Run With the Idea

Published by James C. Bassett at April 4, 2025

The Running

And so, I began to run. And as I had always expected, I despised every second of the misery it induced.

The first day my girlfriend took me running, I was certain my heart would explode after the first 100 yards; at a quarter mile, I was sure my lungs and heart were quaking with enough force to shatter my ribs and burst forth from my chest like the cute little monster in Alien.

By the time she returned me to our home, after a total distance of one full mile, I wished that they would, just to put an end to my suffering.

Very gradually, over the course of many agonizing months, I built up my endurance to the point that I could run 5K without fervently wishing for death with every step. For several years, knowing it was “good for me,” I continued to run (irregularly), and a few times even made it beyond 5K, once all the way to 10K (6.2 miles!).

I had in mind an arbitrary goal of regularly running 10 kilometers, but it never seemed at all likely; I most certainly never saw any point in ever attempting more than that.

At one point, after an extended period of not running at all, for several weeks I was running two miles or so every other day and barely surviving that.

I felt restless and overwhelmed in my personal life then, and anxiety one day prompted me to move, and I felt a foreign desire to run — and to run far. It was something — the one thing in my life, it seemed then — over which I actually had control. So one day I increased my paltry two miles to four; two days later I ran six miles — and two days after that, somehow, more than 10.

(Ten miles all at once, without stopping. I still don’t know how I managed to increase from two to ten miles in a week with no training or preparation. Yet, somehow, having done it once, it became my typical run, eight to ten miles, depending on my route, every other day. From one month to the next I increased my total distance from less than 22 miles to almost 140. It probably wasn’t medically advisable, and I certainly would not advise anyone else to be so foolhardy.)

And that’s when the magic happened.

No, not the magic where the agony vanished. Unfortunately, that still never happens until about 20 minutes after I stop running. (It’s like the old Vaudeville joke: “Why are you hitting yourself on the head with that hammer?” “Because it feels so good when I stop!”)

I remain entirely unacquainted with the so-called “runner’s high.” But somehow on that first long run I reached a point where running became, well, almost automatic. The misery remained, but it receded, somehow, from my awareness. And it felt as though my body was running all by itself, without my direction, without me making a conscious effort, forcing it to run.

There is a childhood game where you stand in a doorway and press the backs of your hands outward against the door frame for 30 seconds — and when you step into the room your arms seem to float upward of their own accord.

Running became like that — when I ran, my legs became so enslaved to running that walking, or even standing still, seemed almost to take more effort than continuing to run. My body had become so inured to the rhythm of running that it felt as though changing would make things worse.

(Remember how when you were a child and you ran down a steep hill, picking up speed, going faster and faster until you were scared that you might tumble and hurt yourself — but you knew that if you tried to stop running you’d tumble for sure? Yeah, like that, in a way.)

Okay, this still was not the magic.

The Magic

The real magic was this: when my body reached that point where it no longer needed my mind to make it run — my mind shut down.

My mind shut down to the point that it took me some while to become aware that it had shut down — that it was no longer so excruciatingly aware of my agony, no longer counting breaths or steps, no longer telling me, “Okay, don’t worry about making it all the way home, just concentrate on making it to that next light pole — surely we can make it that far…”

Instead, for an unknown amount of time, my mind had been thinking nothing. Absolutely nothing at all. It had completely emptied, as though I had been asleep. Like highway hypnosis while driving, I suddenly realized that I had no memory of the last several minutes, no idea of how I had come to where I was.

That emptiness meant that it could be filled — by anything.

And what filled it was a story.

New Stories

Specifically, what came into my mind was a new idea, and once I became aware of it — once my mind returned from its own private Idaho — I started exploring it consciously. And over the remaining course of my run it became a fully realized plot. A story.

In my first week of running longer distances, I came up with three new stories — three completely worked-out plots.

Obviously, I can’t guarantee one complete plot each time I run. But even if I just end up thinking about an existing idea, developing a plot or a dialogue sequence, nailing down a character’s voice or background, inventing a transition or even just a turn of phrase, it’s worthwhile.

It’s productive in a way that sitting at the computer and trying to be productive — trying to force my creativity — is not.

Extreme explorer Erling Kagge, who spent 50 days walking alone to the South Pole, wrote of this experience in Silence: In the Age of Noise that “Nature spoke to me in the guise of silence. The quieter I became, the more I heard.”

Beyond the obvious external meaning, if you can shut off all the constant extraneous daily mental blather, it becomes that much easier to hear your subconscious, your inner creative mind.

Finding Niksen

Like the Italian concept of dolce far niente, “the sweetness of doing nothing,” the Dutch have a concept they call niksen, which means, not necessarily doing nothing but doing something without a specific purpose. It’s not idleness, as such, but rather doing something just for the sake of doing something.

