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The afternoon and early evening before running my first marathon in Honolulu, I stayed shut in my hotel room jotting down notes expanding on a new story idea I had. Doing so meant abandoning the novel I had been writing, but I was at best treading water with it.

I had had some thoughts about this idea for a couple of weeks at this point, but nothing too concrete. My time had been devoted mostly to the marathon training, which was a major contributor to why the novel I’d been working on wasn’t progressing much. I just didn’t have the time to hone the story in an efficient yet impactful manner, which had caused me to meander and drag out part one of the story, which had been meant to be one of the shorter parts.

This story was going to avoid that pitfall because I wasn’t planning on turning it into a novel – at least, not at first. It was going to be a screenplay, which meant it had to be crisp and lean. I was going to apply the feedback I’d gotten from my second script consultation for Dig Down. Scenes were going to be quick, make their point, advance the story, and then move on to the next one.

It was the main antagonist I had the strongest sense about. I was captivated by them, someone who never turned violent, never even made overt threats – but what they said would veil those threats that would be very much present. They would almost be like a puppeteer, pulling the strings, getting the rest of the characters to bend to their will, even if the other characters didn’t realize they were doing so, or couldn’t even understand how their actions were being forced by the villain.

I’d had ideas for three of the main characters, but had started brainstorming the concept of a fourth, who I was just referring to as The Brute, someone who would be the blunt force of violence, and who the other characters all thought they were reacting to and working against.

The main character started coming into shape for me. They wouldn’t be heroic, far from it. Life was something they were only in for themselves, until they saw, through exposure to the two antagonists, how that could end up. I had an arc for their growth, with a question of whether their change would be enough.

I was excited to delve into this story more once I got done with the race.

I always believed my writing was strong. I believed that Dig Down would be good enough to be optioned after it had placed as a finalist in two screenwriting contests. I had been humble and honest enough to understand where my screenwriting could be improved, and accepted that I would need to start over if I wanted to move forward.

As I sat in my hotel room taking down notes for this new idea, I felt the hope that comes with a new story idea, and felt strongly that this would lead me to a breakthrough.

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.

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.

Now that I had set my mind to running my first marathon, I needed to find one to enter. This actually proved to be quite simple, and it would actually feel very fitting.

The year I was bit by a tick and got Lyme Disease, I had been building up my stamina running longer and longer distances until I ran my first half marathon. My goal was to run a half marathon one year, and then run a marathon the next. Afterwards, I expected to stop entering 5 and 10k’s at the rate I was, only entering them from time to time if interested.

While I was toward the latter end of preparing for my half marathon, I had begun researching marathons to enter the following year. I was surprised to see that most of them had a time limit in which to complete the race. From the ones I looked into, the Boston Marathon seemed to have the shortest times to run the marathon, requiring paces I knew I couldn’t keep.

This was already going to be a challenge. I didn’t want to add more pressure on myself with a countdown running in the back of my mind. I wanted to find one as stress free as possible.

What I ended up finding was the Honolulu Marathon, a race that was self-described as lowkey, with no time limit, and locals around the track cheering the participants on no matter how late into the day they were still on the course. This looked to be the perfect marathon to sign up for.

Even when my running plans were derailed, and I couldn’t walk without a pronounced limp, I still felt this was still a possibility. Since there was no time limit, who cared if it took me almost nine hours to complete it by hobbling the 26.2 miles. I could still say I completed a marathon.

So after running a 3 and a half mile and feeling great afterwards, the Honolulu Marathon was the first race I looked up to enter. I wanted to see if after 6 years I’d finally get that second chance at this as my first marathon.

It was perfect! The race was scheduled for December 7th. I’d get to experience the tropical weather right before the holidays in upstate New York. The sixth months would give me just enough time to condition my body and train for that distance…

…if I started right away.

From the start of 2023, I began to build up my running stamina. I would run a couple times a week, then increase the distance for the following week. The bottom of my shins always seemed to take the brunt of it, maybe I was stomping as I ran, but my knees never ached, and I always felt ready to run the next time I came to the gym.

Those were two good developments, but the best was one that came as an absolute surprise — I was running faster than I was before all my knee problems.

