Running up some steam

I'm in the Gold Coast at the moment. I came over to see my parents (it's Mum's birthday today) and to run in the Gold Coast Marathon - actually, the half-marathon.

At 6:20am on Sunday - a slightly chilly but beautiful Gold Coast morning - I lined up with seven thousand other crazies to run 21.09 kms. The temperature when I left the house was 14 degrees and all the runners around me were complaining about the cold, even though most were kitted out in cheap gloves and long sleeved-tops they planned to discard along the route.

There's always a great atmosphere before an event like that. Camaraderie sizzles around the crowd, bubbling over in smiles and cheers and shouted jokes. Excitement and nervousness abounds. Guys in funny costumes bounce around and make everyone laugh.

Then the gun goes off and the running starts. Laughter slowly slips away. By the fourteen k mark I wasn't cracking quite so many smiles, or waving as enthusiastically to the lovely people lining the route and cheering. In fact it was really starting to hurt. I was wishing I'd trained a WHOLE lot more than I did. And I started to wonder if there was some comparison I could make to writing.

Too obvious? Writing like running? Actually, I was thinking that writing was like running several marathons, not just a half of one. Currently, I'm re-writing a story I wrote a couple of years ago. For the fourth time. Will it be finished after the current re-write? I don't know. The likelihood is that I'll strap on my running shoes once more and re-write it all over again after that.

Sometimes writing hurts. Especially, I think that re-writing sometimes hurts. When a long enough period of time has elapsed from when you wrote the words in the first place, and you can look at it with slightly more objectivity than before, then you can start to 'kill those darlings' and take out sentences, paragraphs or even characters that don't progress the story, no matter how dear to your heart they are.

The trick is just to keep your legs - or your fingers on the keyboard - pounding towards the finish line, no matter how much you feel like stopping. But having said that, I don't think I'll be running another half marathon. It's too hard on the old joints. From now on I'll stick to marathon writing instead. Much better all around!