In an article published to The New York Times in 1999 titled, To Invigorate Literary Mind, Start Moving Literary Feet, Joyce Carol Oates details her compulsive running habit “not as a respite for the intensity of writing but as a function of writing.” A Henry David Thoreau lecture later published in 1862 by The Atlantic praises then clarifies, “the walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking exercise, as it is called, as the sick take medicine at stated hours…but is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day.” And two thousand years before both Oates and Thoreau, the Roman philosopher, orator, and writer Marcus Tullius Cicero said, “It is exercise alone that supports the spirits, and keeps the mind in vigor.”

Great writers, past and present, do exactly what Oates, Thoreau, and Cicero prescribed themselves. Exercise, in various forms, is as important a part of the routine as the writing itself. Writers strictly block out time every day for exercise less out of care for physical gain and more from a belief that their work, their sanity, depended on it.

[1] Steven Pressfield – bestselling author of, among others, The Legend of Bagger Vance, Gates of Fire, The War of Art, and Nobody Wants To Read Your Sh*T:

I’m at the gym at 5:30 every morning but it takes me till around 11:30 to actually sit down and start work…From the moment I open my eyes, I’m preparing myself to work, to confront my own Resistance and to overcome it. My friend Randy has a concept, “Little Successes.” He tries to start his day with a series of successes, so that when he sits down to the blank page, he’s got momentum. The gym is that for me. It’s physical but it’s mental too. It’s a ritual, as Twyla Tharp says in The Creative Habit. I never want to get out of bed. I HATE the idea of getting up and going to work out. But I do it to do something I don’t want to do. And of course it feels great when it’s over. I feel virtuous. It’s a Little Success.

[2] Malcolm Gladwell – author of five New York Times bestsellers: The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, What the Dog Saw, and David and Goliath:

At the end of a long day, when you’re tired, I find running is the thing that brings you back to life. Something to look forward to as well. I think it’s soft to run with music. It’s people who are running from their running. They’re trying to distract themselves while they’re running. That seems to me—what’s the point? If you don’t want to run, if the act of running is so terrifying to you that you need to blast music in your ears, then you should be doing something else.

I free-associate [while running]. I suspect a lot of useful thinking is going on on a subconscious level. I do not run with music, so I am completely unencumbered when I run.

[3] Haruki Murakami – Called one of the world’s greatest living novelists by The Guardian for works like Kafka On The Shore, Norwegian Wood, and 1Q84:

When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at four a.m. and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for ten kilometers or swim for fifteen hundred meters (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at nine p.m.

I keep to this routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind.

[4] Jack Kerouac – 20th Century novelist of classics like On The Road and The Dharma Burns, and pioneer of The Beat Generation:

I try to do nine touchdowns a day, that is, I stand on my head in the bathroom, on a slipper, and touch the floor nine times with my toe tips, while balanced. This is incidentally more than yoga, it’s an athletic feat, I mean imagine calling me ‘unbalanced’ after that.

[5] Joyce Carol Oates – author of more than 70 books, including bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys and Blonde:

Running! If there’s any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can’t think what it might be. In running the mind flies with the body; the mysterious efflorescence of language seems to pulse in the brain, in rhythm with our feet and the swinging of our arms. Ideally, the runner who’s a writer is running through the land- and cityscapes of her fiction, like a ghost in a real setting.

There must be some analogue between running and dreaming. The dreaming mind is usually bodiless, has peculiar powers of locomotion and, in my experience at least, often runs or glides or ”flies” along the ground or in the air.

[6] Ryan Holiday – bestselling author of The Obstacle Is the Way, Ego Is the Enemy, The Daily Stoic, Perennial Seller, and Conspiracy:

There is one quiet place left on this earth. One quiet place where there are no phones, no news tickers, no instant messages or even music. It’s the one place where you can have not just quiet but utter silence and meditative calm, even if those things don’t come to you naturally.

That place is underwater.

It is impossible not to get something out of the silence, the repetition, the staring at the line on the bottom of the pool. Me, I like the sound and pressure I feel in my ears as my head goes in and out of the water. I like the way my goggles fog up and reduce my visibility to just the necessary amount. I like the feeling of the flow state when I hit just the right speed for just the right distance.

