Literary Legs

What Runners and Writers Can Learn From Joannie Rochette at the Winter Olympics

Have you ever had a bad day affect your run?  Or perhaps the stress of the day weighs on your mind so much that concentrating on that interval workout is difficult? Well, from now on you have no excuse.

Forget Lindsey Vonn and her bruised shin. The unquestioned toughest athlete of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver is Joannie Rochette from Canada.  Two days after her mother died of a heart attack--she had come to Vancouver to see her daughter skate--Rochette had the performance of her life at the short program.  An only child, Joannie and her mother were very close, and Rochette responded by skating to a personal best score that put her in third place after the short program (watch performance here). On Thursday, she skated well enough in the long program to earn a bronze medal (watch here). 

 

Let's think about this for a moment from an athletic perspective.  The fact that she can even walk--much less skate in the Olympics and give the best performance of her career--is a testament to her superhuman mental toughness.  If you have ever lost a parent or anyone close to you, you know the feeling: that haze that surrounds you those first few days.  Normal day-to-day activities can be impossible.  The fact that Rochette could push through the haze and skate, not to mention medal, is astounding. Her singular focus is one of the reasons why she is an Olympic athlete in the first place. Rochette talked about that focus in an interview on the Today Show, and I was struck by her comment that to stay focused, she "just tried to be in the bubble, like I was going to war." (This is probably the only time you'll see figure skating compared to war, by the way.)

Her performance also speaks to Rochette's ability to block out all distractions, if that's what we must call her mother's death.  How many times have you let a crappy day get in the way of a good run? What amazed me is that there are certainly some days when physically I am not at my best--and that's just for a lousy 45 minute run in the neighborhood.  On those days, it's easy to want to pack it in. But her performance also, of course, speaks to the therapeutic benefits of exercise.  I am sure that she needed that routine to help her cope.

But we can also learn about writing from Rochette's performance, or actually from NBC's coverage of Rochette's skate. Fortunately, their commentary during her routine on Tuesday was understated.  Actually, it was not stated at all: the three commentators said nothing during the whole thing (well, to be honest, Scott Hamilton was probably bawling, so he was unable to talk anyway), and even as she broke down in tears afterward and tried to collect herself, they offered only a few sentences. What could anyone possibly say in a time like this?  Nothing, of course.  But they didn't need to.  What we saw was plenty powerful.  Any cliche-ridden sentences would have been overkill.

So what do we learn from NBC's understated commentary?  First, we must see NBC's performance as a text.  And not just a text, but a persuasive text. To see it as such, all you have to do is ask yourself if, at the end of the performance, you were persuaded to cheer for her, to want her to win. Assuming you don't have a heart of stone, this was probably easy to do. So the televised performance, then, was just a set of facts (legal writers: that would be the facts section of your brief).  And those facts spoke for themselves.  We needed to adjectives, no adverbs, no ineffective intensifiers telling us that this was the "performance of a lifetime" or that "this was an amazing display of courage."  No overt persuasion was needed in order to get us to appreciate the moment. 

In writing, especially persuasive writing, brevity is best; restraint wins out every time.  Show, don't tell. Of course, it helped that part of NBC's team was Tom Hammond, the understated NBC track and field announcer.  Hammond didn't need to tell us that Rochette's performance was gutsy, heartwrenching, and pure grit.  We saw it, and telling us these things would have been belaboring the obvious.  As Chris Chase said on the Yahoo Sports Blog, "It would have been easy for NBC to go with the cheesily narrated, soft-lit puff piece about the relationship between Rochette and her mother. But producers smartly realized that there was no need to manufacture drama in this tale. It had it all. The producers let the story tell itself, and it succeeded."  Though it should be noted that Hamilton could not resist himself after her Thursday performance, saying, "I've never seen such a superhuman amount of courage, determination.  What an inspiration." But even this was hardly hyperbolic.  

They didn't need to provide the narrative.  It was there for us on the ice. I didn't need anyone to tell me that it was emotional or heartwrenching, or that Rochette was tougher than any of us could ever hope to be.  NBC showed us, and that was plenty.

Keeping Your New Year's Resolution to Exercise

What's wrong with this picture? 

This is a picture from Tuesday's Wall Street Journal accompanying the article "Quest for a Free Workout." Rising health club dues, according to the article, have made trails, paths, and...malls more crowded with exercisers.  This is a problem in January, when newbie exercisers not following proper etiquette tend to crowd trails, paths, and malls by not walking or running in single file, thus adding to congestion.

