What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

by Haruki Murakami

Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.

As I run I tell myself to think of a river. And clouds. But essentially I’m not thinking of a thing. All I do is keep on running in my own cozy, homemade void, my own nostalgic silence. And this is a pretty wonderful thing.

I never could stand being forced to do something I didn’t want to do at a time I didn’t want to do it. Whenever I was able to do something I liked to do, though, when I wanted to do it, and the way I wanted to do it, I’d give it everything I had.

The body is an extremely practical system. You have to let it experience intermittent pain over time, and then the body will get the point.

It’s pretty thin, the wall separating healthy confidence and unhealthy pride.

On the highway of life you can’t always be in the fast lane.

Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that’s the essence of running, and a metaphor for life—

I’m not a human. I’m a piece of machinery. I don’t need to feel a thing. Just forge on ahead.

Break one of my rules once, and I’m bound to break many more.

It’s precisely because of the pain, precisely because we want to overcome that pain, that we can get the feeling, through this process, of really being alive—or at least a partial sense of it.