Norfolk Te_____, Day 68. The Limits of the Last-Minute Sprint
I once described (to myself—I know, I’m weird) that my running performance was one of the best metaphors for my study productivity levels I could think of. Take an average race, in a place I haven’t had time to explore. I don’t know where the finish line is when I begin the race (or rather, I don’t the path leading up to it). I run the race—maybe I am describing what happened at Mt. Sac Invitational my sophomore year of high school cross country—and I refrain from picking up the pace too drastically out of caution. I run downhill, turn left (I still remember this, wow) down the turf, hit on the pavement trail, and my instinct tells me to run faster. The finish is close, but can I trust pure gut? I pick up a little, and in a minute, I see the finish line literally on a small hill around the corner. I sprint with all my might and finish, realizing that the last-minute sprint had too much leftover energy in it.
That’s the buzzword: last-minute sprint. I have done the majority of an essay the morning it was due before—waking up at 7 and hitting upon dream-inspired clarity to make it to the finish line by 11. I won’t say it was unpleasant because I didn’t feel anything—my body went into a hyper-attentive mode, sustained for the duration of the day much to my inconvenience.
The point is this: I’ve always counted on the last-minute sprint to round out a race to the deadline. But today, I learned the literal limit of this real-life metaphor. At the track session from 5 to 6, we did four sets of a 1000 metres followed by 500m (100m to 200m jog between them). In the last 500, I curved around the track with my fellow runners and then sprinted, out of a need to get out the unused energy from the workout. I got up to the standard start-finish mark on the track, but had a sudden realization: I had 200 metres left. At this point, my lungs couldn’t handle the intensity. I dropped my pace, barely able to breathe or keep going until I was running again with the others. They passed me. At the end, they called my move ‘mental’—jokingly, of course, but it taught me something.
The last-minute sprint is a desperate spirit of procrastination. I know that I started my Romanticism essay last week, but finally today I arose from intellectual stalemate and pulled together a more workable thesis. I know I can’t let myself fall into that pressure tank of time that shapes a lot of my writing process usually. I need to finish before Katya visits. (And finish the other essay.) And enjoy Dublin this weekend.
P.S. Yes, I didn’t really include a summary of my day this time. Well, I enjoyed the 19th Century seminar on Henry James’ Portrait of A Lady and the Romanticism lecture on Robinson’s Lyrical Tales and Hannah More’s ‘Slavery: A Poem’, but today’s real-life metaphor stands as a better centrepiece.
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