What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (12 page)

And so, in 2004, for the first time in four years, I again entered the Murakami Triathlon. A siren marked the start, everyone began swimming, and somebody kicked me in the side. Startled, I was afraid that once again I was going to mess up. I swallowed some water, and the thought crossed my mind that I should switch to the breaststroke for a while. But my courage returned, and I told myself that there was no need for that, that things would work out. My breathing calmed down, and I started the crawl again. I concentrated not on breathing in, but on breathing out in the water. And I heard that nice old sound of my exhalations bubbling underwater.
I’m okay now
, I told myself as I neatly rode the waves.

Happily, I was able to conquer my panic and finish the triathlon. I hadn’t been in one for so long, and hadn’t had time to do bicycle training, so my overall time wasn’t much to speak of. But I was able to achieve my first goal: wiping away the shame of being disqualified. As usual, my main feeling was one of relief.

I’d always thought I was sort of a brazen person, but this issue with hyperventilating made me realize a part of me was, unexpectedly, high strung. I had no idea how nervous I got at the start of a race. But it turns out I really was tense, just like everybody else. It doesn’t matter how old I get, but as long as I continue to live I’ll always discover something new about myself. No matter how long you stand there examining yourself naked before a mirror, you’ll never see reflected what’s inside.

And here I am again, at nine thirty a.m. on October 1, 2006, a sunny fall Sunday, standing once more on the shores of Murakami City in Niigata Prefecture, waiting for the triathlon to begin. A little nervous, but making sure not to hyperventilate. I go over my mental checklist one more time, just to be certain I haven’t forgotten anything. Computerized ankle bracelet—
check.
I’ve rubbed Vaseline all over my body so when I finish swimming I can easily get my wetsuit off. I’ve carefully done my stretching. I’ve drunk enough water. And used the toilet. Nothing left to do. I hope.

I’ve been in this race a few times, so I recognize a few of the other participants. As we wait for the race to start, we shake hands and chat. I’m not the type who gets along easily with others, but for some reason with other triathletes I have no problem. Those of us who participate in triathlons are unusual people. Think about it for a minute. Most all the participants have jobs and families, and on top of taking care of these, they swim and bike and run, training very hard, as part of their ordinary routine. Naturally this takes a lot of time and effort. The world, with its commonsensical viewpoint, thinks their lifestyle is peculiar. And it would be hard to argue with anyone who labeled them eccentrics and oddballs. But there’s something we share, not something as exaggerated as solidarity, perhaps, but at least a sort of warm emotion, like a vague, faintly colored mist over a late-spring peak. Of course, competition is part of the mix—it’s a race, after all—but for most of the people participating in a triathlon the competitive aspect is less important than the sense of a triathlon as a sort of ceremony by which we can affirm this shared bond.

In this sense, the Murakami Triathlon is a convenient race. There aren’t so many competitors (somewhere between three hundred and four hundred), and the race is run in a very low-key way. It’s a small, local, homemade type of triathlon. The people in the town warmly support us. There’s nothing gaudy or overdone about the race, and that quiet kind of atmosphere appeals to me. Apart from the race itself, there are wonderful hot springs nearby, the food is great, and the local sake (especially Shimehari Tsuru) is outstanding. Over the years that I’ve participated in the race, I’ve made some acquaintances in the area. There are even people who come all the way from Tokyo to cheer me on.

At 9:56 the start siren goes off, and everyone immediately begins the crawl. This is it—the most nerve-racking moment of all.

I plunge in and start kicking and plowing through the water with my arms. I try to clear my mind of everything extraneous and concentrate not on inhaling, but on exhaling. My heart’s pounding, and I can’t get the rhythm right. My body’s a bit stiff. And as you might expect, somebody kicks me in the shoulder again. Somebody else is leaning over me, getting on top of my back, like one turtle getting on top of another. I swallow some water, but not very much.
Nothing to worry about,
I tell myself.
Don’t panic.
I breathe in and out at a steady rhythm, and that’s the most critical thing right now. As I do, the tension drains away. Things are going to be okay. Just keep swimming like this. Once I get the rhythm down, all I have to do is maintain it.

But then—and with triathlons you almost expect this—some unforeseen trouble leaps out at me. As I’m doing the crawl I raise my head to check my direction and think
What the…?
My goggles are all fogged up, and I can’t see a thing…It’s like the whole world is cloudy and opaque. I stop swimming, tread water, and rub the goggles with my fingers to try to clear them up. But still I can’t see. What is going on? The goggles are a pair I use all the time, and I’ve done a lot of training with them so I can see where I’m going as I swim. So what in the world is happening? Then it hits me. After I rubbed my skin with Vaseline I didn’t wash my hands, so I wiped the goggles with oily fingers. What an asinine thing to do! At the start line I always wipe my goggles with saliva, which keeps the inside from fogging up. And this time I had to go and forget to do that.

During the whole 1,500-meter swim my foggy goggles bothered me. I was constantly off course, swimming in the wrong direction, and wasted a lot of time. Sometimes I had to stop, remove my goggles, tread water, and figure out where I should go. Imagine a blindfolded child trying to hit a piñata, and you get the idea.

If I’d thought about it, I could have swum without my goggles. I should have just taken them off. When I was swimming, however, I was kind of confused and didn’t have the presence of mind to figure that out. Thanks to this, the swimming part of the race was pretty disorderly, and my time wasn’t nearly as good as what I’d been hoping for. In terms of my ability—remember how hard I’d trained for this—I should have been able to swim much faster. I consoled myself with the thought that at least I wasn’t disqualified, didn’t get left behind that much, and was able to finish the swim. And whenever I managed to swim in a straight line, I did a decent job of it, I think.

