Run, write

I just sat down at my desk, sweaty, back from a run. I got back home recently enough that it’s still too soon to shower, you know, when you’d keep sweating even after getting out of the shower. I ran back home faster than I set out, but not too fast, for fear of toppling over and letting all these sentences fall out of my head.

I’m not even talking about these sentences. I was excited about other sentences I’d thought of while running, and on my way home to write them all down I got to thinking about how this often happens—sentences spilling out of my head on runs, and rushing home to record them before forgetting. I’m at risk of losing that first batch of sentences while I take this detour to write about the meta phenomenon.

It happens often enough—a run greasing my brain to write—that it almost feels stupid I don’t run every day before writing. It’s not that I’ll love every sentence tomorrow, that they’ll all be perfect sentences, but that they flow. I don’t really believe in writer’s block (I’m more in the Susan Shapiro “plumber’s don’t get plumber’s block” camp), but I do know that some days it’s really flowing, and other days it’s slow and arduous. Why not coax the flow with a jog.

So why don’t I bring my phone and write down sentences while running? Yeah, maybe, but more often than not I like to run like a lost dog following the most interesting smells until I end up on a street I’ve never been down before.

I don’t know exactly what triggers the sentences that come to mind. Today I ran by a sentence on the sign outside the Krohn Conservatory that totally arrested me: “A living museum of botanical splendor.” The sign itself is beautiful, green and surrounded by plants, and the sentence really beckoned. But I don’t think that’s what tripped my writing wire, because it wasn’t for another few miles until I started thinking of my own sentences.

I did not, on my run, think of a concluding sentence.