I watched the New York City marathon on television this weekend. Watching Paula Radcliffe (the winner of the women's race who gave birth to a child just 10 months ago!) run, she seemed to run along with an inside rhythm. She bobbed her head along with music that wasn't there, and pumped her legs to what could only have been the beat of her own heart.

I immediately began thinking about Joyce Carol Oates' connection between running and writing. "Writers and poets are famous for loving to be in motion," she writes in The Faith of a Writer . She claims that running helps her to sort out her writing: "The structural problems I set for myself in writing, in a long, snarled, frustrating and sometimes despairing morning of work, for instance, I can usually unsnarl by running in the afternoon."

I am neither a runner nor a writer, though I'd like to be both. Would anyone care to confirm or dispute Oates' theory about running as a cure for tangled thoughts and sentences?