[7] Robert Greene – bestselling author of The 48 Laws of Power, The Art of Seduction, The 33 Strategies of War, The 50th Law, and Mastery:

Pain is good for you. It’s great for you. I’m a huge fanatic of working out, particularly swimming, because it’s painful. I swim long distances. You reach the half mile or three quarters of a mile and you think “this is no fun,” but when you finish, the value that you get is much greater than the pain. That pain, that resistance is good for you.

[8] Nicholas Thompson – editor-in-chief of WIRED:

I do notice that a lot of the best thinking I get done, or ideas generation, or problem solving, happens when I’m running and trying to focus on stuff outside of my head. I remember vividly going on a run and coming up with the structure for the speech I gave at my wedding, which is actually a pretty important writing assignment! It was at East Rock in New Haven. I just remember running up and being like, ‘Oh! That’s the structure.’ And why it came to me running and not sitting, I don’t know. But I think probably for most things I’ve written or edited, there’s been a key insight that came while I was running.

[9] Rich Roll – Bestselling author of three books, including the #1 Amazon bestseller Finding Ultra:

Submerged, the idle chatter of the monkey mind recedes. Each stroke, each lap is like a metronome, lulling me into a calm state of presence. When my swim is complete, I have an inescapable feeling of gratitude, with a light dusting of accomplishment.

[10] Kurt Vonnegut – Literary icon who penned classics like Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat’s Cradle, and Breakfast of Champions:

I awake at 5:30, work until 8:00, eat breakfast at home, work until 10:00, walk a few blocks into town, do errands, go to the nearby municipal swimming pool, which I have all to myself, and swim for half an hour, return home at 11:45, read the mail, eat lunch at noon. In the afternoon I do schoolwork, either teach or prepare. When I get home from school at about 5:30, I numb my twanging intellect with several belts of Scotch and water ($5.00/fifth at the State Liquor store, the only liquor store in town. There are loads of bars, though.), cook supper, read and listen to jazz (lots of good music on the radio here), slip off to sleep at ten. I do pushups and sit ups all the time, and feel as though I am getting lean and sinewy, but maybe not.

[11] Ruth Fitzmaurice – Bestselling author of I Found My Tribe:

[Swimming]  is a reset button: you’ll never regret a swim, you’ll always feel good coming out of that water. It becomes a craving when you are having a bad day. It is that sense of bravery too – of overcoming – because I am genuinely terrified, especially in winter. It’s a way of taking control when so much is out of your hands. And the cove is a healing place in a hippy, spiritual sense.

[12] Oliver Sacks – Renowned neurologist, physician, and bestselling author of Musicophilia, Awakenings, and On The Move:

Oliver Sacks swam until he died. He believed swimming was instinctive, and that we must learn to walk but not to swim. In his revealing memoir “On the Move,” Oliver remembers swimming in a pond at Hampstead Heath on his fortieth birthday, where he first swam as a toddler with his father, who called swimming “the elixir of life.” The most placid, joyful moments of the memoir are when Oliver is swimming, because he is without “fear or fret,” and this gets him thinking. “Thoughts and images, sometimes whole paragraphs,” occur to him, and he must swim back to shore to hastily write them down.

[13] Charles Dickens – The great novelist of the Victorian era who wrote classics like Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, and David Copperfield:

Promptly at 2:00, Dickens left his desk for a vigorous three-hour walk through the countryside or the streets of London, continuing to think of his story and, as he described it, “searching for some pictures I wanted to build upon.” Returning home, his brother-in-law remembered, “he looked the personification of energy, which seemed to ooze from every pore as from some hidden reservoir.

[14] Maria Popova – Contributor to The Atlantic, The New York Times, and other outlets, and her site BrainPickings.org gets more than 5 million readers per month:

I do most of my long-form reading on the elliptical. I find that when my body is so occupied with an intense workout, my brain has a much easier time focusing on a single task.

[15] Christopher Morley – Novelist, essayist, journalist, and poet best known for Parnassus on Wheels and The Haunted Bookshop:

An odd feeling comes sometimes to a writer who has long carried in the knapsack of the mind some notion that he was to put in ink. It is a sensation I can only describe as Getting Ready to Write…In these moods bicycling seems perfectly the right employ. It is all very well to say to yourself that you are not thinking as you wheel serenely along: but you are, and that sure uncertainty of the cyclist’s balance, that unconsciously watchful suspension (solid on earth yet so breezily flitting) seems to symbolize the task itself. The wheel slidders in a rut or on a slope of gravel: at once, by instinct, you redress your perpendicular. So, in the continual joy and disgust of the writer’s work, he dare not abandon that difficult trained alertness.