Katie Arnold, RUNNING HOME
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[0:59]I'm so excited to be interviewing Katie Arnold.
[1:01]Katie is a contributing editor at Outside Magazine, where she has been on staff for 12 years.
[1:07]She writes a column for Outside Online called Raising Rippers about how to raise adventurous
[1:11]kids.
[1:12]She has contributed to the New York Times, travel and leisure L in many other publications,
[1:16]and currently lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico with her husband and her two daughters, running
[1:20]home a memoir is her first book.
[1:22]So welcome to Katie.
[1:23]Thanks so much for coming on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[1:26]Thanks for having me.
[1:27]It's exciting to be here.
[1:28]Katie made a special trip in from visiting New Jersey, so I feel particularly honored
[1:32]that she was willing to do that for this.
[1:35]So can you please tell us, Nair, what your beautiful memoir called Running Home is about?
[1:39]Sure, Running Home, what's about a lot of things?
[1:42]Predominantly, it's about my relationship with Running and with my father, and how the
[1:47]two kind of converged after he died in 2010, and I was beset by this really kind of crippling
[1:55]anxiety.
[1:56]I just had a new baby, I had a toddler and an infant, and after he died, I became convinced
[2:03]that I was dying too.
[2:05]And I didn't realize at the time that that's not uncommon, it's not an uncommon way
[2:09]to grieve, but it was terrifying to me.
[2:12]And I live in Santa Fe, New Mexico, so there's lots of alternative therapies and healing
[2:18]and healers, and I tried a lot of them over the course of 18 months, and I was really looking
[2:23]for a way to not worry so much, but the thing that worked the best was the thing that had
[2:30]always worked for me, which was running.
[2:32]It made a lot of sense, I've been around in my whole life, but in some ways it didn't
[2:36]make sense because I was terrified of dying, and so, and this wasn't, you know, running
[2:41]on the road, this was into the mountains alone, on backcountry trails and real wilderness
[2:47]for many hours at a time, but I found that when I ran, I could run through and pass those
[2:53]worries, like my mind would settle, it was became a moving meditation, and so the book
[2:59]is really a story about how I grieve my father and how running healed me, and the wilderness
[3:05]healed me.
[3:06]And also about like the love you had for you, growing up, I mean, I feel like there's a
[3:09]lot before he passed away, like that you catch me out of childhood and huge influence
[3:14]on me.
[3:15]Both artistically, he was a photographer for National Geographic, and so he really taught
[3:20]me how to see the world and to pay attention, which is what you need as a writer, and
[3:25]so he was a beautiful writer, but his medium was photographs, and I knew from a very young
[3:30]age, six or seven, that I wanted to become a writer, and so his way of capturing the
[3:35]world, like really paying attention to those moments, their ordinary moments, their beautiful
[3:40]moments, but there's something about them that you want to capture, and so just by
[3:45]us, Moses, by being his daughter, I learned how to pay attention, so that he was a huge
[3:50]influence on me in that way, and then he also taught me, you know, to find solace and inspiration
[3:55]outside in nature.
[3:56]So those two things, and that's a narrative in the story about how I became who I am in
[4:03]large part because of him, and you have, in the books that he said at one point, the
[4:09]most important element of a photograph is what you leave out, so it's to frame only what
[4:13]is most significant.
[4:14]So I was wondering, is there anything you felt you left out in order to frame the story?
[4:19]Oh, so much, so much.
[4:21]I mean, the story always had to come back to my father, my relationship with him, and
[4:27]my relationship with running, and of course, there's so much more to me than both of those
[4:31]things.
[4:32]You know, my relationship with some of my siblings, my step siblings, I wish, you know,
[4:37]that's a whole other book, right, being a blended family in the 70s and 80s, and Patrick
[4:41]wrote that.
[4:42]Yeah, and Patrick wrote that great, you know, she wrote a novel, Common Wealth, which
[4:47]I think, you know, from what I understand was autobiographically based.
