The acclaimed Japanese novelist, Haruki Murakami, once wrote, “Most of what I know about writing I’ve learned through running every day.” In his memoir, What I Talk about When I Talk about Running, Murakami, a marathon runner and triathlete, says that “ exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that’s the essence of running, and a metaphor for life — and …for writing.”
Although I am not a runner, I often think about Murakami’s metaphor when working out at the gym. Is there a connection, as he believes, between the extreme physical exertion demanded by long distance running (or any other sport) and writing? My experience, based on countless hours of exercise, suggests not. Rarely do I generate an idea for a novel while spinning at my maximum level of intensity on a stationary bike. Sometimes the title of a short story will come to me on a seated climb. All too often, what seems brilliant on the bike turns into gobbledygook on my computer screen, such as the time I titled a creative nonfiction piece “Zen and the Art of Jewish Baseball” while pedaling furiously.
Yet, the discipline, focus and endurance required to achieve athletic prowess does seem transferable to writing. Murakami is not the only acclaimed novelist to thinks so. The American writer John Irving says, “I think the discipline of wrestling has given me the discipline I have to write.” Given that Murakami and Irving both write hefty novels and are exceedingly prolific, I decided to try finishing my first novel while simultaneously mastering a difficult core exercise called the plank.
I had many opportunities at the local gym to hone the skill of planking, which entails holding up one’s body weight in a static push-up position for an extended period of time. (The world record is 3 hours, 7 minutes and 15 seconds.) In yoga, I practiced the plank as part of avinyasa in a flow sequence. In boot camp, I learned to hold the plank until my wrists were screaming. There wasn’t a muscle that escaped the reach of the plank. As I grew stronger, my instructor whose tattooed biceps rippled under his Lululemon T-shirt, lengthened the time period for the exercise, insisting that the plank is one of the safest ways to condition the total body — as long as you are not planking between two buildings.
But, did the discipline and stamina needed to hold a plank for increasingly longer time periods fuel the completion of my first novel? Was my focus and concentration transferable to the writing process? I considered these questions in detail as the instructor’s stop watch ticked slowly, very slowly. Then, one Saturday morning, as he counted down the final five seconds of an eight minute plank, I found clarity. As I hovered above the floor in the aerobics studio, oblivious to what was happening outside, I entered a place of enormous possibility. My outstretched body was no longer an imperfect form with a curved spine. I was a sleek, floating tabletop of marble. At least, that’s what my instructor said. And I believed him. I had entered the fitness dream in the same way that a novelist enters into a fantasy of her own creation.
John Irving put it this way: “I don’t have to say to you or anyone in our WRESTLING community that we are a small world unto ourselves and there is often a big difference in how much we love and understand each other and how little we’re understood or appreciated by people who spend their weekends watching basketball.”
Irving appears to be talking about the presumed boundary between wrestlers and non-wrestlers. But, more to the point, he identified an infrequently noted quality that athletes and novelists share: that mesmerizing ability to construct “a small world unto ourselves.” To borrow from another of Murakami’s illustrative metaphors, athletes and novelists seem to descend into a deep well. I know I did as I planked my way to the last sentence of my first book, working out regularly while working in.