These are "veteran" mall walkers in a Sarasota, Florida mall who are power walking in January.  They are part of a group that meets regularly.  It's a distressing picture on two levels.  One, they are exercising in a mall, arguably the most depressing symbol of suburban American culture for, among many other reasons, its faux outdoorsy look.  Save for a prison yard--and hey, at least that's outside--I can't think of a more depressing place to exercise.

But it's more distressing because they are in a mall in Florida in January.  Don't people move to Florida in the first place precisely for the weather?  Because the winters are pleasant, because they can be outside in the winter in sunny 70 or 80 degree weather?  Don't get me wrong--if it's a choice between mall exercise and no exercise, hit the mall.  However, this is Florida, the Sunshine State.  I can understand exercising in the Mall of America in Minneapolis in January, but Florida?  Get those kids outside, ladies, where they belong! 

Starting an exercise program is one of the most popular New Year's resolutions.  It's also one of the first that people give up on. And this makes me wonder: do people give up on exercise routines--specifically running--because they begin them in the middle of the winter, when it's cold and dark and dreary? These conditions are tough on anyone, even veteran runners; it's a constant struggle for me to head out in the cold darkness at  6:30am.  Other people begin their exercise programs at the local gym.  But while indoor aerobic exercise can be more comfortable, it's also mind-numbingly boring.  The only thing I can do on a treadmill is a speed workout, since the thought of a steady 60 minute run horrifies me.

So, I wonder, then, how many people give up on exercise programs not because they hate the act of exercising, but because they hate the environment in which they are doing it?  Do fewer people give up on exercise routines in warm weather climates than in cold weather climates, since the warm weather people start their programs in the sunny, pleasant outdoors instead of being surrounded by sweaty, stinky people in the gym?

My solution: move the New Year to June in the Northern Hemisphere, so everyone can start their programs outside.  I guarantee more people would stick with it. 

Warm weather outdoor running certainly boosts my motivation.  I frequently travel for work, and I go to Southern California three times a year. I'll be there next week.  So Saturday I'll be running in sub freezing temps here in DC, and Sunday I'll be running along the water where the high will be in the upper 60s.  My legs will be fresher, my lungs magically larger. 

The lesson here? Exercise outdoors (more specifically, in nature, since it's better for your brain, and especially if you want to be a canonical poet).  The change of scenery—no two runs are identical, even if you cover the same route—will keep you fresh and energized far longer than a treadmill will.  Or a mall.   

Running Improves Cognitive Function. Lifting Weights, Not So Much.

Continuing my discussion on how exercise improves creativity and executive function--and thus the writing process--today we'll focus on a recent study that examines how aerobic exercise fares compared to resistance exercise.  In other word, what's better for the writing process, lifting or running?  Should you go for a 5 mile run or a 60 minute weight routine?

Runners, rejoice! 

Authors of an April 2009 article in the journal Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise entitled "The Effect of Acute Aerobic and Resistance Exercise on Working Memory" found that running reduced reaction time and increased accuracy on a working memory test, while resistance training had no effect.  The article was published by a group of researchers in the Department of Kinesiology and Community Health at the University of Illinois. 

Subjects (all undergraduate students) in the study were placed in three groups.  One was the control group at rest, one completed 30 minutes of treadmill running at 60-70% VO2 max, and the last group completed three sets of 8-12 reps at 80% of their one-rep max for each of the seven major muscle groups.  The resistance participants rested for 60 seconds between each set and 90 seconds between each exercise.

After exercise, participants were given a cognitive task that required them to encode a set containing either three, five, or seven letters and to then decide whether a single "probe letter" was present in the set. Subjects were tested both immediately after their workouts and again 30 minutes later.

The researchers found shorter response time during the tasks for the 30 minute treadmill group, both immediately and 30 minutes after their exercise session. Similar effects were not observed in the resistance training group.  The researchers said that "shorter RT (response time) latency was observed for task conditions requiring increased working memory capacity after aerobic exercise, relative to the pretest, providing support for the view that changes in cognitive function after acute exercise are disproportionately larger for tasks requiring greater amounts of executive control." 

So it appears as if aerobic exercise has a beneficial effect on tasks requiring executive control, or those that require higher-order thinking like writing. While researchers are still trying to determine why, the prevailing thought is that increased blood flow to the brain--present during aerobic exercise, which increases heart rate, but not nearly as much during weight training--increases the movement of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), affectionately known as "Miracle Gro for the Brain," across the synapses.