[4:51]So, you know, there's a whole story in that that couldn't be in this, because it had
[4:56]to come back, you know, sort of to the main narrative.
[5:00]But yeah, there was some grief over the things I couldn't include, but I'm really pleased
[5:04]with the shape of it.
[5:05]The book always had its own momentum in energy, like running, often because I would run,
[5:11]and then I would come back and write, and so I would bring that feeling into my writing.
[5:15]But the book always sort of told me what it needed and where it was going, and my job
[5:20]as a writer was to sort of listen and to let it be what it wanted to be.
[5:25]And there were many times when I felt the shape wasn't quite there, and, you know, I kept
[5:30]winnowing it, you know, and trimming out what wasn't essential.
[5:34]So when you went back to visit your dad when he was sick, you said you wanted to, you
[5:38]had been working for Outside Magazine for 12 years, and you told him you wanted to write
[5:43]about being a mom.
[5:44]Yeah.
[5:45]And he said something like, pick something serious.
[5:46]Yeah.
[5:47]Well, he said, make sure, you know, whatever you write about, make sure it's important.
[5:50]Make sure it's important.
[5:51]Did that become the beginning of the book?
[5:53]Well, it was interesting, because that was sort of a hard moment, because my father was
[5:57]sick at the time, and although, and his illness was quite short, so it progressed very
[6:02]rapidly.
[6:03]But this was still the very beginning of it, and so he was still, you know, in good shape.
[6:07]And so when he said that, and I, you know, I just just said that, like, that came from
[6:11]deep within me.
[6:12]It had not been pre-meditated that I was going to tell him, or even that I'd really
[6:16]been thinking about it.
[6:17]I must have been, right?
[6:18]And that's sort of the beauty of that intuitive voice, which is what the book is about
[6:22]a lot, like listening.
[6:23]Like we have our own answers.
[6:25]We don't need to grab things off the shelf and find the answers.
[6:29]And so that, you know, as he says to you at the end, like when he says, listen to your
[6:32]own body, listen to your body now, feel like that's such a theme.
[6:35]It's like, listen to your body exactly.
[6:38]And so I said, you know, I want to write about being a mother, I think.
[6:41]And when he said, make sure whatever you write about, it's important.
[6:44]There was that moment of like, is this not important?
[6:48]And so that I could never, you know, find out what he would think about this book.
[6:53]But I don't think I need to.
[6:54]I think that it did become, you know, important in its way.
[6:59]And so it probably was the beginning.
[7:00]I know it was the beginning of my writing about being a parent for outside.
[7:05]It was sort of that moment was the genesis of my column that I write called Raising Rippers
[7:10]about bringing up kids, you know, outside.
[7:12]And so yeah, it's just funny when you look back those moments that we're defining.
[7:16]And it, when you said that, it was a little bit of a gut punch, you know, is it not
[7:21]important?
[7:22]And he wasn't making that judgment, but sort of as his daughter, I was feeling
[7:26]like that.
[7:27]Yeah.
[7:28]Yeah.
[7:29]As we often do their appearance.
[7:30]Speaking of all the running for a minute, when your dad was sick and you visited him at
[7:33]Huntley Stage, you went running in the midst of the illness.
[7:37]You said, my legs are heavy and slow, but I don't care.
[7:39]I'm not running for speed or fitness.
[7:41]I'm running to get out of the house and escape the dread.
[7:43]What's to come?
[7:44]I'm running to feel the human air swoosh through my lungs, to feel normal again and just
[7:48]a little bit alive.
[7:49]I'm running to forget and to remember.
[7:51]Can you talk to me about like how you felt right then?
[7:53]Yeah.
[7:54]I mean, the grief in the house, even before he died, was so heavy.
[7:58]And it was a very physical feeling for me.
[8:01]And I had lost people that I loved before grandparents and, but I hadn't experienced
[8:06]such an intense close-up experience with grief.
[8:11]And it was, it surprised me because it was so physical.
[8:14]You think it's an emotion, like an a sadness.