The last time I was running consistently was in 2016 when I ran my first half marathon. In the races that gradually built up in distance, my average pace was about ten minutes per mile. For shorter races, like 5k’s, my quick pace was nine minutes.

My first few runs were double digit paces, but as I built up the distance, from three laps to five (one third of a mile), to half a mile, two thirds and then a mile, my pace shrunk into the nine minute range. I couldn’t believe it. I was convinced when I started running again, even if the limp was gone, I would still be in the range of fifteen minutes to maybe twelve at best. Recapturing the speed of my running days would have been amazing enough.

But faster?

What was more, as I continued to add laps to my runs, and my legs no longer felt weighted and rigid, my pace continued to quicken. I was pushing myself every time to run fast, and was finding myself consistently dipping below nine minute miles into the eight minute range.

This was so fantastic that I actually feared I was derailing my running when I stopped going to the gym to run for 2 weeks in March after my first script consultation when I focused on making all those revisions to re-submit my screenplay of Dig Down into the Page Turner Screenplay Competition.

When I resumed my running after the 2 week writing hiatus, I dropped back down to rebuild my stamina. I was expecting to have to start from scratch again. Indeed, my legs felt weighted, like I was stomping each lap instead of running it, and my shins felt sore and rigid again.

But my pace was still in the nine minute range.

And on top of that, I was no longer feeling winded when I was running. My legs started adjusting to running a few times a week again. After the knee surgery, and all the years not running, I was now somehow faster than I’d been when I was younger and healthier.

The only catch was that most times I ran was only for a mile. Occasionally I pushed myself to a mile and a half. I was still only running a fraction of the shortest distance I used to run.

I was due to test myself once again.

I had resumed running again after the nearly 2 weeks I’d taken off to revise my script of Dig Down based off of the notes from the first script consultation I’d ever received. I was consistently running a mile a couple of times a week, and had built up the stamina to get to one and a half to two miles. It was at this time I decided to give my body a true test.

Every May, the Albany holds a Workforce Challenge. It’s an event where employees from jobs all over the Capital Region can run or walk a distance of 3.5 miles. It’s an event I had run several times in the past, but had to take a break from when my knee had taken a turn for the worst. I had entered the event the previous year, but only to walk, something I knew I could handle because it was a half mile less than what I was able to walk in the mornings on a daily basis.

I knew going into it that this was going to be a bit of a jump. I had proven to myself I could run, but I was only just getting to about half the distance of this race. On top of that, this was the first time I’d be running in such a large group since my knee had recovered. There were always people on the indoor track, and yes, some of the many workers would decide that it was fine for them to meander in the running lane, no matter how many times I lapped them. But this would be the first time I was testing out my knee weaving through tightly packed crowds.

When I signed up for the event, I didn’t tell anyone I would be running. If I ran out of gas once I reached two miles, or twisted my knee or something trying to work my way between pockets in the crowd, no one would ever have to know the aspirations that I’d had going into the run. There wasn’t really any pressure on me to run, but I didn’t want to start boasting about being able to run, only to have something go wrong and walk a portion of the race.

When I signed up, I gave myself a pretty slow pace, accounting for the possibility that I might have to walk a portion of it. I also stayed back a little further at the start of the race, in case I still wasn’t able to keep up with the runners in that bracket. All those runners in front of me usually gave me added motivation to keep chugging along, as there was always someone in front of me that I could mentally push myself to try to run down and pass.

I took it slow at the start of the race because it start off uphill. The first mile felt like it took a little longer to reach than usual. I think my eyes were scanning for signs of the second mile marker. When my legs didn’t feel tired or my lungs felt out of breath with a mile to go, I knew I had it in the bag. When I reached the same hill that had started the race, I think I was more focused on not racing down it too fast than I was anything else.

It wasn’t quite double the longest distance since I’d gotten back into running, but it was a mile and a half more than I’d previously pushed myself to run. And I’d passed this test with flying colors.

I’d started the day not telling anyone I was attempting to run again. I decided to put an end to keeping things to myself.

I met up with co-workers afterwards for some celebratory drinks. They were the first people I told that I would be running a marathon before the end of the year.