I’d had a simple plan for the day before my first marathon: relax. Just relax.
I wasn’t going to take any big excursions. I wasn’t going to eat any big meals, or have a lot to drink. The buses to take runners to the starting line were going to be running at 4 in the morning, because the race started at 5, so I wasn’t going to be staying up late either.
The plan for the day was to just stay in my hotel and relax…
…something that’s easier said than done when you’re in Honolulu.
Originally, I was just going to spend my day following an online course on Udemy. I had gotten into coding 2 years prior, and had found a course that had about three hours of lessons that would teach me how to create a Pac-Man type game. I figured if I wasn’t going to enjoy this beautiful weather on pre-race day, I could still feel some sense of accomplishment by learning something.
Unfortunately, the instructor was so passionless I abandoned the project before I’d gotten an hour in. Seriously, they were so droll, both in delivery and content, that they made making video games feel like a bland chore.
It was only the early afternoon, so I needed to come up with something else to occupy my time until 8, when I planned to try to make it a (very) early night so I could have an early rise (2am) and still feel like I got a decent amount of sleep.
I tried working on the novel I had started for NaNoWriMo that year and was fledgling through a week after the challenge had ended, only in the early stages of part 2 of the story. This was also short lived as I had been losing steam in the project, seeing its scope had ballooned much more than I’d ever intended. I didn’t want to just give up writing though. More to the point, I didn’t want to just retreat to TV for the last 6 hours before trying to fall asleep.
While I was flipping through my notes of the manuscript, I found ideas I had jotted down for a completely different story. And as I flipped the pages, I went beyond the couple of thoughts I’d had, to more notes I’d added as the idea had festered. And when I came to the end of those, I started to add more. I had lines of dialogue for several of the main characters, each relaying their thoughts in their own words, so that each of their voices had a uniqueness to them.
That’s when it hit me. I knew I was going to abandon the manuscript I had been picking at for the last couple of weeks. This was my brand new story, that I could start off as a screenplay, and then adapt to another medium later if I wanted.
I scribbled down a page or two of ideas, and added a new thought here and there as 8pm approached. Note taking didn’t bring me all the way to 8, I turned to TV for the last couple of hours to relax and unwind in bed, but jotting down the ideas got me through the day, and more importantly, I knew that after I was done with the marathon, I had a path to follow with my writing.