Rebuilding Stamina

Part One of Trying to Remount the Horse

I am left winded. Exhausted. I sit there, wondering how I am going to proceed. The whole exercise, as small as it was, put me into the ground. I should be able to do more. How could I not write more than I did? 100 words? That’s nothing, yet it was too much to handle. Why?

Once per week, I run over 10K. A little over a year ago, I could barely reach a mile without feeling completely spent. Now, if I wanted, I could probably hit 15K or further. Then, every day I don’t run, I do a workout routine. Whole body, strength and cardio – effectively a cross-training routine, not quite to failure but close enough, about 30 minutes with a walk after.

I do this because I felt it was important to get to where I could move without too much pain. After multiple injuries, I saw the possibilities awaiting me, where I would be one of those guys who struggle to stand and walk across a room. Being overweight wasn’t an issue, but I was out of shape and suffered in many ways due to it. Most people probably feel this way in some form or another. I chalked it up to “just getting older.” Yeah, right.

After the culmination of a few things, I decided it was time to get back into a good rhythm, one akin to when I was a gym rat trying to push my PR’s beyond what is really useful in the real world outside of walking up to someone to ask them “brethren, doth thou even hoist?” This time, I had a different approach. Rather than go for big weight lifting records and heavy-as-fuck lifts, I wanted to make it more holistic and blended between cardio and strength, focusing on moving without hurting.

Part of that was to run, to learn to run at distance.

Before, from the days of my being a gym rat, the furthest I ever ran was roughly 2.5 miles. That’s it; I could get no further. My new goal: 5K (3 ⅓ miles). And I thought that to be where I would end. Go to 10K? Why? That’s just crazy talk.

Taking some other lessons to which I won’t belabor here, I tried to run as far as I could while maintaining breathing through my nose. That was my limit. If I started to struggle to breathe through my nose, I had to stop rather than sucking wind slack jawed and all.

Long story short, I went from barely able to manage ½ to ¾ miles to now running 11K with a known capacity to go further if I wanted to try.

The other day, an understanding hit me, a link between my fitness routine and something arguably more important, yet strangely tougher to manage: my writing.

My current fitness state was not built on just hopping into the weight room and lifting away or throwing on running shoes and running a 10K. It just didn’t happen like that. Nothing really does. Sure, maybe I could’ve done that, but I would have been left broken and laid out in recovery for days to weeks after, asking myself why in hell did I do such a stupid thing.

Yet, I always believed I could do something similar as a writer.

Pop out several thousand words in a sitting and do it again whenever I choose.

Burp out a novel on a whim.

Get inspired and then slap down a brilliantly written prose on some topic.

All this without the slightest impact to me. I could just get up and do it again, right? Writing, art, creative endeavors – they aren’t anything like fitness, right? Right?

Funny how we all think we should be able to jump in like we were experts the whole damn time.

Stamina. It is odd how it hit me the other day. How I strangely felt depleted after writing a few hundred words of prose. How I get the idea to write out an essay on some topic and a few lines in before somehow being unable to muster a coherent thought (work with me here, given one could argue if I ever managed a coherent thought).

Poetry, on the other hand, I write regularly and can often spurt out 2 or 3 a day without impacting that capability. Why is that?

Here is where the theme comes in: stamina.

It’s the stamina, stupid. It just took me long enough to connect the dots.

The thing is, practice and routine are what are needed to build this magic sauce. They are synonyms. Like when I forced myself to write poetry more regularly. It was hard at first, but eventually it became easy. When I was forcing myself to write to a word-count each day, it eventually got easy. When I wanted to post on my site each day, I practiced until I was able to do it.

Only I stopped. Rightly, I started to understand I focused on the word count, not on the actual writing. Instead of a small pivot, to use it as the tool for practice as it was supposed to be, I dropped it. Now I can’t seem to manage it anymore. Duh.

Stamina is built through practice, through habit, through routine. It’s the result of that drive, the ability to run the 10K – to write a novel – on a regular interval when before the capability to run even a mile, to write a few paragraphs without dropping from exhaustion, comes from. Routine and practice builds the stamina I need.

No matter what anyone wants to think, writing and art is hard. It is very much like physical fitness in that regard. It takes steady, relentless work. Besides just knowing one needs to write regularly, I never really made the connections before. The question as to why it seemed so easy at one time to be productive whereas now I was seeming unable to, I forgot how much effort I put in on the front end to get there.

Well now I am back to square one.

I need to get back onto the treadmill of art and build back up my ability, my artistic stamina. One damn word at a time.

Note: this is also cross-posted to Poetically Unlicensed on Substack

Jeremy C Kester