It’s September and I just finished my last half marathon for the year. It was a gorgeous Saturday morning, cool at the start, hot at the end, no wind. I got to run through the Lethbridge river valley as the cottonwood trees are all transforming into their fall colors. I trained pretty hard for this one, and though I didn’t quite make the time I’d been hoping for, it was a nice conclusion to my running season.

Training for a half marathon is a beast. Particularly if you’ve got a body that’s build more for life as a medical physicist/writer. But this year I decided to get back into long distance running.

You make progress in long distance running through consistency. It’s not so much the urge to get out and run fast, but you improve by showing up. My running schedule over the summer included a moderate run on Tuesday evenings (5 – 10 km), a tempo run on Thursdays (5 km), and then progressive distances on the weekends. I started at about 10 km in the beginning and built up to 21 km, then tapered back for race days. I ran on vacation. I ran hills. I ran in the rain.

Writing a novel is a lot like that. You make progress by showing up with consistency. A typical science fiction novel is about 80,000 words long. They can vary of course, but I find that’s a reasonable ballpark for me to aim for. During National Novel Writing Month it takes me about 2 hours of solid writing to meet the daily goal of 1667. So by some quick math, that’s about 96 hours of focused writing, just to produce a first draft. And only about half of that even makes it into the final book!

Writing is a marathon in and of itself.

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