10. Tricks

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A few scary mutants among our human number hold a vast advantage of talent from the beginning and suffer no obscurity about its proper use. But do you personally know any of those people? For most of us, accomplishments of the creative body are accomplishments of incremental struggle—punctured every now and then by dislocating self-knowledge. This kind of long, mostly undifferentiated struggle is boring. We are simply not up to it. So, we have invented tricks.

If you’d looked 24-year-old Michael Owen in the eye at sunset on the northwestern end of the Santa Monica Bay bike path, pointed out to Malibu and said, “You’re going to finish your first Olympic-distance triathlon in the 81st percentile,” I would have received this as a fiction. It just wasn’t who I was.

How I became that person was hard work, sure, and catching the vision, and having a lot of lucky breaks in terms of life circumstance to balance out all of the unlucky musculoskeletal ones, and being loved, and abiding. In the broad sweep, these things are all real. But if you zoom in all the way down to their fractal edges, the virtues aren’t discernible anymore, because at the molecular level what they are made up of is tricks.

Tricks like:

Adjacency. When something you want is next to something you only want to want, it can get you close enough to take a shot. So: The bakery is next to the gym. The congenial adonis is next to the free lane of the pool. The practice of scrawling uncensored in a notebook every morning for years sets you up to write a fiction scene without overthinking it. Meditation is next to dreams and dreams are where your ideas get surprising. Biking and dancing trade off, neck and neck, in a cycling class where the music makes no distinction.

The bakery is next to the gym.

Number games. Number games are a reminder that not only are tricks useful, but also we are easily tricked. The way I count lengths in a mile-long swim defies concise explanation, but the illogic of it is just contorted enough to put the bigness of the task past a corner, out of view. As a writer, I have one number of daily significance: 500. Score 500 (by drafting that many words of the novel) and you’re free for the day (to vacuum, research, worry about not having an income, etc.; it’s more of, like, a spiritual freedom). Most simply, much athletic work fades back to something like ease when we become conscious, in breath and stride, of what I suppose is our oldest rhythm: one, two, one, two.

Music. Not everyone responds to music the same way, but if you do then you know its almost formulaic power to organize: your thoughts, your mood, your breath, your movement. I can’t advise that anyone try to run ten kilometers without some Beyoncé or Bach or Bruckner or David Byrne. (Literally these are the four best choices.)

In a few exalted cases, the small tricks add up to a bigger one, which is the moment when you temporarily forget who you are and what you’re doing. This is the relinquishing that makes up the first half of a leap. When you land—the other half—you’ve pulled off the greatest trick of all: changing from the person who couldn’t do that to the person who did.

Coming Tuesday: Woo woo.

Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.