Sitting in a sidewalk café watching the pigeons hunt for pastry crumbs, or sitting at the beach and watching the waves can be niksen. Unlike mindfulness, niksen does not require you to focus on the present moment and be conscious of your surroundings; instead, it’s about giving yourself permission to let your mind wander, or even to not think at all, without expectation of a destination or guilt over “wasting time.”

The Dutch consider this a pathway to tranquility and mental calmness.

Many artists have pointed out the need to take a step away from the work in order to give the creative faculties a chance to develop an idea free from the tyranny of the conscious mind, like a prestidigitator’s “misdirection,” distracting the audience’s attention from the sleight-of-hand that ends up seeming like magic.

Whether that means taking a long walk or watching a movie or cooking dinner, removing the idea from the spotlight and allowing it to ferment in the background while the conscious mind is distracted elsewhere often leads to a breakthrough. For me, running is a shortcut to that breakthrough stage. Running is my niksen, my path to the Silence.

Of course, I am not nearly the first writer to run. Joyce Carol Oates, Malcolm Gladwell, and Adam Hochschild are daily runners. Perhaps most famously, Haruki Murakami has run more than two dozen marathons and an ultramarathon — a full 100 kilometers (62 miles)!

Yet writers tend not to write about running and writing. The Silence is far too personal a thing. In his slim book about running, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Murakami is cagey, writing both, “Most of what I know about writing I’ve learned through running every day,” and “Occasionally, hardly ever really, I get an idea to use in a novel. But really as I run, I don’t think much of anything worth remembering.”

But the undercurrent of the book is that for him the acts of running and writing are intertwined, in a way even inseparable.

Another ultra-marathoner, Matt Inman, creator of the massively popular web comic The Oatmeal, is more forthright, writing in the Introduction to The Terrible and Wonderful Reasons Why I Run Long Distances that “For me, running has always been a meditative act; when I run, I think. Most of my comics are written in my head while I run.”

I will never run an ultra-marathon, nor even a marathon. I simply have no desire to do anything that crazy (although that is what I always said about ever running farther than 10K…).

(I have never trusted the kind of people who run marathons, nor have I ever believed the original, rather confused legend of the marathon. “We are overrun, and without reinforcements immediately all will be lost!” This would have been a good reason for Pheidippides to have run himself to death, but it seems to me that the news of a victory was not necessarily so urgent. I personally would have run-walked at best, and probably at the very least stopped for lunch along the way.)

But one thing I do share with Murakami and Inman is that I have found running to be a path to writing. I’m sure there is a purely physical component to this effect — that simply getting exercise, moving the body, pumping blood through the brain, helps the brain to function better — just as a concern for my physical health is part of my motivation to run.

But there is much more to it than just the physical.

I am not a religious person, so I prefer Inman’s term, “meditative.” I do not have the patience for traditional meditation; whenever I have tried it, my brain seems to always take the lack of external stimulation as a license to careen from random thought to random thought with the speed of a runaway train on greased rails on a steep mountain. Stream-of-consciousness doesn’t even begin to describe the manic mental chaos that ensues.

When I run, though, the physical over-stimulation — even if it happens to be pure, unadulterated agony — is enough to overwhelm my brain and force it to give up control. “I run in order to acquire a void,” Murakami wrote; the emptiness of my thoughts when I run is that void.

I don’t, of course, reach that state on every run, but more often than not. I never know when it will come, although for me it rarely happens before six or seven miles; I suppose I need that much accumulated agony before my brain is bludgeoned into submission.

Paying attention to my mental state to try to see it coming is as ineffective as trying to pay attention to the moment at which you fall asleep — because that state is a perfect unfocusing of attention, focusing attention on it prevents it from happening.

So all I can do is run, and give the ghost in my machine the opportunity to slip silently away for a few moments of respite. Whenever that point comes, it is welcome.

The creation of any art relies on intuition. Because writing is grounded in language, it is more cognitive than most arts, more dependent on actively engaging the intellect, and therefore when we are writing it is much harder to let go of conscious thought and give the intuition the chance to raise its voice.

But as Murakami noted, “Being active every day makes it easier to hear that inner voice.”

According to Kagge, “Shutting out the world is not about turning your back on your surroundings, but rather the opposite: it is seeing the world a bit more clearly, staying a course and trying to love your life.”

I never love running, and I never will, but I love the mental state I can achieve when I run, and that makes it worth the excruciating effort. When I run, the world around me goes by in a blur, but the world within, the world of my writing, becomes ever clearer.

Need more creative inspiration through fitness? Check out these offerings from our former personal trainer and fitness enthusiasts.