Just call me Michael Phelps

The Olympics are always a good writing time for me (if I don’t get sucked too much into watching them), because I find myself thinking: Look at those people. Pure dedication. Constant training and sacrifice. These athletes work in the gym every morning at 7am, then swim in the pool for eight hours a day, or bike a hundred miles, or do flips across a gym mat all day. If they can do that, I can sit down at my desk at 5am every morning and write for a few hours (without complaining). I want to be in the writing Olympics, I want my work widely published and produced, and if that’s going to happen, I’ve got to train like these people.

I’m sure that these two weeks are probably the biggest surge of the year for gym memberships and sales of running shoes (maybe except for New Year’s week). Maybe it’s the same way for the number of pages written in the dark early morning. And like most gym memberships, attendance at the desk will fade off over time (especially once Lost starts coming at at 10pm). But hopefully, for some of us at least, the habits will stick.

(I have manged to write 7 pages in the dark hours in the past two days, by the way.)