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.

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.

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

Next to the boathouse by the river was a homeless man wearing layers of filthy clothes. He was pushing a shopping cart and belting out “America the Beautiful.” Whether he really meant it or was being deeply ironic, I couldn’t tell.

I gave up on my disobedient legs and started focusing on my upper body. I swung my arms wide as I ran, making my upper body swing, transmitting the momentum to my lower body. Using that momentum, I was able to push my legs forward (after the race, though, my wrists were swollen).

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

Since I was on autopilot, if someone had told me to keep on running I might well have run beyond sixty-two miles. It’s weird, but at the end I hardly knew who I was or what I was doing. This should have been a very alarming feeling, but it didn’t feel that way. By then running had entered the realm of the metaphysical. First there came the action of running, and accompanying it there was this entity known as me. I run; therefore I am.

I’m me, and at the same time not me. That’s what it felt like. A very still, quiet feeling.

The end of the race is just a temporary marker without much significance. It’s the same with our lives. Just because there’s an end doesn’t mean existence has meaning. An end point is simply set up as a temporary marker, or perhaps as an indirect metaphor for the fleeting nature of existence. It’s very philosophical—not that at this point I’m thinking how philosophical it is. I just vaguely experience this idea, not with words, but as a physical sensation.

Mind you, completing the ultramarathon did make me extremely happy and gave me a certain amount of confidence. Even now I’m glad I ran the race. Still, I had to deal with these aftereffects somehow. For a long time after this I was in this slump—not to imply that I had such a tremendous record to begin with, but still. Each time I ran a full marathon, my time went steadily down. Practice and racing became nothing more than formalities I went through, and they didn’t move me the way they used to.