Alone in the crowd

We've had a number of thunderstorms here over the past week or so and it's made posting difficult; I have a surge protector, but who wants to take the chance? Even now, the clouds are rolling in again, heavy, dark-grey, fat with rain.

Over the weekend there was a triathlon staged around the two adjoining villages. They were in luck: Saturday was rainy and Sunday showery, but the race was between the gushes from the sky.

Long, lean bodies clad in all colours of lycra swam the cool sea, cycled the narrowed roads and ran the beach-front footpath for kilometres; all in the pursuit of prize money.

Out for my morning constitutional, I heard the whine of the wheels cutting through the air and the occasional clap of sparsely spread rain-coated spectators. I silently wished them well, for it was a long and arduous journey, no matter the spectacular scenery.

Later, squads of athletes jogged past, on the other side of the road. No traffic - it had been stopped for the athletes safety - and I realised the oddity: they were silent.

They passed in groups, in couples, in singles, in sprints and slow, heavy strides, as if the end were near, though I knew it to be at least three kilometres off.

But the silence. No one spoke. There were no urgings to keep going, no friendly banter as one passed another, no dares, no curses, no lung-straining gasps. Only slap or thud of heavy feet on concrete.

The faces were red with effort, or pale with exhaustion, drawn with anguish or simply blank. Legs kept running, arms kept pumping, skin kept sweating and muscles kept working.

And when they were gone, I wondered why these men and women pushed themselves so. What made them, in their camaraderie, continue on in isolation? These are elite athletes, pushing themselves to their personal limits of physical endurance.

I'd seen them practicing the week prior to the race, riding up and down our long street, always in groups, chatting; the same with the jogging. Friendly, supportive and urging their colleagues on, yet race day: silence. It was as if it were okay to be helpful before anything was on the line, but once that gun went off, it was each to his own.

Kind of like writing. As authors, we have a solitary existence - to write the best work we can - yet there will always be someone out there to help should we need it. Holly Lisle, in her book Mugging the Muse (free from her website and I recommend any who wish to become a writer get a hold of it) said: If short story writers are like sprinters, and the writers of novellas are like milers, then novelists are marathoners. The ones who write over 150,000 are the Iron Men of the writing world.

We have to keep fit to reach our milestones, and like those triathletes, we do it all in silence and we do it with the same focus. Of course, once we're done writing, we don't have a stinky, sweaty skin suit to wash...