It’s been awhile — to get through Eastern States I took one of the breaks from newsletter publishing that I’m going to allow myself each year (my game, my rules). But that race is over (it went exceptionally well, by the way) and it’s time to get back to my real work.
That’s much easier said than done, though. Disruptions, even for noble causes, are still disruptive, and for whatever reason, I require long start-ups and wind-downs, and I do my best with long periods of work — like 10 or 12 (or 20) hours after start-up and before wind-down. That’s not a characteristic that fits well into other people’s worlds — it certainly doesn’t fit into a standard 8-hour workday.
I try to to adapt, to fit into other people’s schedules, but in practice that means I spend a large proportion of my time starting up and winding down, and not much of it actually doing.
The answer, of course, is to go onto my own schedule, force things, be antisocial and absorb or ignore the consequences of that. It’s a nasty but necessary thing if I aspire to anything more than mediocrity (and I do).
Bringing this to now… I’ve been puttering around trying to write something — anything — of even marginal worth for days now, and getting nowhere. I suspended my writing to pour myself into the race, and now I have this oh-so-brief interlude — a trough between the battering waves — before the next noble disruption (a much-needed family vacation, fast approaching). I badly needed to produce something.
And there’s this open, long-pending category on my website (“Adventure Reports”) and there’s a life-list race happening this weekend that good friends are running in, and I’ve been meaning to write about my own experience with that race for a long time now, with the thought that it might in some way benefit them, but until now I’ve done nothing more than spin my wheels. Good intentions are fine, but they mean nothing.
So yesterday, I decided it was time to force the issue. I decided I’d finish my “UTMB 2017 Adventure Report” and publish it before I stopped. There was a hard deadline on this — the race starts today at 1830 Central European Summer Time, and it would do no good to publish it late. The result was an all-nighter, the first one in a long while… and a finished product. I forced the issue, and I published. It isn’t perfect — but it’s published. And I’m still up now, writing this, knowing it won’t be perfect either, but writing it anyway. And soon I’ll hit that “Publish” button at the bottom of the screen. Paraphrasing Seth Godin (who is both brief and wise), I’ll do that not because it’s perfect or even ready, but because I promised.
You can read the product of my force-the-issue overnight work session here: My UTMB (2017)
Writing this piece reminded me that sometimes endurance and deprivation are required (and worthwhile). And also that if you ever get to a point where slow forward motion is all you can manage, you’d best move forward. Here’s hoping that if you need to force the issue to get your own groove back, you’ll do what’s necessary, whether it’s an all-night writing session or some other “extreme” measure.