What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (11 page)

So in the end I missed the four-hour mark by just a little. I did complete the run, after a fashion, which means I maintained my record of completing every marathon I’ve been in (a total of twenty-four now). I was able to do the bare minimum, but it was a frustrating result after all my hard training and meticulous planning. It felt like a remnant of a dark cloud had wormed its way into my stomach. No matter what, I couldn’t accept this. I’d trained so hard, so why did I get cramps? I’m not trying to argue that all effort is fairly rewarded, but if there is a God in heaven, was it asking too much to let me glimpse a sign? Was it too much to expect a little kindness?

About a half year later, in April 2006, I ran the Boston Marathon. As a rule I run only one marathon a year, but since the New York City Marathon left such a bad taste in my mouth I decided to give it another try. This time, though, I intentionally, and drastically, reduced the amount of training I did. Training hard for New York hadn’t helped much. Maybe I’d done
too much
training. This time I didn’t set a schedule, but instead just ran a bit more than usual every day, keeping my mind clear of abstruse thoughts, doing only what I felt like. I tried to have a casual attitude. It’s only a marathon, I told myself. I decided to just go with this and see what happened.

This was my seventh time running the Boston Marathon, so I knew the course well—how many slopes there were, what all the curves were like—not that this guaranteed I’d do a good job.

So, you’re asking, what was the result?

My time wasn’t much different from New York. Having learned my lesson there, I’d tried my best to keep things under control during the first half of the Boston race, maintaining my pace, holding some energy in reserve. I enjoyed running, watching the scenery go by, waiting for the point where I felt I could pick it up a notch. But that point never came. From mile twenty to mile twenty-two, the point where you pass Heartbreak Hill, I felt fine. No problem at all. My friends who were waiting at Heartbreak Hill to cheer me on later on said, “Haruki looks really good.” I ran up the hill smiling and waving. I was sure that at this rate I could pick up the pace and run a decent time. But after I passed Cleveland Circle and entered downtown Boston, my legs started to get heavy. Very quickly exhaustion overtook me. I didn’t get cramps, but in the last few miles of the race, after passing over Boston University Bridge, it was all I could do not to get left behind. Picking up the pace like I’d planned was impossible.

I was able to finish, of course. Under the partly cloudy sky I ran the full 26.2 miles without stopping and slipped past the finish line, which was set up in front of the Prudential Center. I wrapped myself in a silver thermal sheet to ward off the cold, and received a medal from one of the volunteers. A wave of relief washed over me—relief that I didn’t have to run anymore. It always feels wonderful to finish a marathon—it’s a beautiful achievement—but I wasn’t satisfied with the time. Usually I look forward to a cold Sam Adams draft beer after a race, but now I didn’t even feel like having one. Exhaustion had seeped into each and every organ.

“What in the world happened?” My wife, who had been waiting for me at the finish line, was baffled. “You’re still pretty strong, and I know you train enough.”

What indeed?
I wondered, not having a clue. Maybe I’m simply getting older. Or perhaps the reason lies elsewhere, maybe something critical I’ve overlooked. At this point, anyway, any speculation has to remain just that: speculation. Like a small channel of water silently being sucked up into the desert.

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.

I may not hear the
Rocky
theme song, or see the sunset anywhere, but for me, and for this book, this may be a sort of conclusion. An understated, rainy-day-sneakers sort of conclusion. An anticlimax, if you will. Turn it into a screenplay, and the Hollywood producer would just glance at the last page and toss it back. But the long and the short of it is that this kind of conclusion fits who I am.

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.

I look up at the sky, wondering if I’ll catch a glimpse of kindness there, but I don’t. All I see are indifferent summer clouds drifting over the Pacific. And they have nothing to say to me. Clouds are always taciturn. I probably shouldn’t be looking up at them. What I should be looking at is inside of
me.
Like staring down into a deep well. Can I see kindness there? No, all I see is my own nature. My own individual, stubborn, uncooperative, often self-centered nature that still doubts itself—that, when troubles occur, tries to find something funny, or something nearly funny, about the situation. I’ve carried this character around like an old suitcase, down a long, dusty path. I’m not carrying it because I like it. The contents are too heavy, and it looks crummy, fraying in spots. I’ve carried it with me because there was nothing else I was supposed to carry. Still, I guess I have grown attached to it. As you might expect.

