I began training for my first marathon in June 2023. To give some context, when I ran five days in a row for the first time, I was running in the indoor track at my local YMCA to complete my first full week of training, and then got in my car to head to the Lighthouse Film Festival in New Jersey for my first ever film festival.
Training would consume my life for the rest of the year. I spent the next two months building up the stamina in my legs to handle the 18 week training session I was about to embark on, first running a mile every weekday for a month, then two. I took a week off from work in late June, and that whole vacation was built around conditioning myself for the marathon.
The first day of training was easy. It was a day off. But then it was three straight days of running, from Tuesday through Thursday, 3 miles a day, with a long run on Saturdays, which I was eager to do first thing in the morning just to get it over with.
To connect another dot on the timeline, when I took that amazing trip to Toronto in September for the Toronto International Film Festival, I was five months into my training. I felt the trip, while focused on the film festival, was an amazing blend of the two goals I was striving for that year, as well as experiencing as much of Toronto as I could cram into the time I had left in the day.
The mileage kept increasing with each week, until 5 miles was my short run. This left me with little drive and energy to pursue anything else, and could have been a contributing factor to why I couldn’t muster up anything when it came to sitting down and drafting a query letter, even after Dig Down had placed as a finalist in 2 separate screenwriting contests, and Lock the Doors had held its own as a horror screenplay.
It may have also been why trying to write a new novel during NaNoWriMo turned out to be so hard. In addition to Thanksgiving always consuming a couple of days at the end of the month, the start of the month was when I was hitting the peak of miles run in a week of 40, 9 more miles than I would run in the week I actually ran the marathon. I think I ran into other issues with that particular story, namely the scope was much larger than I’d originally expected, but it certainly didn’t help trying to sit down and write a couple of pages after one intense daily running session followed another, and there was another to follow in a day or two.
As I went deeper and deeper into training, running was all I started to care about. I’d write a page or two where I could, and I’d jot down ideas for new stories when I had them, but any life balance shifted completely to running. My legs were always rising to the challenge of the longer distances I needed to run, I shattered my previous time for a half marathon by over twenty minutes, and the pounds were melting off. By the time I left for Hawaii, I lost over 30 pounds.
Nothing fazed me as long as my running was going well. When I heard back from the last contest I’d entered and found out Dig Down wasn’t selected for that as well, I just shrugged it off because I had a run the next day. To be honest, I’d already concluded that the way I’d adapted Dig Down wasn’t good enough to win, and had forgotten there had still been a contest I’d entered that I hadn’t heard from. My mindset at that point had been that if I wanted to succeed at screenwriting, I’d have to write a story specifically as a screenplay, not adapted from another medium.
All I needed to do was come up with a new story idea and write it as a screenplay. I was just too preoccupied to come up with a new one while I was training. I didn’t mind waiting until after the marathon to get back into writing again. I had a goal to fulfill. I could get back to the writing when I was ready for it, and it was ready for me.
I may have been running faster than I’d had in my life, but the idea came faster to me than I to it. It wasn’t going to wait until after I ran my marathon. It came to me while I was relaxing in my hotel room the day before the race.