Pheidippides, at your service

There are two schools of thought surrounding cold swimming pools: you can wade in gradually, or you can take the plunge all at once. The same goes for removing Band-Aids, filing taxes, and enduring various other minor daily discomforts. Slow and steady wins the race versus it hurts less if you get it over with. On the other hand, you don't approach a marathon that way. You can't just run it real quick and get it over with; unlike ripping off a Band-Aid, marathoning has to be slow and steady. The same goes for training for a marathon. Coaches use the rule of thumb that a marathoner in training should increase his distance by no more than 10% per week. If you can only jog one mile at the outset, it therefore takes eight months to train for the 26-mile race. You build up to the event slowly and with discipline if you have any real ambition of success.

All this circumlocution leads up to this question: is interviewing more like a Band-Aid or a marathon? Do you have to work up to it by degrees, or can you just do it? The idea of asking a stranger for an interview has not grown less terrifying over the last month and a half; on the contrary, as the event has gotten closer the proximity has made it seem larger. Should I treat interviewing as a cold swimming pool which, perhaps, one should just dive into -- begin straight off with asking strangers for love stories? Or should I treat it as the marathon -- begin by interviewing a friend, and work up to strangers by degrees as I grow more comfortable with the process? I'm inclined towards the latter, but then I would be; I'm a procrastinator in some ways and wouldn't mind putting off the moment of truth. Yet to be fair to my own instinct, I might very well be more comfortable approaching someone unfamiliar if what I approach them with is not also completely unfamiliar. (It's partly for a similar reason that I want to start my interviews with easy questions like "what do you do?" and "how long have you lived in East Kudzuburg?" -- my subjects will be more comfortable if they don't have to plunge right into deep and private waters, and for that matter, so will I.)

So I'm hoping that this weekend I'll be able to get together with a friend and do some conditioning, to return to the marathoning metaphor. I'm a lot less likely to be turned down, and maybe afterward they can share feedback that might help me conduct a better interview next time. Then I can return home and play back the recording, courtesy of Kino, and listen for questions I missed. If I can't get a hold of anyone, I'll work on an alternative.