I set a goal earlier this year – to finish a 10k – and I finally achieved that goal this past weekend.  Yes, it was about 15 degrees when we started.  Yes, there was snow on the ground.  Yes, my wife said I was nuts.  And yes, I ran the whole way.  I didn’t break any records – I’m not going to share my time – and there were people walking who were moving faster than me in places – but I finished the whole race.  I’m still a little proud of myself, in a childish way.

What struck me the most wasn’t that I ran this huge race that most people wouldn’t run (about 6.2 miles – the longest timed race of my life – but still only about a quarter of a marathon).  Or even that I finished, but did a bad job (room for growth is a good thing, right?).  It was how I did it.

If you’re going to run for an hour, it isn’t like you’re not thinking at all for 60-70 minutes (or more, in my case).  You’re thinking the whole time.  You see people around you stopping, or finishing, or going faster.  You have hundreds, maybe thousands of chances to stop.  If you’re in pain, or freezing, or – as I was – bundled up too much and sweating in the cold, you check your watch too much and think too much about the course and how much farther you have to go.  You decide each time to keep going, or stop.  You might also change your pace.  But it’s really easy to stop.

There’s this thing that some people do that drives me crazy, but makes sense.  Some people like to run long races in chunks.  They run for a while, then walk a bit, then run for a while, then walk, and so on.  Time and pace vary, but the strategy is actually pretty cool.  I have two problems with this: first, it doesn’t work for me.  I have a hard time re-starting once I stop running.  And I often get the pace wrong when I stop and start.  Second, these people often go faster than me and finish in front of me.

The more that I read about finishing creative work, the more I hear people talk about piling up small chunks of effort into larger, complete wholes.  (Most recently, I read this in STEAL LIKE AN ARTIST by Austin Kleon, and HOW TO FLY A HORSE by Kevin Ashton.)  Writing a book is a lot like running a 10k, it seems, because it is built from a long string of effort.

For me, at least, this is a really nice way to both envision the task of writing a book (of which I’ve been planning and working on several over the years) and motivate myself to finish some of these older projects that have been festering.

Don’t you love a good analogy?