[8:16]But for me, it was a felt sensation.
[8:19]It was like a layer on my skin or heavy, heavy coat.
[8:24]And I wanted to kind of scrape it off my skin.
[8:27]I would take these hot showers at his house thinking I could rinse it off.
[8:32]I even went home to Santa Fe and went to like the fancy Japanese spa on the
[8:36]mountain and got the salt rub and, you know, lying there as like the salt is
[8:41]literally in like if I be of a little cut, it's like salt in the wounds.
[8:45]It really was that.
[8:46]And I got up and, you know, she rinsed it off and I was hoping I would feel better and
[8:51]it was still there.
[8:52]And so in that moment that you just read about, that was on one of my trips back.
[8:56]It was just this, you know, in deep need to get out and to be out in the open and in
[9:03]the fresh air and breathing in that clean air and just out of the clawing heaviness
[9:10]of grief, which, you know, I thought then when he died several weeks later that that
[9:14]would, the grief would end.
[9:17]And I just, you know, little did I know it was just beginning.
[9:21]And tell me more about the anxiety that came afterwards.
[9:24]Like had you had anxiety like this or had this?
[9:27]I had never had like health anxiety like that.
[9:30]I had had, no, I'd never had extreme anxiety at all.
[9:33]I mean, I've had little worries here and there over things.
[9:37]And, you know, of course, when you become a mother, so I'd become a mother two years
[9:40]earlier to my daughter, Pippa.
[9:42]And all of a sudden, that's a whole new level of worry that you've never experienced.
[9:46]So, you know, I'd had those moments of like that I brought this creature into the world
[9:50]and now I have to keep her alive, you know, normal mother stuff.
[9:54]This was like I could hear a report on the radio or read like a snippet of a headline.
[10:00]or the first paragraph in like the modern love column in New York Times,
[10:04]which for the longest time seemed like it was the cancer column in the paper.
[10:08]And I could read that and then I would think that I had those symptoms
[10:12]and I would feel them.
[10:13]And I think it's a little different than hypochondria,
[10:16]although I'm not entirely sure,
[10:18]but it felt I didn't go to the doctor all the time.
[10:21]I just, I was afraid I was dying.
[10:23]And partially it was postpartum.
[10:26]It was grief.
[10:28]It was also a little bit of midlife.
[10:30]You know, I was probably that the time is 38.
[10:33]You know, when you lose your parent, you really do realize that you're going to die.
[10:37]And I think as that's what youth is, right?
[10:39]You don't know that or you don't believe it or it's not going to happen to you.
[10:42]And then you lose a parent and you realize it will.
[10:45]And you're a mother at the same time and you're like, please not now.
[10:49]So it was, you know, my mind, I've always had a big imagination.
[10:53]I've been a writer since I was a young girl and a huge reader.
[10:56]And so the imagination is a great tool as a writer,
[10:59]but my imagination went a little bit haywire and I had something new every week.
[11:03]I felt like, and this went on for about a year and a half.
[11:06]I feel like you also have this added layer.
[11:08]I feel like a pressure or something because you were a child of divorce
[11:12]and you didn't get to see your dad on a daily basis growing up.
[11:14]And I thought you wrote about that in such a beautiful way.
[11:17]My parents are divorced.
[11:18]I relate to that part of that.
[11:20]And you wrote, if it's okay, if I read this part, it was so good.
[11:22]The heaviness in my chest is old and familiar.
[11:25]It's not quite grief, not yet, though I can feel that coming,
[11:27]but a hitch in my heart, a tick of apprehension.
[11:30]Something is missing, but I don't know what.
[11:32]I feel as young as the girl and dad's pictures.
[11:34]I'm homesick that is comforting in between feeling, not quite there,
[11:37]not quite here that I felt my whole life with my father.
[11:40]Our relationship has been a constant cycle of coming together and moving apart.
[11:43]Hello's and goodbyes, the excitement of arriving,
[11:46]and the guilt of going all twisted up like a tangled skein of wool.
