On Friday, what @runningcoachmegan would call a “threshold day”, I did not hit a single split. The workout was 1.5 miles warmup; four one-mile repeats (with 120 seconds rest) at 5:45-6:00 minutes per mile; 1.5 miles cool down. I did 6:17, 6:03, 6:21, 6:10. It was 11 AM because I’d had kid stuff in the morning. Humid. 91 degrees. My app suggested after that I re-consider my goal for the marathon. Just like writing novels, running marathons is often humiliating, seeing where and what you know you are and trying not to look too hard at the insane hubris of your goal.

I did none of the assigned speed work when we were in Maine. I was sick, sure. The hills were intense. But also, I didn’t want to do the assigned speed work so did not. It’s been a hard week, month, year, and it was a strangely complicated trip and what I wanted—told myself I needed—was some loping, at whatever speed I felt like, 8-10 mile runs most days to calm my nerves.

I do not believe in writing as catharsis. Though I do believe in it as unfurling thoughts and feelings into language such that they feel steadier once settled into language that, just like hard splits, almost always still falls short. Running, if you’re also training for something, also can’t be only to feel better. Often, when I finish a hard workout that I fail at, I’m furious, annoyed. I’m not 22 or 32 or 40 any longer, and, while I wouldn’t for a second want to be any of those ages again, it sometimes sucks to have to face the fact of that. Parts of my body hurt that didn’t used to. I can’t sit or stand for long stretches without my back or neck, some other muscle I did not before that know existed, aching. I am often doing stretches waiting for the subway, waiting for a table at a restaurant, standing in the kitchen talking to my kids while pasta boils.

I thought on mile three of the four miles I was meant to do fast Friday—34 seconds slower than the app said and barely hanging on—it’s likely I won’t beat Harry after all. And then I almost laughed out loud except my breathing was too hitched and tight for that.

I do not actually care if I beat Harry is the truth of it.

Like most things that at first felt like a competition I was itching to get into, clawing to come out on top, I just love Harry now. I’m grateful that his fast marathon has given me the time and space to think about him, listen to his music, sometimes when I’m sad. I double checked, in my chest and toes, if that was a true statement. And: it is.

What running’s taught me, more than anything I’ve ever done, what likely every one of these posts is about, is that the process is the point. A statement to be stitched on pillows, put on posters, except I stand by it. I love running. And now, also, I love thinking about Harry Styles (I refuse to say, I love Harry, because of course I don’t know him; all of this is just thinking, listening, watching videos, projecting and imagining).

The fact that googling something about sub-three hour marathons at two AM is what got me to this point is the sort of magic of obsession, the sort of magic of going hard and long and unrelenting on one thing, knowing full well half the time that you’ll never come close to what you hoped.

It’s how I also feel about writing novels: somewhere in the mess of it you find these people, places, a whole new sense of time; ideas you get to be obsessed with; you’re digging down, looking around, seeing what else language, sentences, scenes and paragraphs, can be and do and sound like in your brain. You’re a little bit more solid after, a little bit more fed and steadier because of all that digging, thinking, trying, so much, failing, all that time.

In an interview I listened to with Harry—while I was running—he said, a slightly different version of, we are all ordinary, just some of us let other people watch us being ordinary. This was one of the best descriptions I have ever heard of making art. To let people watch you be ordinary, to invite people into the particular and strange, shameful, terrifying, complicated, yearning desperate space that is your just-like-everybody human self.

And/but, the important thing to say about this: to render ordinariness, compellingly, in any art, is really fucking hard. It is completely terrifying or you’re not doing it right. To not let yourself write from a perch, on high, (and therefore safe), so certain of your own extraordinariness—there is no stench that turns me off in fiction more than the feeling that the writer thinks they’re smarter than everybody else. To, instead, do the long-fought daily work of trying to keep the ordinary also feeling electric and alive. The small-scale, recursive work of burrowing in and amplifying the ways that ordinary life is also magic, particular, entrancing; to continue not to cheat and lie about what life or humans are.

Amy Hempel talks in more than one interview about going to see stand-up in San Francisco in her twenties. “All that time I was observing nuance, inflection, timing, how the slightest difference mattered. How the littlest leaning on a word—or leaning away from it—would get the laugh, and this lesson was so valuable.” Not unlike letting people watch you being ordinary, her improv friends described their work to her as, “being human on purpose,” and, a line I think about quite often, “falling back on the language in your mouth.”

Harry is a strong, elegant dancer, but also, there’s an ease, a sometimes silliness, a well-placed side-eye toward the audience; for every dance move that feels choreographed there’s a moment of flapping hands like he can’t help it, like whatever move that was planned, there is still more energy left; running, headlong, straight down the stage; rolling his fists wantonly, head up, a sly grin, like my sisters and I used to roll our fists in the car to songs when we were three and five and seven.

It seems to me like understanding ordinariness, its beauty, power, being willing, able to get inside of it and offer it to other people, is part of what (I imagine) makes it magic to be in a stadium with him.

And to say: I know Harry’s at MSG the next couple months. I’m sure he’s worth every penny, but 450 dollars is a big chunk of our current family budget. I’m working on some avenues to entry, but also, in the vein of wanting things but the wanting being more the thing even than the thing itself, part of me kind of likes just thinking that he’s out there, that he’s also walking, running, all over Brooklyn and Manhattan, just like I am, performing three nights a week just like I teach three nights a week, mostly only ordinary after all.

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Last week I fell and scraped my elbow, running. I was on Fire Island with my pal who has had a house there the past six years and I’ve been out most of the years they’ve had the house. I have a favorite place I like to run that’s called The Sunken Forest. The name alone is worth the trip. And ocean, obviously, at least three times a day. Of course, also…

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Now, watch Harry talk about his time away from music; how he started jogging, loves the runner’s high, and then, he says, “I als…

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Also, (trying to give these bits up here in case you don’t get to the end), I’m doing a Siblings Panel at Greenl…

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(quick note/reminder, that this is currently a space in which I write to you about training for a marathon trying to beat Harry Styles’ (near miraculous) time of 2:59:13; a warning though that what is happening is what often happens when I fixate on something: I’m falling hopelessly in love with Harry Styles instead.)

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“The most urgent question for a writer may seem to be, What experiences do I have as my material, what experiences do I feel able to narrate? But that’s not right. The more pressing question is, What is the word, what is the rhythm of the se…

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I didn’t know who Harry Styles was until he ran a sub-three-hour marathon. If someone would have said his name to me—and I’m not sure I know anyone who would—depending on how well I knew this person, I might have nodded vaguely in assent to whatever they said and moved on. I know now that he was in a band called One Direction. This is also something, th…

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I…

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In Florida, I get up every morning before the sun comes up to watch the light on water shift, the blotted gray and then the pink and orange, turned to purple, with a line of almost white below it and then a thinner band of orange-red close to the sun. The water, when the sun comes up, is mostly calm and quiet, a squawk or chirp, and, somewhere, out acro…

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