So here I am training every day for the Murakami City Triathlon in Niigata Prefecture. In other words, I’m still lugging around that old suitcase, most likely headed toward another anticlimax. Toward a taciturn, unadorned maturity—or, to put it more modestly, toward an evolving dead end.

Nine

OCTOBER
1, 2006
•
MURAKAMI CITY, NIIGATA PREFECTURE

At Least He Never Walked

O
nce when I was
around sixteen and nobody else was home, I stripped naked, stood in front of a large mirror in our house, and checked out my body from top to bottom. As I did this I made a mental list of all the deficiencies—or what, to me at least, appeared to be deficiencies. For instance (and these are just instances), my eyebrows were too thick, or my fingernails were shaped funny—that sort of thing. As I recall, when I got to twenty-seven items, I got sick of it and gave up. And this is what I thought:
If there are this many visible parts of my body that are worse than normal people’s, then if I start considering other aspects—personality, brains, athleticism, things of this sort—the list will be endless.

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. And you start to recognize (or be resigned to the fact) that since your faults and deficiencies are well nigh infinite, you’d best figure out your good points and learn to get by with what you have.

But this wretched sort of feeling I had as I stood in front of the mirror at sixteen, listing all my physical shortcomings, is still a sort of touchstone for me even now. The sad spreadsheet of my life that reveals how much my debts far outweigh my assets.

Now, some forty years later, as I stand at the seashore in a black swimsuit, goggles on top of my head, waiting for the start of the triathlon, this memory of so long ago suddenly comes back to me. And once more I’m struck by how pitiful and pointless this little container called
me
is, what a lame, shabby being I am. I feel like everything I’ve ever done in life has been a total waste. In a few minutes I’m going to swim .93 miles, ride a bike 24.8 miles, then run a final 6.2 miles. And what’s all that supposed to prove? How is this any different from pouring water in an old pan with a tiny hole in the bottom?

Well, at least it’s a beautiful, perfect day—perfect weather for a triathlon. No wind, not a wave in the sea. The sun’s bathing the ground in warmth, the temperature at about 73 degrees. The water is ideal. This is the fourth time I’ve taken part in the triathlon in Murakami City in Niigata Prefecture, and all the previous years the conditions have been atrocious. Once the sea was too rough, as the Japan Sea in the fall is apt to be, so we had to substitute a beach run for the swimming portion. Even when conditions weren’t so drastic, I’d have all kinds of awful experiences: it would rain, or the waves would be so high I couldn’t breathe well when I did the crawl, or else it’d be so cold I’d freeze on the bike. In fact, whenever I drive the 217 miles to Niigata for this triathlon I’m always expecting the worst in terms of weather, convinced that something terrible’s going to happen. It might as well be a sort of image training for me. Even this time, when I first saw the placid, warm sea, I felt like someone was trying to pull a fast one.
Don’t fall for it,
I warned myself. This was just make-believe; there had to be a trap lying in wait. Maybe a school of vicious, poisonous jellyfish. Or a pre-hibernation, ravenous bear would charge at my bike. Or an unfortunate bolt of lightning would zap me right in the head. Or maybe I’d be attacked by a swarm of angry bees. Maybe my wife, waiting for me at the finish line, was going to have discovered some awful secrets about me (I suddenly felt like there might actually be some). Needless to say, I always view this meet, the Murakami International Triathlon, with a bit of trepidation. I never have any idea what will happen.

No doubt about it now, though, today the weather’s great. As I stand here in my rubber suit, I’m actually starting to get warm.

Around me are people dressed the same way, all fidgeting as they wait for the race to start. A weird scene, if you think about it. We’re like a bunch of pitiful dolphins washed up on the shore, waiting for the tide to come in. Everyone else looks more upbeat about the race than I am. Or maybe it just looks that way. Anyway, I’ve decided to keep my mind clear of the extraneous. I’ve traveled all this way, and now I have to do my best to get through the race. For three hours all I need to do is keep my mind blank and just swim, ride a bike, and run.