[11:49]Happy and sad.
[11:50]Now that we're heading toward our last goodbye,
[11:52]the word has a terrible new meaning, homesick.
[11:55]Oh, yeah, I know.
[11:57]It's so beautiful.
[11:58]I was like crying as I read all this on my gosh.
[12:00]Oh, thank you.
[12:01]That, like, intense in and out feeling that, like, loneliness,
[12:04]but you're not alone.
[12:06]Yes, it just stays with you.
[12:08]It's like, I think it's in your muscle memory as a child of divorce,
[12:13]and that here and there, and kind of their home and neither place,
[12:18]although I will say, like, I had very loving parents,
[12:22]and, you know, we had very comfortable homes in both places,
[12:26]but something about going back and forth.
[12:28]It wasn't leaving when you weren't quite ready,
[12:31]and that apprehension of what would be waiting for you
[12:34]when you got there and how would it have changed since you were last there,
[12:38]and then, you know, the awful feeling of leaving,
[12:42]because I did only see my father four or five times a year,
[12:45]which now, in this, in this day and age of divorce,
[12:48]is, you know, that is so different.
[12:50]Kids are going back and forth all the time.
[12:53]So the leavings were always hard.
[12:55]I mean, my dad's face was just the saddest thing on the planet,
[12:59]and so that feeling of kind of being in between,
[13:03]but twixt in between, I don't think ever goes away.
[13:06]Now, I'm like the one who has a divorce murder,
[13:10]and I so didn't want to be that person,
[13:13]because they could see my sad face.
[13:15]Sometimes I remember at the beginning,
[13:17]I would like say goodbye at their death,
[13:19]and I would have to like hide behind the cars on the street
[13:21]and like cry and make sure nobody like lean back to see me.
[13:24]It's so hard to protect yourself.
[13:26]I know.
[13:27]And I don't know.
[13:28]Carrying,
[13:29]but the worst is when you have to feel like you have to carry the emotions of your parents.
[13:33]Yes.
[13:34]And that's what I did.
[13:35]And that's what I did.
[13:36]And that's a lot for a child.
[13:39]Right.
[13:40]And you have these loyalties and who are you loyal to
[13:42]and you think you have to choose like it's a them or, you know,
[13:45]it's an either or.
[13:46]And this was also new.
[13:48]And, you know, we certainly weren't talking about it.
[13:51]So it was just going into my little seven-year-old body and rain.
[13:55]And, you know, again, my parents were so lucky.
[13:58]And they got, you know, they kept it together.
[14:01]And they got along and didn't ever speak ill of each other,
[14:04]which was an incredible gift.
[14:06]Incredible.
[14:07]But as a child, when you don't know what's going on,
[14:10]you don't know how all of a sudden you ended up in New Jersey,
[14:13]when your father's in Virginia,
[14:15]you start to make up stories.
[14:17]And, you know, you want to solve it.
[14:19]It becomes a mystery.
[14:20]And I think that's a large part why I became a writer.
[14:24]I mean, I'd always had that urge.
[14:26]But I think you're trying to solve your own story.
[14:29]And so did you ever get any formal writing training?
[14:32]Like, I feel like you're such a beautiful writer.
[14:34]Thank you.
[14:35]No, seriously.
[14:36]And I went back and I read a bunch of essays online.
[14:38]I love your column.
[14:39]I'm like, printing out the brief girls one for my daughter.
[14:42]Just the way you see things.
[14:43]Even a simple topic becomes really like literary and beautiful.
[14:47]Right.
[14:48]So does it all come naturally?
[14:49]Or did you take any classes or do you have a workshop?
[14:51]A little bit of both.
[14:52]I've just always written, and I'll mention this
[14:55]because it just happened yesterday.
[14:56]But I was in New Jersey at a reading.
[14:58]And my fifth grade teacher came to see me.
[15:01]And she was hugely influential in my life in that when I was
[15:06]a fifth grade, so nine or 10.
