The Race of The Unknown Distance

Creative regret is just pacing for a race that turned out to be longer—or shorter—than we thought.

Dear Beautiful People,

A few years ago, a friend I’ll call C was explaining to me how bike races work. C had competed in all kinds: road racing, time trials, track sprints. Even I could grasp the basics: fastest rider wins. Then she told me about a bizarre race that challenges that basic notion: The Race of the Unknown Distance. I still don’t know much about cycling, but the concept—the philosophical questions raised by this race—have never left my mind. These questions are as applicable to writers and creators, as well as anyone with goals of one kind or another, as they are to cyclists.

In my favorite place to ride a bike: Amsterdam

In the Race of The Unknown Distance, riders begin with a course, a start time, and a field of competitors, but they lack the one piece of information that would allow them to strategize: how long it’s going to last. At some point, while racing, a bell will ring to signal the final lap. Until then, no rider has any idea how to best use their time.

You see where I’m going with this?

Some riders assume the race will be short, so they go all-out for as long as they physically can, hoping it will be over soon. Some riders hold back, conserving their energy for a final push, figuring that when the bell rings they can make up the distance with a last hard push. A few try to split the difference, riding cautiously but always on the verge of acceleration, using moderation as a strategy.

Without knowing the length of the race, every strategy contains its own form of success—and failure.

If the race is short, the cautious rider loses. If it’s long, the overly-aggressive rider collapses. And the rider who waits for the perfect moment may find that the moment never arrives—or that it arrived earlier, and passed unnoticed. Because there is no correct pace, only a series of decisions made in the absence of the one fact that would make those decisions meaningful.

There is a persistent belief among writers, and probably among anyone trying to create anything—starting a project, creating a business, getting a degree—that there will at some point be a better moment. A time when your skills are better honed, or you have a clearer idea of what the hell you’re doing. So maybe you set aside your “best” idea for that magical, mystical moment. The “right” moment.

But how do you know how much time you have left? You don’t. None of us do. Because that’s what life itself is: a Race of The Unknown Distance.

Biking past the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

What I’ve found in my own life is that creative frustration comes out of a misunderstanding of time and how we spend it. Not a failure of talent or discipline, but a failure of timing—usually the mistake is putting something off for a better moment in the future. We all want to use our energy and creative time wisely. We want to get it right. But there is no “getting it right” when the distance is unknown.

This is something another friend of mine, the brilliant ceramics artist Sandra Trujillo, taught me: never save your ideas. Don’t hoard your best thoughts, waiting for the moment when it will all come together, somehow, in some imaginary better form than whatever you can do right now. Though she didn’t exactly put it this way, she was saying: Just do it. Now.

Author Annie Dillard says the same thing in her beloved book, The Writing Life (1989):

One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time… These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.

It’s refreshing, isn’t it? Because the world most of live in argues otherwise, full of advice about how to optimize this and strategically enhance that. It’s full of arbitrary timelines (“30 Under 30”), irrelevant benchmarks (“how big is your platform?”), and false narratives of arrival (“publish by this age”). All of it assumes that the bell will ring on a schedule.

Occasionally, I do like to accelerate.

But in the Race of The Unknown Distance, the bell does not operate on a schedule. It rings when it rings. And a lot of creative regret is just pacing for a race that turned out to be shorter—or longer—than we expected.

And here’s the truth: the race WILL end without warning. The bell rings. The riders who have something left surge forward. Others, who spent themselves earlier, cannot respond. Some cross the line with energy to spare, realizing too late that they could have given more. NO ONE IS WRONG.

And no one gets it exactly right.

The only difference is how they chose to ride when they didn’t know. And how that made them feel.

Personally, I’m taking Trujillo and Dillard’s advice. As Dillard writes: “The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now.” Does that mean a sprint? Some days, maybe. Others, no. It depends on my mood.

In the Race of The Unknown Distance, the only sure thing is that we are already in the race; it’s happening now. For how much longer, we don’t know. Pace yourself accordingly.

xo Buzzy