When are we going to start? I check my watch. But it’s only a short time after the last time I checked it. Once the race begins I won’t, ideally, have any time to think…

Up to this point I’ve been in six triathlons of various lengths, though for four years, from 2001 to 2004, I didn’t participate in any. The blank in my record exists because during the 2000 Murakami Triathlon I suddenly found myself unable to swim and was disqualified. It’s taken some time to get over the shock and regain my composure. It wasn’t at all clear to me why I couldn’t swim. I mulled over various possibilities in my mind, and as I did so my confidence took a nosedive. I’d been in many races, but this was the first time I’d ever been on the Disqualified roster.

Truthfully, this wasn’t the first time I’d stumbled during the swimming portion of a triathlon. In the pool or in the ocean I’m able to do the crawl over a long distance without pushing it. Usually I can swim 1,500 meters (a swimmer’s mile) in about thirty-three minutes—not especially fast, but good enough for a triathlon. I grew up near the sea and am used to ocean swimming. Some people who practice only in pools find it hard, and frightening, to swim in the ocean, but not me. I actually find it easier because there’s so much space and you’re more buoyant.

For some reason, though, whenever it comes down to an actual race, I blow the swimming portion. Even when I entered the relatively short-distance Tinman competition, in Oahu, Hawaii, I couldn’t do the crawl very well. I got into the water, got ready to swim, and suddenly had trouble breathing. I’d lift my head to breathe, same as always, but the timing was off. And when I’m not breathing right, fear takes over and my muscles tense up. My chest starts pounding, and my arms and legs won’t move the way I want them to. I get scared to put my face in the water and start to panic.

In the Tinman competition, the swimming portion is shorter than usual, at only half a mile, so I was able to give up on the crawl and switch to the breaststroke. But in a regular 1,500-meter race you can’t get by swimming the breaststroke. It’s slower than the crawl, and at the end your legs are exhausted. So in the Murakami Triathlon in 2000 the only thing left for me was to tearfully be disqualified.

I got out and went up on shore, but felt so mad at myself that I got back in the water and tried swimming the course over again. The other participants had long since finished the swimming portion and had set off on their bikes, so I was swimming all alone. And this time I was able to do the crawl with no problem. I could breathe easily and move my body smoothly. So why couldn’t I swim like this during the race?

At the first triathlon I’d ever participated in there was a floating start, where all the participants lined up in the water. As we were waiting, the person next to me kicked me hard in the side several times. It’s a competition, so it’s to be expected—everybody’s trying to get ahead of others and take the shortest route. Getting hit in the elbow while you’re swimming, getting kicked, swallowing water, having your goggles fall off—it’s all par for the course. But for me, getting kicked hard like that in my first race was a shock, and that may have thrown my swimming off. Perhaps subconsciously that memory was coming back to me every time I started a race. I don’t want to think that way, but the mental side of a race is critical, so it’s very possible.

Another problem was that there was something wrong with the way I was swimming. My crawl was self-taught, and I’ve never had a coach. I could swim as long as I cared to, but nobody would ever have said I have an economical or beautiful form. Basically it was the kind of swimming where I just gave it all I had. For a long time I’d been thinking that if I was going to get serious about triathlons I’d have to do something to improve my swimming. Along with searching for what went wrong on the mental side, I figured it wouldn’t be a bad idea to work on my form. If I could improve the technical side of my swimming, other issues might come into sharper focus as well.

So I put my triathlon challenge on hold for four years. During that time I kept up my usual long-distance running and ran in one marathon per year. But somehow I just wasn’t happy. My failure in the triathlon accounted for part of this.
Some day
, I thought,
I’m going to get revenge.
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.

