What I Talk About When I Talk About Running: A Memoir

by Haruki Murakami

The year 1983 rolled around, and I participated for the first time in my life in a road race. It wasn’t very long—a 5K—but for the first time I had a number pinned to me, was in a large group of other runners, and heard the official shout out, “On your mark, get set, go!” Afterward I thought, Hey, that wasn’t so bad! In May I was in a 15K race around Lake Yamanaka, and in June, wanting to test how far I could run, I did laps around the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. I went around seven times, for a total of 22.4 miles, at a fairly decent pace, and didn’t feel it was that hard. My legs didn’t hurt at all. Maybe I could actually run a marathon, I concluded. It was only later that I found out the hard way that the toughest part of a marathon comes after twenty-two miles.