Haruki Murakami - What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

Contents

Foreword

Suffering Is Optional

T heres a wise saying that goes like this: A real gentleman never discusses women hes broken up with or how much tax hes paid. Actually, this is a total lie. I just made it up. Sorry! But if there really were such a saying, I think that one more condition for being a gentleman would be keeping quiet about what you do to stay healthy. A gentleman shouldnt go on and on about what he does to stay fit. At least thats how I see it.

As everybody knows, Im no gentleman, so maybe I shouldnt be worrying about this to begin with, but still, Im a little hesitant about writing this book. This might come off sounding like a dodge, but this is a book about running, not a treatise on how to be healthy. Im not trying here to give advice like, Okay everybodylets run every day to stay healthy! Instead, this is a book in which Ive gathered my thoughts about what running has meant to me as a person. Just a book in which I ponder various things and think out loud.

Somerset Maugham once wrote that in each shave lies a philosophy. I couldnt agree more. No matter how mundane some action might appear, keep at it long enough and it becomes a contemplative, even meditative act. As a writer, then, and as a runner, I dont find that writing and publishing a book of my own personal thoughts about running makes me stray too far off my usual path. Perhaps Im just too painstaking a type of person, but I cant grasp much of anything without putting down my thoughts in writing, so I had to actually get my hands working and write these words. Otherwise, Id never know what running means to me.

Once, I was lying around a hotel room in Paris reading the International Herald Tribune when I came across a special article on the marathon. There were interviews with several famous marathon runners, and they were asked what special mantra goes through their head to keep themselves pumped during a race. An interesting question, I thought. I was impressed by all the different things these runners think about as they run 26.2 miles. It just goes to show how grueling an event a marathon really is. If you dont keep repeating a mantra of some sort to yourself, youll never survive.

One runner told of a mantra his older brother, also a runner, had taught him which hes pondered ever since he began running. Here it is: Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. Say youre running and you start to think, Man this hurts, I cant take it anymore. The hurt part is an unavoidable reality, but whether or not you can stand any more is up to the runner himself. This pretty much sums up the most important aspect of marathon running.

Its been some ten years since I first had the idea of a book about running, but the years went by with me trying out one approach after another, never actually settling down to write it. Running is sort of a vague theme to begin with, and I found it hard to figure out exactly what I should say about it.

At a certain point, though, I decided that I should just write honestly about what I think and feel about running, and stick to my own style. I figured that was the only way to get going, and I started writing the book, bit by bit, in the summer of 2005, finishing it in the fall of 2006. Other than a few places where I quote from previous writings Ive done, the bulk of this book records my thoughts and feelings in real time. One thing I noticed was that writing honestly about running and writing honestly about myself are nearly the same thing. So I suppose its all right to read this as a kind of memoir centered on the act of running.

Though I wouldnt call any of this philosophy per se, this book does contain a certain amount of what might be dubbed life lessons. They might not amount to much, but they are personal lessons Ive learned through actually putting my own body in motion, and thereby discovering that suffering is optional. They may not be lessons you can generalize, but thats because whats presented here is me, the kind of person I am.

AUGUST 2007

One

AUGUST 5, 2005 KAUAI, HAWAII

Whos Going to Laugh at Mick Jagger?

I m on Kauai, in Hawaii, today, Friday, August 5, 2005. Its unbelievably clear and sunny, not a cloud in the sky. As if the concept clouds doesnt even exist. I came here at the end of July and, as always, we rented a condo. During the mornings, when its cool, I sit at my desk, writing all sorts of things. Like now: Im writing this, a piece on running that I can pretty much compose as I wish. Its summer, so naturally its hot. Hawaiis been called the island of eternal summer, but since its in the Northern Hemisphere there are, arguably, four seasons of a sort. Summer is somewhat hotter than winter. I spend a lot of time in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and compared to Cambridgeso muggy and hot with all its bricks and concrete its like a form of torturesummer in Hawaii is a veritable paradise. No need for an air conditioner herejust leave the window open, and a refreshing breeze blows in. People in Cambridge are always surprised when they hear Im spending August in Hawaii. Why would you want to spend summer in a hot place like that? they invariably ask. But they dont know what its like. How the constant trade winds from the northeast make summers cool. How happy life is here, where we can enjoy lounging around, reading a book in the shade of trees, or, if the notion strikes us, go down, just as we are, for a dip in the inlet.

Since I arrived in Hawaii Ive run about an hour every day, six days a week. Its two and a half months now since I resumed my old lifestyle in which, unless its totally unavoidable, I run every single day. Today I ran for an hour and ten minutes, listening on my Walkman to two albums by the Lovin SpoonfulDaydream and Hums of the Lovin Spoonfulwhich Id recorded on an MD disc.

Right now Im aiming at increasing the distance I run, so speed is less of an issue. As long as I can run a certain distance, thats all I care about. Sometimes I run fast when I feel like it, but if I increase the pace I shorten the amount of time I run, the point being to let the exhilaration I feel at the end of each run carry over to the next day. This is the same sort of tack I find necessary when writing a novel. I stop every day right at the point where I feel I can write more. Do that, and the next days work goes surprisingly smoothly. I think Ernest Hemingway did something like that. To keep on going, you have to keep up the rhythm. This is the important thing for long-term projects. Once you set the pace, the rest will follow. The problem is getting the flywheel to spin at a set speedand to get to that point takes as much concentration and effort as you can manage.

It rained for a short time while I was running, but it was a cooling rain that felt good. A thick cloud blew in from the ocean right over me, and a gentle rain fell for a while, but then, as if it had remembered, Oh, Ive got to do some errands!, it whisked itself away without so much as a glance back. And then the merciless sun was back, scorching the ground. Its a very easy-to-understand weather pattern. Nothing abstruse or ambivalent about it, not a speck of the metaphoric or the symbolic. On the way I passed a few other joggers, about an equal number of men and women. The energetic ones were zipping down the road, slicing through the air like they had robbers at their heels. Others, overweight, huffed and puffed, their eyes half closed, their shoulders slumped like this was the last thing in the world they wanted to be doing. They looked like maybe a week ago their doctors had told them they have diabetes and warned them they had to start exercising. Im somewhere in the middle.