[15:08]I wrote a piece, a story.
[15:10]And she recognized something in it.
[15:13]And she became kind of a champion for me and a believer,
[15:16]even when many times I didn't believe.
[15:19]And I write about this in running home.
[15:21]But my sister, who's older than me, had a typewriter,
[15:24]and was, quote unquote, the writer in the family.
[15:26]And you know, when you're a kid, you make up this weird logic.
[15:29]Like, my sister's the writer, so I can't be.
[15:32]So I always had that tug a little bit.
[15:34]or talking about that, you know, the twist in between, like,
[15:37]am I or aren't I?
[15:38]Like, I want to be, but my sister is.
[15:40]So anyway, the fifth grade teacher, she really recognized it
[15:43]and named it in me.
[15:45]And that stuck with me.
[15:47]And I just kept writing, but I didn't take creative writing
[15:51]classes in college or anything, again,
[15:53]because I'd had that storyline in my head.
[15:56]And that's what this book's about, too,
[15:58]is the stories we tell ourselves that hold us back,
[16:01]like that one.
[16:02]is ultimately like this book, I hope, that set us free.
[16:05]But I became a journalist at outside,
[16:07]and I really learned how to write there.
[16:09]And it was, it suited me, but I've also always kept notebooks.
[16:14]So I write in notebooks, and I capture those moments
[16:17]that I was talking about earlier.
[16:19]And they don't have to be for anything.
[16:21]You know, it's either like something I observe on the street
[16:24]or a conversation I over here,
[16:26]or I thought I have about something.
[16:28]And I'll write it down, and there's no pressure
[16:30]for it to be perfect or beautiful.
[16:33]But it's just something I know caught my eye.
[16:36]And that's something that my father taught me.
[16:38]He always carried notebooks and little stenopads in his pocket.
[16:41]And one time he gave me one, and he just had labeled it,
[16:45]things my dad says I won't want to forget or something.
[16:48]And so I learned from him how to, you know,
[16:51]be an observer and take notes.
[16:53]And that's a big part of it.
[16:54]So to write like that, like it doesn't have to be for something,
[16:58]becomes that writing practice that was influential to me.
[17:01]And when I met my friend Natalie Goldberg,
[17:04]who is quite well known writing teacher and student of Zen,
[17:09]and she teaches her students just to write and not edit
[17:13]and to fill their notebooks.
[17:15]And so I would do that.
[17:16]I did writing practice for many years.
[17:18]I still do.
[17:19]And that's really my, when you write that way,
[17:21]you might start writing about an apple.
[17:24]And then you might end up writing about your mother,
[17:26]you know, in the course of that 10 minute writing exercise,
[17:29]you see where your mind goes and the leaps.
[17:32]And that's really the practice I do.
[17:36]And then you can take situations like the horrible one
[17:39]with the men telling you on the path,
[17:41]and you turn it into something,
[17:43]you like that must be so, like,
[17:45]to get some sort of closure on it.
[17:47]When in actuality, there is nothing now.
[17:49]I mean, how do you cope with knowing,
[17:52]like back to anxiety, I guess,
[17:53]for a little bit and running by yourself on these trails?
[17:56]That things can happen.
[17:57]I mean, you wrote a whole essay
[17:58]which was so great about, like, people ask you,
[18:00]are you afraid to run alone?
[18:01]Yes.
[18:02]And he listed like 57 things, why you should be afraid
[18:04]and whatever.
[18:05]But then you go anyway.
[18:07]You go anyway.
[18:08]Do you feel like the people in your life, like your husband
[18:10]and your kid, do you feel protective of you
[18:12]in these situations?
[18:13]Do you feel like you're ever being, like, reckless?
[18:16]Yeah, I think about that a lot
[18:18]because the stakes are obviously higher now
[18:20]than I'm a mother.
[18:21]But I think in the piece you're referring to,
[18:23]I was attacked on the trail.
[18:25]And that's a chapter in the book.
