Photo: Martin Dugard
Taking Paris hits stores four weeks from today. I write this because it suddenly feels close and I want to remind myself that it's not tomorrow. Be patient. Twenty-eight days is a long time to wait for anything, including a Christmas-like event landing the first week in September. So I must remain calm, knowing that four Tuesdays from now will come when it comes. As I've written before, I don't know how other writers manage the long wait between completion of the manuscript and the publication date. I normally choose to ignore it.
But this time is different.
Right now, on the desk in front of me, I've got a very large Michelin map of Europe to help plan an upcoming adventure with Callie. Key cities are circled in pen, along with the minor burgs I've seen before and would like to visit again (Cherbourg, anyone?). But the map is a minor distraction, just like the continuing inability of the Angels to find starting pitching, and the endless stream of books I've been reading these past two months without really paying attention.
At the end of the day, writing is a solitary game. Calene supports me completely, always has, but she can only watch as my thoughts continuously return to Taking Paris and its upcoming release, whereupon the reviewers will weigh in with their critiques and the general public will vote with their dollars. I console myself now by re-reading some of the kind reviews that have already been published, but those are false prophets. Placebos. The true comfort in publishing a book comes with the knowledge that the writing was the best I've ever done — and a spot on The New York Times bestseller list. Good writing may be its own reward, but good writing and good sales pay the mortgage.
This may sound odd for those who know me well, with my independent streak and fondness for the Irish exit, but there are times when I long for a writing community. Covering the Tour de France all those years was more the merrier for the hours in the car with fellow writer Austin Murphy and the post-stage press room, stringing together a few thousand words on deadline surrounded by a cadre of international journalists bent on the same task.
And I am thankful for good friends in the writing business who email from time to time, or simply pick up the phone — guys like Martin Smith and Brian Sobel. Without them I would be wandering in a desert of my own making, just like when I transferred colleges in my junior year and lost my tribe. At the time, I didn't think of them as my tribe. I thought of them as the guys I drank beer with and stayed up late talking about records and girls; one Terry Sheridan drinking a Budweiser and flipping The River to Side Four while smoking a Marlboro. So I didn't think it would matter if I returned home to California for my last year of school. But it did.
While driving home from Mammoth, I was listening to swimmer Missy Franklin on Julie Foudy's podcast explain how alone she felt after graduating from college and returning home to train for the 2016 Olympics without the familiar faces of her university teammates. Her discussion of mental health was taped one year ago, a prescient commentary on the issues taking center stage in sports. I look at the solitude and lofty expectations that crushed a few notable athletes, all because they suddenly felt alone on the world stage with absolutely no one that could relate to the pressure they carried.
I certainly don't feel that sort of pressure. I don't fly through the air, twisting and somersaulting, suddenly lost as I can't locate my altitude, a very good chance of breaking my neck on landing. But on these days when the new book is four weeks out and I fervently pray that Taking Paris is the book that will finally land me on the NYT list on my own merits rather than piggybacking on the big names of my co-authors, it would be nice to have a small tribe to call bullshit and tell me to get off my high horse. It's just a book, they would say. Have a beer. Turn up the volume. Debate whether or not “Wreck on the Highway” really happened.
I do have such a tribe.
Two, in fact.
Actually, three.
My friends in the Tough Guy Book Club bust balls all the time. They've already read Taking Paris as part of our discussion and offered their opinions. Our weekend in Eugene at the Trials was epic, the latest in the series of adventures we've enjoyed around the world over the last decade.
My village of coaching friends has an insufferable group text that woke me up at 4 a.m. all last week to break down Olympic track and field events, to the point of predicting relay splits just for the hell of it in the wee hours. They're mostly sprint coaches and like to have a laugh at the expense of us distance guys, but I love them like brothers.
And then there's that original tribe from Northern Michigan University (I mention the name of the school because I recently discovered that the all-knowing Google has no response to the question typed in by some anonymous reader: "Where did Martin Dugard go to college?"), a group of buddies from Gant Hall with whom I reconnected years ago — although the precise location of one Terry Sheridan is still a mystery.
I started writing this blog without a plan, other than to say my book comes out in four weeks and I'm a little scared no one is going to read the pages I bled on every single day. Then the words to this missive wrote themselves, and I realized I am not enduring this alone. This fan of the Irish exit and deep introverted solitude actually has tribes — plural — ready to crack a beer, turn up the volume, and debate long into the night.
No matter what happens on September 7.
Lucky man.