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

by Haruki Murakami

Still, as a fellow long-distance runner who’d encountered them day after day, I felt like we somehow understood each other. Even if the skill level varies, there are things that only runners understand and share. I truly believe that.

There’s also another course nearby that takes about three hours to complete—perfect for a long run. Most of it is a flat road that parallels a river and the sea, and there aren’t many cars and hardly any traffic lights to slow me up. The air is clean, too, unlike in Tokyo. It can get a little boring to run by yourself for three hours, but I listen to music, and since I know what I’m up against I can enjoy the run. The only problem is that it’s a course where you loop back halfway, so you can’t just quit in the middle if you get tired.

I generally concentrate on work for three or four hours every morning. I sit at my desk and focus totally on what I’m writing. I don’t see anything else, I don’t think about anything else.

After focus, the next most important thing for a novelist is, hands down, endurance. If you concentrate on writing three or four hours a day and feel tired after a week of this, you’re not going to be able to write a long work. What’s needed for a writer of fiction—at least one who hopes to write a novel—is the energy to focus every day for half a year, or a year, two years. You can compare it to breathing. If concentration is the process of just holding your breath, endurance is the art of slowly, quietly breathing at the same time you’re storing air in your lungs. Unless you can find a balance between both, it’ll be difficult to write novels professionally over a long time. Continuing to breathe while you hold your breath.

You’ll naturally learn both concentration and endurance when you sit down every day at your desk and train yourself to focus on one point. This is a lot like the training of muscles I wrote of a moment ago.

If you have the strength to lift a coffee cup, they figure, you can write a novel. But once you try your hand at it, you soon find that it isn’t as peaceful a job as it seems. The whole process—sitting at your desk, focusing your mind like a laser beam, imagining something out of a blank horizon, creating a story, selecting the right words, one by one, keeping the whole flow of the story on track—requires far more energy, over a long period, than most people ever imagine. You might not move your body around, but there’s grueling, dynamic labor going on inside you. Everybody uses their mind when they think. But a writer puts on an outfit called narrative and thinks with his entire being; and for the novelist that process requires putting into play all your physical reserve, often to the point of overexertion.

On the other hand, writers who aren’t blessed with much talent—those who barely make the grade—need to build up their strength at their own expense. They have to train themselves to improve their focus, to increase their endurance. To a certain extent they’re forced to make these qualities stand in for talent. And while they’re getting by on these, they may actually discover real, hidden talent within them. They’re sweating, digging out a hole at their feet with a shovel, when they run across a deep, secret water vein. It’s a lucky thing, but what made this good fortune possible was all the training they did that gave them the strength to keep on digging. I imagine that late-blooming writers have all gone through a similar process.

The methods and directions a writer takes in order to supplement himself becomes part of that writer’s individuality, what makes him special.

Most of what I know about writing I’ve learned through running every day. These are practical, physical lessons. How much can I push myself? How much rest is appropriate—and how much is too much? How far can I take something and still keep it decent and consistent? When does it become narrow-minded and inflexible? How much should I be aware of the world outside, and how much should I focus on my inner world? To what extent should I be confident in my abilities, and when should I start doubting myself? I know that if I hadn’t become a long-distance runner when I became a novelist, my work would have been vastly different. How different? Hard to say. But something would have definitely been different.

Most runners run not because they want to live longer, but because they want to live life to the fullest. If you’re going to while away the years, it’s far better to live them with clear goals and fully alive than in a fog, and I believe running helps you do that. Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that’s the essence of running, and a metaphor for life—and for me, for writing as well. I believe many runners would agree.

Whenever I focus on training, my muscles get tight. When I put on my jogging shoes in the morning and set out, my feet are so heavy it feels like I’ll never get them moving. I start running down the road, slowly, almost dragging my feet. An old lady from the neighborhood is walking quickly down the street, and I can’t even pass her. But as I keep on running, my muscles gradually loosen up, and after about twenty minutes I’m able to run normally. I start to speed up. After this I can run mechanically, without any problem.

What I mean is, a person’s mind is controlled by his body, right? Or is it the opposite—the way your mind works influences the structure of the body? Or do the body and mind closely influence each other and act on each other?

When you see runners in town it’s easy to distinguish beginners from veterans. The ones panting are beginners; the ones with quiet, measured breathing are the veterans.

We runners wear gloves, wool caps pulled down to our ears, and face masks. Still, our fingertips freeze and our earlobes sting. If it’s just the cold wind, that’s all right. If we think we can put up with it, somehow we can.

So we give up on running and instead try to keep in shape by swimming in indoor pools, pedaling away on those worthless bicycling machines, waiting for spring to come.

This is a trite observation, but as they say: If something’s worth doing, it’s worth giving it your best—or in some cases beyond your best.

You overcome your limitations, or you don’t, one or the other.

Either way, when I look back on that race now I can see that it had a lot of meaning for me as a runner. I don’t know what sort of general significance running sixty-two miles by yourself has, but as an action that deviates from the ordinary yet doesn’t violate basic values, you’d expect it to afford you a special sort of self-awareness. It should add a few new elements to your inventory in understanding who you are.