[18:27]And this was when my daughter was four months old
[18:30]and we were hiking.
[18:31]I was hiking with her on the trails
[18:33]that I had hiked every day of my pregnancy.
[18:35]Very familiar to me.
[18:37]And the man was caught
[18:39]and he went to jail for a period of time,
[18:42]but now he's out again.
[18:44]And I see him occasionally.
[18:46]And I do sometimes wonder, like,
[18:48]it is kind of a marvel to me
[18:50]that I came through that
[18:52]and not only went back to the trails,
[18:54]but then began running ultra distances alone.
[18:58]And I think what that episode taught me
[19:01]is that I can protect myself
[19:02]and my strength is running.
[19:04]Because as he came toward me on the trail,
[19:06]I ran.
[19:07]And in that moment,
[19:09]I realized that I'm strong
[19:11]and that I am fast and that can save me.
[19:14]But I think I had to put it way away.
[19:16]I think I had to tuck that way down
[19:18]because of how horrifying it was.
[19:21]And he could have killed my daughter.
[19:24]And that as a mother, as you know,
[19:27]you kind of can't think about that.
[19:29]You really, like,
[19:30]you just have to close that door for a...
[19:32]So I tucked it away.
[19:33]But then I got...
[19:34]I had systems.
[19:35]I also call it like I would always tell my husband
[19:37]where I was going.
[19:38]I bring a friend before I had a dog
[19:41]who could run with me.
[19:42]I brought my friend's dog.
[19:44]I always carried my phone
[19:45]though a lot of times I was out of range.
[19:47]I carried pepper spray.
[19:48]So there were things I could do to mitigate risk.
[19:51]But it seemed to me
[19:52]and it became clear to me
[19:54]that not going out into the wilderness
[19:57]or onto the trails was a greater risk to me.
[20:00]going and I think my husband he you know he thinks about it but he knows that we have those systems
[20:05]and I and he knows how important it is to me but I think about it all the time the risk of it
[20:10]and so it's not just that you run it's that you've become this ultra runner and you compete
[20:15]right and you run like so what's the longest you've ever run so the longest is a hundred miles
[20:20]and I ran that last summer at the Leadville Trail 100 which is you know very prestigious race if you
[20:27]know the book born to run it's the book that Chris McDougal writes about it's a fantastic race
[20:32]it's eight more than eight hundred people but fewer than half finish the course and so that
[20:37]was and you did it over what time period I did in 19 hours 53 minutes and I was I won the race
[20:43]I was the first woman I know it was a convergence you know I write a lot in this book about how
[20:48]things come up at certain moments and there's almost like a magic to them a serendipity and things
[20:54]align and that was certainly true was a lot of my dad's material that he left behind that I
[20:59]found after he died that formed this sort of secondary narrative in the book of discovering who he
[21:06]was as I was discovering who I was as a runner and this material he left it was all very documented
[21:13]and organized and a different kind of person would have right after he died gone in and just
[21:19]gone through it systematically and that's not how my brain works I'm more intuitive and so I
[21:24]came to things bits and pieces and everything kind of seemed to come and show itself to me at the
[21:31]right moment and that's really how Ledville felt it was a convergence of my like real essence
[21:37]you know as a mother a writer and a runner on one day I was basically in like a 20 hour flow state
[21:43]of just you know tapped into something bigger than myself for sure yeah how do you even how do you
[21:51]eat so I eat energy gels I eat goo the kind I use is goo and they're my sponsor which is I've
[21:59]been using them forever each pack it has a hundred calories so I need about 200 calories an hour
[22:04]so that means I mean you know one every 30 minutes and then I drink a electrolyte drink that has
[22:10]like 200 calories a bottle so as soon as I start spacing out or if I get kletsy or trip on rocks
[22:17]I know that I'm behind in my calories it's amazing yeah do you ever think about doing something more
[22:22]like the Olympics or some I mean they don't have trail running or oh my gosh that the marathon
[22:32]seems way more terrifying to me than like running fast on the road for 26 miles seems way harder
[22:39]and more scary to me than you know a slower 100 miles I know I love just being in the wilderness
[22:46]and being in the mountains you know the running is so important as a writer that's how I you know
[22:50]that's my creative process is being in motion but it's also being in nature and being you know
