Half
This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Resistance. The whole series is here. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.
A grace of athletic competition is finitude. Almost any race course has a prescribed distance, a starting line you cross with everyone else and a finish line you hope to. There’s usually a cutoff time, and you have to beat that if you want your result to count. In a triathlon, you finish three different times—one for each way of moving—and each of the first two adds heft to the notion that you might actually pull it all off. The third and final finish is a fervent demarcation: No one runs a single step more than it takes to slow down to a shuffle. The last molecules of air before that line spark with victory; the first ones after it shove victor straight to earth.
Into this formula enters the half. The half-marathon, the half-Ironman (branded as an Ironman 70.3, for its total mileage). Anyone who has ever made it halfway through a workout knows this is a mixed blessing: You’ve ruled out failure to launch, but fatigue compounds, and however tired you are now is less than half as tired as you’ll be. So if you look at it a certain way, doing half of something extremely hard and then stopping, on purpose, is almost easy. All the “look what I did,” with none of the “look what’s left.”
For me this is a whole season of halves. Early in the year I ran a wet, wintry half-marathon in Central Park. On Sunday I’ll do another one, the NYC Half, said to be one of only two annual occasions for which they close down Times Square. Mid-May will bring the Brooklyn Half, a tediously routed affair that ends with people face-planting on the boardwalk in Coney Island. And then, on June 9, to close out the last half of age 40, I’ll drive to Maryland for an Ironman 70.3. The longest triathlon I’ve done up till now was half as long as that one, and that one will be just half as long as the one to follow, in July.
Suitably terrified, I’ve been training on the Hudson Valley Rail Trail, which runs near my boyfriend’s house. I join it at a place called Love Road and run for half my intended distance, then turn around. Done this way, the first half is subtly uphill; the last half is down. I like it because once you’re through the first half, you’ve created a logistical obligation to finish.
I wish these mechanics could apply in other areas of life, like novel-writing, which more than once I’ve heard compared to a marathon. I understand the reasoning, but writing a novel is nothing like running a marathon. Writing a novel is more like putting on your Crocs and going out for a casual walk, then not returning home for several years. It may be that you can’t come back until you’ve found a place whose existence is rumored but unconfirmable by any third party—on the other side of the country, or on the moon, or in a part of your heart that’s invisible from every point on earth except one, and that only every 130 years. Writing is athletic, but it often lacks the consolation of preordained constraints. It has no halves. You’re there already, or you aren’t yet.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.