How Faulkner and Hemingway Can Make You a Better Runner

In the December 2009 issue of Running Times, Roy Benson talks about how to gauge perceived effort while training.  If you want to get faster, your training must include variety.  Sure, you'll be able to complete a 5k if you go out and run 30 minutes (or more) every day at the same pace, but you'll never get much faster.  Instead, your training regimen must include speed work, recovery days, long runs, and threshold runs.  And Benson tells readers to use Hemingway and Faulkner if they have trouble gauging their effort.

Recovery runs, he says, should be completed at a conversational pace.  You have to make yourself go this slowly.  How do you know if you are going slow enough at a pace that ensures recovery from a tough workout the day before?  Benson says, "You can carry on a full conversation with sentences that last as long as William Faulkner's." 

Threshold running is my least favorite.  You run at 80-85 percent effort--an uncomfortable pace--for three to four miles.  Benson says this should be about 30 seconds slower than your 5k pace, running hard enough to require "serious huffing and puffing."  And how do you know if your effort is uncomfortable enough?  Benson says that "your rapid breathing will cut down the conversation to Hemingway's level of shortness ('He caught a fish.' Huff, puff. 'It was big.')."

Of course, Benson isn't exactly right, though his is a common misconception about Hemingway's style.  Hemingway had his share of short sentences, but the hallmark of his style was the simple words, many of which were only two or three syllables, that were contained in long sentences.  These sentences were often a series of clauses linked by coordinating conjunctions.  He was able to construct sentences of 70 or 80 words that were perfectly comprehensible, throwing off the prescriptivists who say that sentences should only be 20-25 words (if all of your sentences are in that 20-25 word range, you'll sound like a robot, and a monotonous one at that).  Here's a 40 word sentence from A Moveable Feast:

"The leaves lay sodden in the rain and the wind drove the rain against the big green autobus at the terminal and the Café des Amateurs was crowded and the windows misted over from the heat and the smoke inside."

If You Want to Be Smart, Run. If You Want to Be Smarter, Run Faster.

In previous posts I have explored how exercise can make you a better writer.  Several studies have demonstrated the immediate effect of exercise on creativity and executive function.  We know that exercise has impressive long term benefits on cognition, but now we also know that aerobic exercise has same-day effects as well.  So that lunchtime run can improve your cognitive function--and can make you a better writer, maybe even rid you of writer's block--at 1pm.

A 2007 study in Neurobiology of Learning and Memory found that learning improved after exercise, and that the learning potential increased with the intensity of the workout.  I've looked at a ton of studies on the immediate benefit of exercise on cognition--for an article I'm writing--and this is the only one I've seen that how cognitive function is tied to the intensity of the workout.

In the study, researchers assessed how well subjects learned novel words of an artificial language.  The subjects were divided into three groups: the control (15 minutes of being sedentary), the moderate exercisers (40 minutes of low-impact treadmill running as measured by their heart rate), and the intense exercisers (two anaerobic sprints of three minutes each, with a two minute break).

The researchers found that intense exercise directly improves learning.  The intense exercisers learned 20 percent faster on the vocabulary test compared to the other two groups.  The study's authors also note that brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) levels were at their highest for the intense exercisers. The authors write, "Short bouts of exercise could be used in situations which require an immediate boost of learning, e.g., immediately prior to study phases in children with and without learning deficits."  I should point out that several studies have shown that relatively low-impact aerobic exercise (at 60% max heart rate) does improve cognitive function, so you may not have to sprint to get the benefit. 

BDNF (called by some "Miracle-Gro for the brain") secretion increases after exercise.  It plays a critical part in learning "due to its involvement in long-term potentiation in the hippocampus."  BDNF also improves the health and functioning of both the synapses and neurons. Scientists have been touting it as a key in cognition (and thus executive function). It appears to play a direct role in learning and memory.  But BDNF often sits passively at the end of your synapses; it doesn't really get moving until your blood starts pumping.  And your blood starts pumping when you exercise.  So to really get the full effect of BDNF, you have to exercise. 

So...exercise>blood pumping>BDNF release>improved brain function. 

See the connection? 

It would appear, then, that our parents had it backwards when we were kids.  Instead of telling us that we couldn't go outside until we finished our homework, they should have told us that we couldn't finish our homework until we played outside. 

Well, it's almost noon.  Time to head out for my run!

Cite: Winter, Bernward et al.  "High impact running improves learning." Neurobiology of Learning and Memory 87 (2007) 597-609.

Coaching Ourselves Through the Pain

This is the first guest blog post on Literary Legs.  It's written by Mary Goldschmidt, PhD, the director of the writing program at the College of New Jersey.  Mary is, in her words, an "avid cyclist, winter runner, and long-time teacher of writing."  Mary's topic is how running and writing intersect in her life (quite appropriate, since it's the tagline of this blog).

