What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (Vintage International)

by Haruki Murakami

No matter how mundane some action might appear, keep at it long enough and it becomes a contemplative, even meditative act.

I can’t grasp much of anything without putting down my thoughts in writing, so I had to actually get my hands working and write these words.

He is so me

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.

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 speed—and to get to that point takes as much concentration and effort as you can manage.

(At a jogging pace I generally can cover six miles in an hour.)

I don’t know why, but the older you get, the busier you become.

When it comes to other people, you can always come up with a reasonable explanation, but you can’t fool yourself.

In long-distance running the only opponent you have to beat is yourself, the way you used to be.

At this point I don’t want to mix music and computers. Just like it’s not good to mix friends and work, and sex.

WHERE DOES THIS SEX PART COME FROM

What exactly do I think about when I’m running? I don’t have a clue.

I just run. I run in a void. Or maybe I should put it the other way: I run in order to acquire a void.

People’s minds can’t be a complete blank. Human beings’ emotions are not strong or consistent enough to sustain a vacuum. What I mean is, the kinds of thoughts and ideas that invade my emotions as I run remain subordinate to that void. Lacking content, they are just random thoughts that gather around that central void.

For me—and for everybody else, probably—this is my first experience growing old, and the emotions I’m having, too, are all first-time feelings. If it were something I’d experienced before, then I’d be able to understand it more clearly, but this is the first time, so I can’t.

As I’ve gotten older, though, I’ve gradually come to the realization that this kind of pain and hurt is a necessary part of life. If you think about it, it’s precisely because people are different from others that they’re able to create their own independent selves.

So the fact that I’m me and no one else is one of my greatest assets.

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.

Who in the world could possibly have warm feelings, or something like them, for a person who doesn’t compromise, who instead, whenever a problem crops up, locks himself away alone in a closet?

Stop being relatable. And to answer ur question, yes there's someone who's care enough to you

Back then I was smoking sixty cigarettes a day.

BUSET

I’m struck by how, except when you’re young, you really need to prioritize in life, figuring out in what order you should divide up your time and energy. If you don’t get that sort of system set by a certain age, you’ll lack focus and your life will be out of balance.

Life is basically unfair. But even in a situation that’s unfair, I think it’s possible to seek out a kind of fairness.

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

The gym where I work out in Tokyo has a poster that says, “Muscles are hard to get and easy to lose. Fat is easy to get and hard to lose.” A painful reality, but a reality all the same.

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

I’m writing, in other words, to put my thoughts in some kind of order.

Just focus on moving my feet forward, one after the other. That’s the only thing that matters.

I feel like I’m driving a car on empty. I need a drink, but if I stopped here to drink some water I don’t think I could get running again.

Damn relate

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

The funny thing is, no matter how much experience I have under my belt, no matter how old I get, it’s all just a repeat of what came before.

Muscles are like work animals that are quick on the uptake. If you carefully increase the load, step by step, they learn to take it.

It doesn’t happen overnight, of course. But as long as you take your time and do it in stages, they won’t complain—aside from the occasional long face—and they’ll very patiently and obediently grow stronger.

Muscles really are like animals, and they want to take it as easy as possible; if pressure isn’t applied to them, they relax and cancel out the memory of all that work. Input this canceled memory once again, and you have to repeat the whole journey from the very beginning.

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.

They put up with such strenuous training, and where did their thoughts, their hopes and dreams, disappear to? When people pass away, do their thoughts just vanish?

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.

Damn berat

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.

Writing novels, to me, is basically a kind of manual labor. Writing itself is mental labor, but finishing an entire book is closer to manual labor.

Being young means your whole body is filled with a natural vitality. Focus and endurance appear as needed, and you never need to seek them on your own. If you’re young and talented, it’s like you have wings.

Duh mbah tp skrg mah udh susah jg soalnya pada HAPE TEROOOOSSSSS

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.

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.

Lol semua jg gini ternyata

As you age you learn even to be happy with what you have. That’s one of the few good points of growing older.

In the midst of this flow, I’m aware of myself as one tiny piece in the gigantic mosaic of nature.

Relatable

There are plenty of things in this world that are way beyond me, plenty of opponents I can never beat.

These girls have their own pace, their own sense of time. And I have my own pace, my own sense of time. The two are completely different, but that’s the way it should be.

Strangely—though maybe it’s not so strange after all—she wears a different outfit every day.

Waiting to see what clothes she has on is one of the small pleasures of each early-morning run.

If something’s worth doing, it’s worth giving it your best—or in some cases beyond your best.

Needless to say, someday you’re going to lose. Over time the body inevitably deteriorates. Sooner or later, it’s defeated and disappears. When the body disintegrates, the spirit also (most likely) is gone too.

I think this is because when I have to speak seriously about something in Japanese I’m overcome with the feeling of being swallowed up in a sea of words. There’s an infinite number of choices for me, infinite possibilities.

run sixty-two miles

Orgil