Electric Surges, How Time Is Divided & The Nature of Running

Kenneth A. Atchity, a screenwriter's agent, a journalistic writer, a book reviewer and former university professor, talks in his book A WRITER'S TIME: MAKING THE TIME TO WRITE about how Time on projects is divided into three parts:

Beginning Time, Middle Time, and End Time.

(Atchity's current URL: http://www.thewriterslifeline.com/ )

(See also Chip Scanlan's Poynter column with Atchity reference and dealing with how to meet deadlines: http://poynteronline.org/column.asp?id=52&aid=32705 )

Each succeeding chunk of time is "faster" than the one before. Beginning Time is often long, drawn out, sometimes laborious and filled with much uncertainty.

It is important to pay attention to how these chunks of time progress when you are working on projects and what lessons they can teach you to use in the future.

As the semester draws to a close, you have all reached End Time when things start to move faster--although some uncertainty lingers.

I ran a half marathon on Saturday in Nashville on an undulating, somewhat hilly course. Running hard always offers me a thrilling and challenging opportunity to ponder the nature of time with its appearance of actually having a beginning, a middle, and an end.

And running offers me a chance to consider deeply what my body, mind, and spirit can do in concert. It offers moments to delight in the physicality of my body moving through space.

This happens simultaneously with the chance to forget all of this completely:

I consider nothing but the coolness of the water I have poured over my head after accepting it in a waxed paper cup and from the hands of a stranger, a volunteer on the side of tree-lined street filled with cheering on-lookers and country music bands and rock and roll bands in Nashville's Belmont neighborhood.

My half-marathon goal had been to break or make 2:00 although I was uncertain how the hills and any sunny weather might influence me. And what effect would there be from my having run the St. Louis half marathon 13 days earlier?

I also had not factored in what the cheering, smiling crowds and the bands all along the way would do. They helped to make up for the sun that came on strong and hot after the first hour, by 8 a.m.

http://www.tennessean.com/apps/pbcs.dll/gallery?Site=DN&Date=20070428&Category=SPORTS&ArtNo=704280803&Ref=PH&Params=Itemnr=8 (Photo of Buddhist monk)

I finished at 2:01:18, pretty good for somebody who is 55 and who resumed regular running 18 months ago after a hiatus of decades.

I did beat by one minute and a half, Eddie George, a Heisman Trophy winner and the former Tennessee Titans running back who no doubt is not someone I could reckon with on a football field.

http://www.tennessean.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070429/SPORTS12/704290389&theme=CMM

Besides that, when I finished I did not know that my former Mizzou master's student Ryan Wallace of Kentucky and Birmingham had finished the half-marathon way ahead of me at 1:44:33.

Ryan is writing an article on the Country Music Half-Marathon and Marathon for SOUTHERN LIVING magazine where he is now a copy editor. The story will appear in next April's issue.

I found this out by happenstance when I saw Ryan last night at Bound'ry Restaurant near Vanderbilt as I was eating with a group of running women from Columbia, including my children's pediatrician. I had seen a man who looked familiar but I was over in a corner and could not get out to look at him closer. But he came over, with a big smile and hearty handshake: there was Ryan to say hello.

Near the end of the run in downtown Nashville--as I went uphill at the 12 mile mark and before I would speed up as I went downhill across a bridge over the green Cumberland River and then sweep down into the finish line chutes of bright yellow that surrounded the Tennessee Titans football field--I thought of a quote sent to me Friday night by one of my running master's students, Bea Wallace.

I offer the quote to you as you approach your finishing "kick" of the semester:

"It came like electricity, it came from every fiber, from his fingertips to his toes. It came as broad waters come through a gorge. He called on it all." --Norman Harris on Jack Lovelock's finishing kick at the 1936 Olympics, 1500 meter run

Then Bea added: "Tomorrow morning you will call for that electricity, and it will come. All the best luck..."

To each of you, I say the same as you finish your semester of hard work--important work that is emotional as much as physical, intellectual, and spiritual in the fullest sense of those words.

BH