What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

by Haruki Murakami

Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. Say you’re running and you start to think, Man this hurts, I can’t 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.

I stop every day right at the point where I feel I can write more.

The point is whether or not I improved over yesterday.

I run in order to acquire a void.

The thoughts that occur to me while I’m running are like clouds in the sky. Clouds of all different sizes. They come and they go, while the sky remains the same sky as always. The clouds are mere guests in the sky that pass away and vanish, leaving behind the sky. The sky both exists and doesn’t exist.

For now all I can do is put off making any detailed judgments and accept things as they are. Just like I accept the sky, the clouds, and the river.

Emotional hurt is the price a person has to pay in order to be independent.

By running longer it’s like I can physically exhaust that portion of my discontent. It also makes me realize again how weak I am, how limited my abilities are. I become aware, physically, of these low points. And one of the results of running a little farther than usual is that I become that much stronger.

I never had any ambitions to be a novelist. I just had this strong desire to write a novel. No concrete image of what I wanted to write about, just the conviction that if I wrote it now I could come up with something that I’d find convincing.

The feeling of "wanting to build" is enough.

So I went to the Kinokuniya store in Shinjuku and bought a sheaf of manuscript paper and a five-dollar Sailor fountain pen.

I never could stand being forced to do something I didn’t want to do at a time I didn’t want to do

you go through a lot of trial and error, but what you learn sticks with you. The happiest thing about becoming

The most important thing we ever learn at school is the fact that the most important things can’t be learned at school.

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

Nothing in the real world is as beautiful as the illusions of a person about to lose consciousness.

Running every day is a kind of lifeline for me, so I’m not going to lay off or quit just because I’m busy. If I used being busy as an excuse not to run, I’d never run again.

When people pass away, do their thoughts just vanish?

race. It’s important to push your body to its limits, but exceed those and the whole thing’s a waste.

This is my body, with all its limits and quirks. Just as with my face, even if I don’t like it it’s the only one I get, so I’ve got to make do.

Movies and TV dramas perpetuate this stereotypical—or, to put a positive spin on it, legendary—figure of the artist.

To deal with something unhealthy, a person needs to be as healthy as possible. That’s my motto. In other words, an unhealthy soul requires a healthy body.

You have to wait until tomorrow to find out what tomorrow will bring.

You’re a man, aren’t you? Start acting like one!

Tinman competition,

No matter how long you stand there examining yourself naked before a mirror, you’ll never see reflected what’s inside.

I breathe in and out at a steady rhythm, and that’s the most critical thing right now. As I do, the tension drains away. Things are going to be okay.

Of course it was painful, and there were times when, emotionally, I just wanted to chuck it all. But pain seems to be a precondition for this kind of sport. If pain weren’t involved, who in the world would ever go to the trouble of taking part in sports like the triathlon or the marathon, which demand such an investment of time and energy? 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. Your quality of experience is based not on standards such as time or ranking, but on finally awakening to an awareness of the fluidity within action itself. If things go well, that is.