[22:56]feeling that there's a larger force out there and that it is big enough to hold you and you feel
[23:02]small in it but in a good way not in a I'm in significant way but that I fit into something bigger
[23:09]and I'm connected and so being in nature in it's hard like I can't think which is more essential
[23:17]is it the running or is it the wilderness and I think that's why being an ultra runner so beautiful
[23:21]because it's too combined well that's just the coolest yeah I can't I'm at the stamina and all
[23:28]the stuff I mean physically an emotion yeah well it's very mental and I mean running is very
[23:34]physical I'm not going to 100% you have to be running you know 100% of the time you're running
[23:40]like your your legs are moving but your mind and it's such a great way to study your mind because
[23:46]in the beginning part of the race or run and I talk about this in the prologue you know you're
[23:51]excited what's happening what's going to come and in the middle you're sort of in that like
[23:55]you know every little thing that you feel and your body becomes a worry like is this a problem
[24:00]is that you know and you have to work through it and in a way that's why meditation is so good
[24:06]because it trains you or you learn how to not attach to those thoughts like the thoughts will come
[24:12]completely when you're running 100 miles invariably you will think many times probably
[24:18]am I going to make it to the end I'm just off and I'm going to trip and fall or you know I
[24:23]going to get lost and if you were to attach to all those thoughts you probably wouldn't finish
[24:29]so what you have to do is just see them and say oh there's that thought again and you know if I
[24:34]have a pain in my ankle early on in the race I will consciously think like okay I note that thought
[24:40]and then I'll just tell myself like if this if I'm still thinking this or feeling this in three or
[24:44]four miles like okay then I can take it more seriously but basically it's just my way of saying like
[24:49]I see you like next you know move on and don't get hooked on those thoughts so it is a meditation
[24:57]you know and you have to be kind of vigilant like you won't you're not going to not have the
[25:01]fears but the trick is to just see them and then let them pass well so now that you've finished
[25:07]writing this book and when did you write this book like what was your process did you write it
[25:11]at night did you write it oh when during the day yeah when actually like I wrote it all over the
[25:16]place so I wrote it my general sort of best kind of day and every day is different as a mother
[25:22]writer and a runner right yeah but you know I would run first thing in the morning I would get
[25:26]the kids off then I would go for a run and then I would come back and work and so I would sit
[25:31]at my desk and my my desk I mean my either my kitchen table or outside under the portal if it was
[25:37]nice out and I would usually work so I might be at my desk by eleven and the kids are in school
[25:43]till three and then I wrote a lot at night and so then you know we get the kids to better on
[25:48]eat and then I would often write for me till ten and would you do it again did you enjoy 100
[25:53]percent I loved it the book was a flow state I'm not always just like not every day when you run
[25:59]do you feel great and does it feel effortless but the book very much wanted to be told and
[26:05]there was just magic around every corner and I think that was because I was willing to let
[26:10]the book show me and anytime like the few times that I got all bossy with the book and thought
[26:15]I was in charge like I would hit the wall a little bit and I would find that resistance and
[26:21]things weren't flowing and then I realized I had to just step back and just listen to the book
[26:26]so I would do it and then I of course I also wrote while running and I would get you know
[26:32]sentences would come or if I if I didn't like a way a paragraph was sounding just you know you
[26:36]absorb that in your body and as I would run it was sort of like jostle itself loose and then it
[26:43]would reassemble itself in the right way with the right words in my head and you would actually
[26:47]remember it I would either try to remember it I had this this whole system I would either just
[26:52]try to hold it in my head and then I realized then I was holding too many thoughts and as I was
[26:57]running I was trying not to forget them so then I started carrying a little note card shoved
[27:01]down my sports bra with a pen and I would stop and write them but then they would get all
[27:07]sweat smeared I would get back and I couldn't read them at my car at the trailhead and then
