Today’s and yesterday’s runs: 4.75 m, 49:03 min; 4.75 m, 46:40 min; 6.07 m; 1:30:00 min. YT: 691.91. I have a friend in town, so yesterday’s run started alone and ended in a long walk around the South of the island. Spending the time with one of my oldest, dearest friends (in town from Zurich for two days) rather than running alone is fully in the spirit My Thousand Mile Year.

Vollmond (Full Moon) at BAM

I saw Pina Bausch at Brooklyn Academy of Music last night – Vollmond, aka Full Moon. It was a dance of romantic relationships at their most turbulent (moon-crazy), of psychic agony and sweet pleasures and emotional sturm and drang. Relationships portrayed through dance (oh God, such dance) as playful, sexy, obsessive, miserable, wonderful, manipulative, co-dependent, abusive, revelatory … but ultimately thrilling and ALIVE. And effing HOT.

Needless to say, I loved it. We all left the theatre feeling the need to dance, and I started wondering why I was spending so much time running that I could be dancing. But today on my run, which I fought like a hibernating bear, I reached a moment where I broke through and went with the music, felt the chill of the October air distributed against my skin, looked up into the sun as I turned a corner and headed into an unknown street, and realized (or remembered) that running, while it may not have quite the erotic heat of dance, does open my heart to that same adventurous, exploratory state that makes me want to ROAR.

Otherwise put, dancing and running both make me hungry, in every sense of the word. And… it’s time for lunch.

Today’s run: 3.01 miles, 30:17 minutes. YT: 647.51. WT: 12.86. Went to bed early and sober and awoke to zero energy. No reward for good behavior today.

There are a whole bunch of things that I do to get myself shifted into a state of concentration for writing and editing. Right now my favorite thing is serious headphones and a Phillip Glass station via Pandora. Not only does it help me focus, it makes me feel like EVERYTHING I’M DOING HAS GREAT GRAVITY AND IMPORTANCE AND SHOULD PROBABLY BE IN AN OSCAR-WINNING MOVIE.

Thank you Phillip Glass. You also make me want to see Edward Scissorhands again.

Today’s run: 5.6 miles, 1:02 min. YT: 86.5 miles. Little energy to speak of until mile four. But that’s alright. I let my body and mind relax, and I saw a lot of exotic dogs. We can’t be a coked up David Bowie circa 1973 on every single run.

Dr. Drew runs to fire up his creativity, too. From Runner’s World:

I wrote almost an entire book while I was running. I can free associate while I run, so I wrote the book Cracked almost entirely while running. Judith Regan, who was the editor and publisher of the book, sort of challenged me to come up with stories. So I went on a run and brought a tape recorder with me. You get into a different mindset when you are running. I would just tell these stories that ended up being the foundation of the book I was writing. I have more spontaneous and interesting thoughts out there, so I would dictate them and then I would transcribe them at home. But the actual story, the things I was saying, I had to run to get my mind in the right place to be that creative and spontaneously trust what was coming out of my head. I’m better at it now because I have written a bit since then, but then I didn’t know what I was doing. I’ve never been in a spontaneously creative process before and the running really helped with that.

I like my method better: A series of mnemonic cues storied in a list in the back of my brain that I regurgitate onto a pad the moment I get home. It’s possible that if I carried a recorder I’d get much more written. But I really don’t like to verbalize my mental scribbles, until they’re written down. It tends to bring them down like a Jenga tower.

Note that Murakami, in What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, says that he rarely gets anything on his runs that would be usable in a book. I think he’s a much more intuitive, gut-level writer. That’s probably because he is GENIUS.

Has anyone read the doc’s book, Cracked? And do you have useful, actionable thoughts, revelations, or insights while running, or do you prefer to zone out?