I hired a few swimming coaches to help me improve my form, but none of them were what I was looking for. Lots of people know how to swim, but those who can efficiently teach how to swim are few and far between. That’s the feeling I get. It’s difficult to teach how to write novels (at least I know
I
couldn’t), but teaching swimming is just as hard. And this isn’t just confined to swimming and novels. Of course there are teachers who can teach a set subject, in a set order, using predetermined phrases, but there aren’t many who can adjust their teaching to the abilities and tendencies of their pupils and explain things in their own individual way. Maybe hardly any at all.

I wasted the first two years trying to find a good coach. Each new coach tinkered with my form just enough to mess up my swimming, sometimes to the point where I could hardly swim at all. Naturally, my confidence went down the drain. At this rate there was no way I could enter a triathlon.

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.

The first thing this coach did was check my overall swimming and ask what my goals were. “I want to participate in a triathlon,” I told her. “So you want to be able to do the crawl in the ocean and swim long distances?” she asked. “That’s right,” I replied. “I don’t need to sprint over short distances.” “Good,” she said. “I’m glad you have clear-cut goals. That makes it easier for me.”

So we began one-on-one lessons to reshape my form. Her approach wasn’t a slash-and-burn policy, totally dismissing the way I’ve been swimming up till now and rebuilding from the ground up. I imagine that for an instructor it’s much more difficult to reshape someone’s form who’s already able, after a fashion, to swim, than to start with a nonswimmer, a blank sheet. It isn’t easy to get rid of bad swimming habits, so my new coach didn’t try to forcefully do a total makeover. Instead, she revised very small movements I made, one by one, over an extended period of time.

What’s special about this woman’s teaching style is that she doesn’t teach you the textbook form at the beginning. Take body rotation, for instance. To get her pupil to learn the correct way, she starts out by teaching how to swim
without
any rotation. In other words, people who are self-taught in the crawl have a tendency to be overconscious of rotation. Because of this there’s too much resistance in the water and their speed goes down—plus, they waste energy. So in the beginning, she teaches you to swim like a flat board without any body rotation—in other words, completely the opposite of what the textbook says. Needless to say, when I swam that way I felt like an awful, awkward swimmer. As I practiced persistently, I could swim the way she told me to, in this awkward way, but I wasn’t convinced it was doing any good.

And then, ever so slowly, my coach started to add some rotation. Not emphasizing that we were practicing rotation, but just teaching a separate way of moving. The pupil has no idea what the real point of this sort of practice is. He merely does as he’s told, and keeps on moving that one part of his body. For example, if it’s how to turn your shoulders, you just repeat that endlessly. Sometimes you spend an entire session just turning your shoulders. You end up exhausted and spent, but later, in retrospect, you realize what it all was for. The parts fall into place, and you can see the whole picture and finally understand the role each individual part plays. The dawn comes, the sky grows light, and the colors and shapes of the roofs of houses, which you could only glimpse vaguely before, come into focus.

This might be similar to practicing drumming. You’re made to practice bass drum patterns only, day after day. Then you spend days on just the cymbals. Then just the tom tom…Monotonous and boring for sure, but once it all falls together you get a solid rhythm. In order to get there you have to stubbornly, rigorously, and very patiently tighten all the screws of each individual part. This takes time, of course, but sometimes taking time is actually a shortcut. This is the path I followed in swimming, and after a year and a half I was able to swim long distances far more gracefully and efficiently than ever before.

And while I was training for swimming, I made an important discovery. I had trouble breathing during a race because I’d been hyperventilating. The same exact thing happened when I was swimming in the pool with my coach, and it dawned on me: just before the start of the race I was breathing too deeply and quickly. Probably because I was tense before a race, I got too much oxygen all at once. This led to me breathing too fast when I started to swim, which in turn threw off the timing of my breathing.

It was a tremendous relief when I finally pinpointed the real problem. All I had to do now was make sure not to hyperventilate. Now before a race starts I get into the sea, swim a bit, and get my body and mind used to swimming in the ocean. I breathe moderately in order not to hyperventilate, and breathe with my hand over my mouth in order not to get too much oxygen. “I’m all set now,” I tell myself. “I’ve changed my form, and am no longer the swimmer I used to be.”