The Final Steps

On making it nearly all the way there.

Hi everyone!

This week, I’m thinking about some recent productivity challenges I did and wondering why I ran out of gas just before the end.

Will I even finish this post?!? Oooh, the suspense….

Hitting the Wall

I’ve run a couple of marathons. Long story as to how and why, but it wasn’t the smartest thing to do with my scoliosis-skewed biomechanics. I eventually developed chronic exertional compartment syndrome, which means that the fascia, or thin tissue that covers our muscles, did not expand along with my muscles. This chokes off the blood flow, creating pain and tingles whenever I run. Surgery leaves unsightly scars and only works about half the time. So, minus a few 20-minute jogs in the early 2010s, I’ve not run since my last 18-mile warmup for the Marine Corps Marathon in 2008.

All this to say: check with your doctor about your biomechanics before you undertake distancing running.

When prepping for the big race, we often talked about how to avoid “hitting the wall” — that point right around the 20-mile mark where you suddenly run out of gas. Your pace falls, the pain catches up with you, you might even have the runs, and essentially all that momentum and adrenaline that carried you 20 fucking miles vanishes. Every step hurts. Your brain just screams, “STOPSTOPSTOPSTOPSTOP.”

There are many ways to get through the wall. Some are long-term strategies of timing your hydration and nutrition right — when you should suck on your chocolate “GU,” or sugar-laden carb bomb, when you should drink water or endurance Gatorade with extra salt.

Other tactics are for immediate use. “Just run to the next street lamp,” you tell yourself. If you’re listening to music, “Just until this next song ends.” Just get to that fan, that sign, that water table, that med tent. And once you get there, tell yourself you’ll just get to that next street lamp, table, fan, the end of that next song.

I used this tactic even with some of our team workouts (I ran with Team-in-Training, which raises money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma society). Speed workouts in particular required that kind of thinking to take yourself out of the pain.

Hitting a wall while running 26.2 miles makes a ton of sense, physiologically and mentally. Most of us aren’t designed, especially with our more-than-ever sedentary lives, to hop up off the couch and bang out tens of miles at a time. (Though I know some people who can, and I both admire and, lovingly, hate their guts.)

But what does hitting the wall look like with our work? I often hit the wall with my writing, and I’m wondering what it might take to get through that.

Summer Challenges

I recently participated in two writing challenges. One is the popular #1000wordsofsummer, created by writer Jami Attenberg. You sign up for her newsletter and commit to writing 1,000 words every day for the first 14 days of June. Daily prompts offer encouragement from well-known writers, and there’s a Slack with over 6,500 people weighing in with their word counts, inspiration, goals, struggles.

The challenge has been going on for seven years, but this was the first time I joined. Overall, it was a very good experience. I finished the narrative outline of my novel that I had started in winter and then dropped when my journalism work became overwhelming. I even started a few potential short stories, one of which might turn into the one I workshop in July for the fiction class I’m taking.

I kicked butt for 13 days. One less, the mathematicians among you will note, than the challenge.

For the second challenge, my fellow journalist and friend decided to send out one pitch a day this week and invited me to do it along with her.

I could say a lot about pitching stories as a freelance journalist. For those of you who aren’t familiar, here’s a few points from Pitching 101:

• The pitch is a genre in itself. It’s your written elevator pitch for your story idea.

• It’s not easy to do, and you can easily spend hours perfecting it.

• Like a cover letter, you want to tweak your pitches to match the publication you want to land. “Spray and pray” rarely work. (What a fucking weird phrase.)

• Acceptance rates, unless you’re a famous journalist like David Grann or just famous like Beyoncé, are probably akin to baseball batting averages: if you land 40% of your pitches, you’re in Ted Williams territory.

• No pitches accepted, no work. No work, no pay. No pay, no bueno.

I loved the idea. I have at least 15 or so ideas just sitting in my “this could be interesting” list that I’ve never gotten around to sending. And you place 0% of the stories you don’t send.

So, for me, this offered an opportunity to clear my idea box and get the ball rolling on these ideas. Even if they didn’t land in the first publication I pitched, I could then tweak them to fit other pubs.

And, I was on top of it. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday — pitches sent.

And then came Friday.

Out of Gas

I hit the wall. Woke up late and groggy, partly because I had to take half a Valium when it hit 1 AM and I still hadn’t fallen asleep. Flat as a tire, I spent the early part of my morning (10 AM at this point), reaching out to my GI office because yet again my white blood cell count has plummeted out of nowhere. I needed to figure out whether to reschedule an injection I’m supposed to get next week. And I will apparently be referred to a hematologist, or blood doctor, because this yo-yo white count has been happening for about a year now, and I can no longer blame my previous medication since I stopped it.

Once all that was done, I thought about the pitches I could send. One would simply be a redirection of an earlier pitch that week that went to the wrong editor: simply a copy-paste and a new email address in the “To” field.

But I napped instead.

And when I woke up, I got lost in some YouTube rabbit hole. When I finally rallied, it wasn’t to pitch — I gave myself the excuse that late on Friday afternoon wasn’t a good time for editors, anyway — but to eat and take a walk. And when I got home, I’d write at least some of my 1000 words. Plenty of time.