I changed my New Balance ultra-marathon shoes (there really are such things in the world) from a size eight to an eight and a half. My feet had started to swell up, so I needed to wear shoes a half size larger.

Competing against time isn’t important. What’s going to be much more meaningful to me now is how much I can enjoy myself, whether I can finish twenty-six miles with a feeling of contentment. I’ll enjoy and value things that can’t be expressed in numbers, and I’ll grope for a feeling of pride that comes from a slightly different place.

It’s a little strange, perhaps, to make this claim at such a late date, but Gatsby really is an outstanding novel. I never get tired of it, no matter how many times I read it. It’s the kind of literature that nourishes you as you read, and every time I do I’m struck by something new, and experience a fresh reaction to it. I find it amazing how such a young writer, only twenty-nine at the time, could grasp—so insightfully, so equitably, and so warmly—the realities of life.

“Have a good time!” I e-mail back. And that’s right: for a marathon to mean anything, it should be fun. Otherwise, why would thousands of people run 26.2 miles?

Every time I visit New York to run the marathon (this will be the fourth time) I remember the beautiful, smart ballad by Vernon Duke, “Autumn in New York.” It’s autumn in New York It’s good to live it again.

But if I train on the bike in the morning, I can run in the evening, even though my leg muscles are stiff. I wouldn’t call this kind of practice fun, but I’m not complaining.

The one I’m using now is a light-as-a-feather Panasonic titanium sports bike, which I’ve been using for the last seven years.

In most cases learning something essential in life requires physical pain.

As I’m cycling along, I take the bottle from its rack, gulp down some water, and return it. I’ve trained myself to do this series of actions smoothly, automatically, always making sure to face forward.

In Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, one of the characters, Tom Buchanan, a rich man who’s also a well-known polo player, says, “I’ve heard of making a garage out of a stable, but I’m the first man who ever made a stable out of a garage.” Not to brag, but I’m doing the same thing. Whenever I find a quality LP recording of a piece I have on CD, I don’t hesitate to sell the CD and buy the LP. And when I find a better-quality recording, something closer to the original, I don’t hesitate to trade in the old LP for a new one. It takes a lot of time to pursue this, not to mention a considerable investment of cash. Most people would, I am pretty sure, label me obsessed.

There’s one thing, though, I can state with confidence: until the feeling that I’ve done a good job in a race returns, I’m going to keep running marathons, and not let it get me down. Even when I grow old and feeble, when people warn me it’s about time to throw in the towel, I won’t care. As long as my body allows, I’ll keep on running. Even if my time gets worse, I’ll keep on putting in as much effort—perhaps even more effort—toward my goal of finishing a marathon. I don’t care what others say—that’s just my nature, the way I am. Like scorpions sting, cicadas cling to trees, salmon swim upstream to where they were born, and wild ducks mate for life.

What I mean is, I didn’t start running because somebody asked me to become a runner. Just like I didn’t become a novelist because someone asked me to. One day, out of the blue, I wanted to write a novel. And one day, out of the blue, I started to run—simply because I wanted to. I’ve always done whatever I felt like doing in life. People may try to stop me, and convince me I’m wrong, but I won’t change.

Sixteen is an intensely troublesome age. You worry about little things, can’t pinpoint where you are in any objective way, become really proficient at strange, pointless skills, and are held in thrall by inexplicable complexes. As you get older, though, through trial and error you learn to get what you need, and throw out what should be discarded.

In a few minutes I’m going to swim .93 miles, ride a bike 24.8 miles, then run a final 6.2 miles.

When it comes to things like this, I’m pretty tenacious. If there’s something I can’t do but want to, I won’t relax until I’m able to do it.

Things started to improve around the time I realized that revolutionizing my form was probably impossible. My wife was the one who found me a good coach. She’d never been able to swim her whole life, but she happened to meet a young woman coach at the gym she’s a member of, and you wouldn’t believe how well she swims now. She recommended that I try this young woman as my coach too.

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.

After our unpretentious race on a fall Sunday, we were all on our way back to our own homes, back to our own mundane lives. And with the next race in mind, each of us, in our place, will most likely silently go about our usual training. Even if, seen from the outside, or from some higher vantage point, this sort of life looks pointless or futile, or even extremely inefficient, it doesn’t bother me. Maybe it’s some pointless act like, as I’ve said before, pouring water into an old pan that has a hole in the bottom, but at least the effort you put into it remains. Whether it’s good for anything or not, cool or totally uncool, in the final analysis what’s most important is what you can’t see but can feel in your heart.

My time, the rank I attain, my outward appearance—all of these are secondary. For a runner like me, what’s really important is reaching the goal I set myself, under my own power. I give it everything I have, endure what needs enduring, and am able, in my own way, to be satisfied.

Running a marathon during the cold months and taking part in a triathlon during the summer has become the cycle of my life. There’s no off-season, so I always seem to be busy, but I’m not about to complain. It’s brought me a lot of happiness.

Meanwhile, running for a quarter century makes for a lot of good memories.