[27:12]I you know because I carried my phone after I was attacked for safety I would type them into my
[27:17]phone and then I was pretty much the last person to discover voice memo on her phone and so now
[27:22]sometimes they'll talk into it so I do all those things and then but more even than the actual
[27:27]sentences that are rewritten while I run it's that feeling of running that flow and that momentum
[27:32]and the rhythm writing to me has always been like music and running you know gives me that cadence
[27:39]so then I'll just come back and write from that place it's like the running is instrumental
[27:44]part and the words are the yeah yeah it's like that's how you make the that's anyway very
[27:52]cool I didn't really go most of the time tell me what you see coming next for you more of these
[27:58]ultra running I've got a race oh my gosh yeah I've got a race on Saturday which I kind of
[28:03]can't believe what's today Monday yeah I'm running a hundred kilometers on Saturday in Virginia 62
[28:09]miles I know it sounds sort of absurd but yes I'm running a race I've got a couple other races on
[28:16]the calendar and I'm writing I'm working on my next book oh good yeah and it's sort of a deeper
[28:22]exploration or a continuation of this story that starts with this very traumatic wilderness
[28:29]accident I had in 2016 on the salmon river in Idaho when I broke my leg and then goes through
[28:36]and sort of looks at how my body had been very strong I trained my body but the question became
[28:43]like what if my greatest strength as an athlete is not my body but my mind and so it's a deeper
[28:50]look at how I used mindfulness and meditation to train myself as an ultra runner and as a writer
[28:58]and then it you know concludes with the Leadville that day that was just beyond expectation like it
[29:05]it made in some ways it made no sense that you know I'm in my mid 40s that this could happen but it was
[29:11]it was such a mental you know I had done all the work and it everything just came together
[29:18]wow so great do you have any advice to aspiring authors write things down and just keep that
[29:24]notebook or keep your phone or your voice memo and write things down even when you don't know what
[29:30]it's for it doesn't have to be for anything I feel notebooks like one a month of my you know the
[29:35]kind of notebook I use I've used the same time forever and a lot of times I don't know what it's for
[29:41]and then only later you know when you have a little bit of distance on it can you go back and see
[29:47]the narrative in fact that's what happened with this book I mean for me years after my dad died
[29:51]I did not know I was writing the book I was writing in my notebooks all the time about the grief
[29:56]the anxiety the details of losing him
[30:00]And the running and I didn't know what the running was for but I allowed myself to be in that
[30:04]place of not knowing with it. I mean there was a scene in the book where my husband who's very
[30:09]patient and you know we give each other a lot of freedom even he was starting to get impatient. He's
[30:14]like what is this for this running and I said I don't know but I know that it's about more than
[30:18]running and I was just in the thick of it just but doing it and then later when I had that distance
[30:25]like literal miles under my feet could I look back at those notebooks and see that I had really
[30:30]been writing the book in the notebooks and that to trust yourself again you have the answers inside
[30:38]not someone else you know if you think something is interesting or there's a story there you know
[30:43]write it down and I always just keep something by my bed because I think like you know I get a lot
[30:48]of ideas just as I'm falling asleep like in that new they're here nor there a place that liminal space
[30:53]between wake and sleep and a lot of times I'll be too lazy to turn on the light and write it down
[30:58]always write it down because in the morning you'll try to remember what it was and it's hard.
[31:03]It's awesome. Thank you so much for coming out. That was great. Thanks again to my sponsor
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[31:23]Thanks for listening to moms don't have time to read books. You can follow me on Instagram
[31:27]at moms don't have time to read books and at zippy Owens and my new podcast at kids do have
[31:34]time to read. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at texture sound for the sound editing
[31:38]and thank you to morning moon productions for providing this fantastic intro and out trim music.
[31:43]Thanks for listening. You can always email me at zippy at zippyowans.com