The food and exercise wiped away a lot of my fatigue.When I returned home around 8 PM and had dinner, I could easily have tried to do at least 500 of my 1000 words. Or 250. Or 100. Or 50.

And I kept telling myself this, over and over.

Instead, I fell down another YouTube rabbit hole: this time, the absolutely charming “Ditch Guy” Dr. Roel Konijnendijk, lecturer in classics at Oxford, explaining why movie depictions of ancient warfare get essentially EVERYTHING wrong. (Spoiler alert: you need to dig ditches. Many ditches. Once you finish digging a ditch, start on your next one. Forget the Roman legions or the English longbow men as the ancient battlefield hero — it’s your ditch digger.)

Yet, with every click of yet another video about Man Charmingly Complaining About Movies Without Ditches, I kept thinking, “DO SOMETHING.”

But I couldn’t. Or wouldn’t.

Or shouldn’t?

My entire life, I’ve found myself easily accomplishing 90-99% of a task, and then everything deflates like a slashed tire.

With small tasks, this is because I feel so close to done that I take a break that turns into a sabbatical.

With ongoing, daily or long-term tasks like these two challenges, though, that’s not exactly the issue. I just seem to peter out — to hit that wall — before the end.

I’m not the only one, of course, and some people petered out long before I did with the #1000wordsofsummer. Some also started late. Even my friend who created the pitch challenge worked on a pitch but didn’t send it on Wednesday.

But I’m not comparing myself to others here. I’m just trying to understand this tendency I have.

What’s going on here?

I wish I knew. But, like all important things, I suspect there’s a combination of factors. Actual fatigue — a low white count not only makes you vulnerable but saps your energy. And maybe that’s the biggest one, and yet again I’m beating myself up for not having the energy and capacity of “everyone else” when I should just accept I can’t.

And maybe that’s why strategies like “write 100 words!” “Just order the thing on Amazon!” “Just copy-and-paste the email and put a different sender in the ‘To’ field!” don’t work.

Maybe, just maybe, there’s a deep resistance within me and my body to any attempt to finish these challenges because they already ask too much of me. With the pitch challenge, I immediately thought of the four-day week schedule, and all the studies showing how much better it is for everyone. Maybe my body was making its vote for that.

As for the #1000daysofsummer, maybe because I know I need to rally for a Monday article deadline, my body said no. Save yourself for that last push. (Speaking of, I had a day where I wrote about 1200 so-so words and haven’t gotten back to it since.)

Plus, I knew I’d write at least 1000 words today, here. Which I’m doing during another challenge: a 3-hour accountability block with two 25-minute sessions and one 50-minute one. And these words just poured out of me.

(And now I’m exhausted.)

I know I’ve talked about these struggles before.

Perhaps I think if I keep writing about it, a solution will come to hand.

In truth, though, just as you can’t predict if you’ll hit the wall during a marathon, I can’t predict when I’ll hit my working wall. There are many examples where I sit down and do the thing, no stopping. I don’t remember those moments, because they feel like the status quo — the way things should be, as opposed to the aberrations that need fixing.

I’d love to have a tidy conclusion here. Maybe hitting the wall is my status quo, and I can learn from it blah blah blah. Maybe we’re all like this, and it just highlights our ultra-capitalist world where if we’re not producing blah blah blah. Maybe First World Problems gratitude blah blah blah. Maybe I’m just a perfectionist and good enough blah blah blah.

Maybe all of those things. But for now, uncertainty.

Recommendations

Ditch guy is amazing. Highly recommend. 11/10.

Euro 2024. I love sports. Watching them, that is. Playing them is a hard no, because I have shit coordination and an aversion to injury. And I can mostly watch Euro without becoming a total stressball, because the love of my life Messi isn’t playing. (In 2022, when he won the World Cup to cement his obvious status as the football GOAT, had to text my friend Michele for live updates about the overtime and penalty kicks. Even hiding from the television in a different room, I covered my eyes. Only when they won did I start running around the house screaming so loudly the cats hid for about an hour. One of the happiest moments of my life.)

Since there’s no Argentina in the competition, I can declare with pride, “Allez les Blues!”

This Week in K-Pop: BTS (방탄소년단), “ON”

BTS’s third album in its Map of the Soul trilogy, Map of the Soul: 7, was supposed to cement their status as a global musical powerhouse by taking over the U.S. market. To promote it, they launched a PR powerhouse, including shutting down Grand Central Station to perform their single, “ON” on The Tonight Show.

On February 25, 2020.

Y’all know what happened a month later.

I was supposed to see them on my birthday in May in Atlanta. That didn’t happen.

They conquered America later that summer with English-language single “Dynamite.” But “ON” is a much better song, and the performance encompasses this idea both of hard work and of running out of gas.

Watch them collapse onto the floor once they’ve finished, and think about the amount of energy spent in the months and weeks beforehand to be able to go that hard for about 4 minutes.

Love y’all,

Sara