Interested in writing a guest blog post about how running and writing intersect in your life?  Drop me a line using the email link to the left.

I recently read a startling admission by one of my students.  In an assignment to introduce themselves as college writers to their classmates and me, one student began her essay with the following statement: “YOU CANNOT WRITE THIS PAPER!”  She explained that this was the message her inner voice (“the petite person with the enormous mouth”) screamed to her every time she received a paper assignment.  I’ve met many students over the years who dislike academic writing, but I was particularly struck by this young woman’s experience: writing, she claimed, had “killed” her self-esteem. 

This is so unlike my own experience of writing that it’s difficult to understand.  Not that I’m unsympathetic.  After seeing how some high school and college teachers mark up papers, I know that students often get an overwhelming array of feedback, mostly critical and rarely helpful. The comment that something is “awkward” doesn’t actually help the writer see why it’s awkward or to revise it to make it less so.  Likewise, the direction to “be more specific” sometimes leads the writer to want to say back: YOU be more specific!  Pages filled with corrections, slashes, and circling send a very clear message: I’m not interested in what you have to say; I’m interested in showing you how you’re wrong.

Can you imagine a running coach using this method?  If your coach gave you critical feedback on every aspect of your form and training process all at once, it would be very difficult to absorb.  That’s why coaching is structured around goal achievement, and feedback is tailored to the specific focus of a given training session.  Moreover, coaching involves showing as often as it does telling.  It’s no different with writing.  I know that my love of sports has made me a better teacher, not only because it often allows me to connect with students, but also, and more importantly, because it’s helped me think of myself as a coach, not a corrector. 

Writers Talking About Running

This month's issue of Runner's World contains two fantastic examples of where running and writing intersect (the tagline of this blog, by the way).

One, Mark Bittman writes about how runners can prepare food that tastes good, fuels their running, and is easy to make.  Bittman, who writes for the New York Times, is my favorite food writer.  He has no formal training as a chef, though he wrote my favorite cookbook How to Cook Everything.  His training is as a journalist and editor.

In the RW article, Bittman discusses how he fell into the trap of overeating, thinking that as long as he ran he could maintain his weight regardless of how much he consumed.  Before he knew it, he had gained so much weight--40 lbs.--that running became difficult (literally, his form broke down) and he became injury prone.  Now, eating sensibly with a plant-heavy diet (though he is not a vegetarian), he is running better and faster than ever.  His diet makes his daily runs easier.

Bittman's article contains some great recipes, though I can do without his annoying David Foster Wallace-like habit of footnotes.  Read the article here.

And two, Kay Ryan, the US poet laureate, is featured in the "I'm a Runner" section this month.  She talks about revising poems in her head while running (a la Wordsworth).  She discusses how poetry and running are similar.  But my favorite line is her response to why she loves running so much.  As only a poet could answer: "It evens out my disposition. It sweeps out my mind. It's a brain conditioner, rinsing out the brain the way that hair conditioner rinses your hair."  Read the interview here.

Does This Mean Richard Simmons is a Good Writer?

We have known for quite a while that exercise--even a single session--can improve mood.  Most scientists agree (and William Wordsworth would concur) as well that exercise enhances creativity.  Somewhere in these two ideas, I would imagine, runs a common thought:  could exercise improve writer's block, a debilitating condition that can be both the cause and effect of depression?  To a professional writer who relies on words to make a living, the inability to put words on paper can cause a downward, cyclical spiral: a case of writer's block leads to depression, which lessens the writer's motivation to write, which cases the writer to become more depressed, and so on. I have long wondered, then, about whether exercise could cure a crushing case of writer's block.  If it can enhance creativity and lead to positive mood changes, it would sure seem so.

A 1997 study in the British Journal of Sports Medicine entitled "Exercise enhances creativity independently of mood" by Hannah Steinberg et al explores this idea.  The authors remark that while previous studies examined the effect of exercise on mood and the effect of exercise on creativity, none has examined the two concurrently.  "It would have been interesting," the authors say, "To determine how far positive moods resulting from exercise might have been related to better cognitive performance."  This is, of course, the very essence of writer's block, where depression, lack of creativity, and lack of written product are linked.  The opposite is also true: the manic moods in manic depressive people can lead to periods of intense creative output. 

In the 1997 study, the authors tested three hypotheses: that aerobic exercise would lead to improved mood, that aerobic exercise would lead to improved creativity (as measured by tests), and that improvements in creativity could be attributed to improved mood. 

