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A lot of people have been asking me how do I write all those pages, and how I keep going to the gym, well, I just finished an hour on the treadmill. It’s the first time doing that in at least two weeks, maybe more. I’ve been doing treadmill as warm up at the gym three days a week, but that’s like ten minutes – it’s a warm up. Now, I’ve been making a choice between getting to my desk to write pages on the new book first thing in the morning, or doing treadmill. As the book deadline approaches I’ll be choosing writing over treadmill, sleep. Lots of good things go away when the book eats the world. During this recent period of no treadmill, I fell on the stairs, just missed my footing. I was so far in my head and my imaginary world that I wasn’t paying quite enough attention to the real world. I ended up on the floor at the bottom of the stairs, landing on my knee, and arm. It made enough noise that Jonathon, my husband, came out of his office to see me crumpled there, and well . . . the whole “Are you all right?” and try to help me up.

I waved him away, not because I didn’t want the help, but because I wasn’t sure that I should move yet. He asked again, “Are you all right?” I gave the only real answer I had, “I’m not sure yet, give me a minute.” I lay there paying attention to my body as the shock of the fall wore off, and then gingerly, with Jonathon’s help I got to my feet. I could stand, I could move. My knee and ankle weren’t happy with me, but everything worked. That happened at about 1:00 in the afternoon, by early evening I was at the gym for my regular workout. My only concessions were the patella bands I wear almost always, and I found my old ankle brace from when I did the original ankle injury that would lead me to the gym in the first place. The bruise and swelling on the knee seemed the worst of it, but I did the whole workout and my trainer made me promise to ice things when I got home. I did, and it was better. In fact, I used the ankle brace all week. And yesterday my ankle hurt a lot. This morning when I got up for the treadmill I left the ankle brace off, and the ankle was better. If the injury isn’t that bad wearing the braces and things can actually hurt, or cause an injury. But because of how badly I’d injured my ankle years ago, I had been overly cautious: lesson learned.

I hadn’t fallen like that in years, because all the injuries and the gym time have made me aware of my body in a way that I hadn’t been before. So important safety tip, no matter how deeply absorbed in the book, I must pay attention to actual walking in the real world. But more than that, I believe that going so long without the treadmill was beginning to cause all my injuries to hurt more. Some of my injuries are permeant, there’s no fixing them, which is why I’m nearly religious about the gym. Because putting muscle around my joints has been the best remedy for all of it, with the extra bonus of looking great, and feeling better and more energized. So, with the belief that no treadmill was beginning to eat away at the progress I’d made physically, I got up this morning and hit the it. I was happy to be doing it again, but somewhere around fifteen minutes in, I began to feel less happy. I’d just done two weeks of not going much over ten minutes at a shot, and now my body, my will power, was going, “Aren’t we done yet?”

By thirty minutes in, I almost stopped, not because it hurt, or because I wasn’t moving at a good pace. I actually got the speed up to a new record. It was a pace that five years ago I’d have had to run to manage, now I walked it well, and it felt great to loosen up everything and get moving. I’m beginning to be a believer in if I don’t sweat on the treadmill I’m not working hard enough. Today the sweat wasn’t just about the workout though, because when I came into the gym it was 56 degrees fariheniet because the heat wasn’t on. I’d switched the heat on, which was good until about thirty minutes in when the furnace decided to blast me with very hot air in an effort to raise the temperature ten degrees in about fifteen minutes. I was so not happy, and I wanted to stop. It was hot, uncomfortable. I couldn’t find music that I wanted to listen to, I had done half the time, surely I could stop now. thirty-five minutes, thirty-eight minutes. Gods, the time was creeping. I decided to head for forty-five minutes and then I’d let myself stop. I upped the speed and just focused on moving my body, focused on keeping my core tight and letting it help hold me in place, as I moved. At forty-five minutes I thought, “It’s only fifteen minutes until I make an hour, I can do that.”

I so didn’t want to make my hour. I wanted to quit, several times. It was too early, it was too hot, my music wasn’t working for me, my ankle, my knee, my . . . I do much the same thing on writing. There are lots of days when I don’t want to make pages, when I’m feeling less than inspired, but I tell myself, “Just four pages,” and somedays I stop with that, but most days I urge myself on with just one more page, sometimes just three more lines. I coax, conjole, and just plain stubborn it out, because otherwise the books won’t get written. It’s about will power, about simply doing it when you don’t want to, when you’re tired, when you’re wanting to do so many other easier things, but you do the hard thing. You do what helps you feel healthy, helps pay the bills, helps you not have weird dreams because you haven’t been making enough pages, whatever – you do it.