I got up on the beach and made straight for where the bikes were parked (which seems easy but actually isn’t), peeled off my snug wetsuit, tugged on my bike shoes and helmet and wraparound sunglasses, gulped down some water, and, finally, headed out onto the road. I was able to do all that so mechanically that by the time I was thinking again, I realized I’d been splashing around in the water until just a minute before and now was whizzing by at twenty miles an hour on a bike. No matter how many times I experience this, the sudden transition feels odd. It’s a different feeling of weight, speed, and motor reflexes, and you use completely different muscles. You feel like a salamander that’s evolved overnight into an ostrich. My brain wasn’t able to make the switch very quickly, and neither could my body. I couldn’t keep the pace up, and before I knew it seven other racers had passed me.
This isn’t good,
I thought, and up to the turning point I didn’t pass anyone.

The bike segment follows a well-known stretch of seacoast called Sasagawa Nagare. It’s a very scenic spot, with unusual rock formations jutting out of the water, though of course I didn’t have the time to enjoy the scenery. We raced from Murakami City northward along the sea, with the turn near the border with Yamagata Prefecture that would send us back along the same road. There were slopes in several places, but nothing steep enough to make me blank out. Before reaching the turn, I didn’t worry about passing others or being passed, but focused instead on pedaling at a steady pace, using an easy gear. At regular intervals I’d reach down for my water bottle and grab a quick drink. As I did all this I gradually started to feel comfortable on the bike again. Feeling I could handle it now, when we reached the turn I downshifted, sped up, and in the second half of the race passed seven people. The wind wasn’t blowing hard, so I could pedal for all I was worth. When the wind’s strong, amateur bicyclists like me get pretty dejected. Making the wind work for you takes years of experience and a great deal of skill. When there’s no wind, though, it all comes down to a question of leg strength. I wound up finishing the 24.8 miles at a faster clip than I’d expected, then tugged on my good old running shoes for the final leg of the race.

When I switched to running, though, things got pretty rough. Normally I would have held back a little in the bike portion to save up energy for the run, but this time, for whatever reason, it just didn’t cross my mind. I just let ’er rip, then plunged right into running. As you can imagine, my legs didn’t work right. My mind ordered them, “Run!,” but my leg muscles were on strike. I could see myself running but had no sensation of running.

Each race is a little different, but the same basic thing happens every triathlon. The muscles I’ve pushed hard for over an hour while biking, the ones I still want to be open for business when I start running, just won’t move smoothly. It takes time for the muscles to change from one rail to another. For the first two miles both my legs always seem locked up, and only after that am I finally able to
run.
This time, though, it took a lot longer to get to this point. Of the three events in a triathlon, running is obviously my specialty, and usually I’m able to easily pass at least thirty other runners. But this time I could only pass ten or fifteen. Still, I was glad to be able to even out my performance a bit. In my last triathlon I’d been passed by a lot of people in the bike portion, but this time it was my run time that wasn’t so great. Even so, the difference between the events I was good at and those I wasn’t had decreased, meaning that perhaps I was getting the hang of being a true triathlete. This was definitely something to cheer about.

As I ran through the beautiful old part of Murakami City, the cheers of the spectators—ordinary residents, I’m assuming—spurred me on, and I wrung out my last ounce of energy as I raced for the finish line. It was an exultant moment. It had been a tough race, for sure, what with my Vaseline adventure, but once I reached the finish that all vanished. After I caught my breath, I exchanged a smile and a handshake with the man wearing race number 329. “Good job,” we told each other. He and I had battled it out in the bike race, where he passed me many times. Right when we started running, my shoelaces came untied and twice I had to stop to retie them. If only that hadn’t happened, I know I would have passed him—or so goes my optimistic hypothesis. When I picked up the pace at the end of the run, I almost passed him, but wound up three yards short. Naturally the responsibility for not checking my shoelaces before the race lies entirely with yours truly.

At any rate, I’d happily made it to the finish line set up in front of the Murakami City Hall. The race was over. I didn’t drown, didn’t get a flat, didn’t get stung by a vicious jellyfish. No ferocious bear hurled himself at me, and I wasn’t stung by wasps, or hit by lightning. And my wife, waiting at the finish line, didn’t discover some unpleasant truth about me. Instead, she greeted me with a smile. Thank goodness.

The happiest thing for me about this day’s race was that I was able, on a personal level, to truly enjoy the event. The overall time I posted wasn’t anything to brag about, and I made a lot of little mistakes along the way. But I did give it my best, and I felt a nice, tangible afterglow. I also think I’ve improved in a lot of areas since the previous race, which is an important point to consider. In a triathlon the transition from one event to the next is difficult, and experience counts for everything. Through experience you learn how to compensate for your physical shortcomings. To put it another way, learning from experience is what makes the triathlon so much fun.

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.

On the way back to Tokyo from Niigata I saw quite a few cars with bicycles strapped to their roofs on their way back from the race. The people inside were all tanned and strong looking—the typical triathlon physique. 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. To be able to grasp something of value, sometimes you have to perform seemingly inefficient acts. But even activities that appear fruitless don’t necessarily end up so. That’s the feeling I have, as someone who’s felt this, who’s experienced it.

I have no idea whether I can actually keep this cycle of inefficient activities going forever. But I’ve done it so persistently over such a long time, and without getting terribly sick of it, that I think I’ll try to keep going as long as I can. Long-distance running (more or less, for better or worse) has molded me into the person I am today, and I’m hoping it will remain a part of my life for as long as possible. I’ll be happy if running and I can grow old together. There may not seem to be much logic to it, but it’s the life I’ve chosen for myself. Not that, at this late date, I have other options.