Running and writing.

Photo credit: Toby Melville/Reuters

I've known for a long time that hiking and running open up new ways of thinking for me. In times when I'm chewing on an idea I can find myself going over the same ground again and again, in repeating circular fashion. If I grab a pencil too soon the idea stays in its rudimentary form. A bare skeleton.

But if I go for a run, or for a hike in the forest, the idea elaborates itself. With each step I find more than my physical self moving forward. Before long my thinking has moved into new territory, found new linkages, discovered more applications, uncovered new memories.

On return I often can't stop writing, my original thought having birthed an entire way of seeing the world in new light.

Other experiences in my life have taught me the connections between memory and body, but this one is particularly vivid because it's so frequent and so useful. I hadn't really given it much thought, but I've just come across an essay on other writers who are runners.

From Homer's Iliad to A.E. Housman, Jonathan Swift to Louisa May Alcott, Joyce Carol Oates to Malcolm Gladwell--all runners.

Here's Nick Repatrazone, writing in the Atlantic.