The authors used three groups in the study.  One group participated in conventional aerobic workouts.  These were high-impact sessions, probably best defined based on the authors' description as the traditional gym-based aerobics class.  The second group participated in aerobic dance, "low impact and involving gentle exercises with a good deal of slow rhythmic stretches."  The authors predicted that both kinds of aerobic exercise would improve mood, but that "concurrent improvements in creativity would be accounted for by the mood enhancements following exercise."  In other words, the better your mood, the more creative you would be.

The results indicated that a 25 minute workout was enough to increase mood and that at least one measure of creativity was boosted as well. What the authors found, though, surprised them: while physical exercise enhances creative thinking, the effect seems to be independent of mood changes (as well as workout type).  In other words, "mood changes did not predict creative performance."  So even if you are in a crummy mood, you can still be creative.  At least anecdotally, this would appear to support the idea that depression can also lead to periods of intense creativity.  Ask any number of poets (Plath, Coleridge, Jarrell, for example) or novelists (Camus, Styron, Hemingway) about this one.

And now for the running part: the authors say that "it is also possible that running, which has most strikingly led to enhanced moods, would have been a more suitable form of exercise" for the study. They wonder if  "free rather than prescribed exercise is more likely to release the stream of consciousness."  This could explain why those in the aerobic dance group scored slightly higher on the creativity test than those in the aerobic workout group: they had greater freedom of movement. 

This last point intrigues me the most.  If "free" exercise is best for creativity, what implications does this hold for making you a better writer?  Is outside running better than treadmill running if you want to get those creative juices flowing when you run?  Would running a new route, one in which you run down whichever street or path suits your fancy, better than that same ol' route you always run?  Is running in nature better than urban running, as I discussed in a previous post? Is running for time better than running for distance? Would running 30 minutes on a track give you any creative benefit? 

Any thoughts?

Mark Sanford's Contribution to the English Language

The link between exercise and writing--the focus of this blog--might be a little bit of stretch today.  Bear with me, though, because it's worth it.  Over the past few weeks, we have witnessed the birth of a new phrase in the English language.  Unfortunately, it's already a cliche. But its changeover from literal phrase to cliche has been stunningly fast, and this a good lesson in how cliches happen.

Cliches are the bane of bad writing.  They are stale metaphors that have long since lost the utility of their literal meaning.  Cliches did not start out as cliches, of course.  They started out as useful phrases meant to be taken literally.  For example, the phrase "stick to your guns" was used in the military when soldiers needed to, literally, stay close to their guns.  But somewhere along the way, it made its way out of the military and into the general lexicon to mean "stay true to your convictions."

So years from now, linguists will have to explain the origin of

"Hiking the Appalachian"

As far as cliches go, few have appeared as quickly as this one. It comes, of course, courtesy of South Carolina governor Mark Sanford, who explained that he was "hiking the Appalachian trail" when he was in Argentina with his mistress.  Of course, Sanford never was hiking, so there was never any intended literal meaning to the phrase.  But linguists and language experts have observed how the term is already being appropriated, with lightning speed, to refer to adultery and the excuse men use to cover it up.  As in: "He was hiking the Appalachian Trail while away on business, if you get my drift."  Mark Peters at the Visual Thesaurus calls it a euphemism, and I agree, but it's also a cliche because no one using the term really means for us to believe that the adulterer is hiking.  It has already lost its literal meaning. 

Creativity and Physical Endurance Personified

This is not a family blog, but I am going to pause on this Fourth of July to acknowledge a great example of someone who personifies the general spirit of this blog, the link between exercise and creativity.

My brother Steve graduated from Harvard in 2006 with a degree in music theory.  So he has the creative part down, from a pretty good school to boot. He writes music, plays instruments, and sings.  But he wanted a physical challenge, something that his degree couldn't offer.  And my brother also knew that he would not be satisfied with something that would merely push him.  He wanted something that would push him to the limit of his physical capabilities.

So he joined the Marines.  Not as an officer, but as an enlisted man.  As you can imagine, not many Harvard grads with a degree in music theory join the Marines enlisted ranks.  He went to boot camp at Parris Island, however, with his eyes on a bigger goal: to be a special forces soldier.   

A couple of months ago my brother successfully completed Force Recon training.  Force Recon is the Marines special forces operation.  He is a member of the 3rd Force Reconnaissance Company based in Mobile, Alabama, and he ships out to Iraq in the fall.  He decided to enlist rather than go to Officer Candidate School because becoming an elite special operations soldier was his goal all along, and he was told that enlisting was an easier way to get into Force Recon training (note: not an easier way to complete it). 

So on this day, I give you this great example of creativity and physical exercise.