourish, before I could think on it for even a moment, I clicked "Empty Trash" just to make sure the mental turds had been flushed away forever).
I read Delany's About Writing and Wendig's The Kick-Ass Writer. I followed Matt Fitzgerald's Brain Training for Runners. I wrote blog posts and posted them (even though no-one reads blogs anymore). I discovered that I am still a writer, but only by reconnecting with a thread I'd dropped when I started my PhD in my late 30s.
Back then, I had been 'writing every day'. If there's one rule I follow for being a writer, it's this one, and I'll be re-instating it, alongside my other rule, 'run every day'. You can throw in a rest day once in a while (one day per week maximum).
On rest days (from writing or running or both) I walked through blue-sky coronavirus days blissful in my ignorance of what was to come. I crested the top of Hut Hill and looked down over the city I now called home, its cluster of ambitious architectures stolid as a diorama, bearded in a deciduous/pine tromp l'oeil.
Those were days of delicious weather, of endless long walks that broke the law by two hours or more; of runs that rankled the civilians and new-fangled runners with their 'breathing'. There were club runners who advertised the fact, and who later were the subject of harrassing phone calls to the police. We know how Cummings feels.
Those were brilliant cool days when the wind wound down the empty country shoulderless roads like blissful rivers of calm. I wandered, running, lonely as a cloud down their shimmering surfaces, along in my world, in my remembered present, a city surveyed fresh and new, like a virgin, only for me.
