What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (5 page)

It was midsummer in Athens when I ran. As those who’ve been there know, the heat can be unbelievable. The locals, unless they can’t help it, avoid going out in the afternoon. They don’t do anything, just keep cool in the shade to conserve their strength. Only once the sun sets do they take to the streets. Just about the only people you see walking outside on a summer afternoon in Greece are tourists. Even dogs just lie down in the shade and don’t move a muscle. You have to watch them for a long time before you can figure out whether they’re still alive. That’s how hot it is. Running twenty-six miles in heat like that is nothing short of an act of madness.

When I told Greeks my plan to run alone from Athens to Marathon, they all said the same thing: “That’s insane. No one in their right mind would ever think of it.” Before I came, I had no idea how hot the summer is in Athens, so I was pretty easygoing about it. All I had to do was run twenty-six miles, I figured, only worrying about the distance. The temperature never crossed my mind. Once I got to Athens, though, it was so blazing hot I did start to get the jitters.
They’re right,
I thought.
You have to be crazy to want to do this.
Still, I’d made this flamboyant gesture, promising I’d run the original marathon course and write an article about it, and I’d flown all the way to Greece to accomplish it. No way could I back out now. I racked my brain to come up with ideas on how to keep from getting exhausted by the heat, and finally got the idea of leaving Athens in the early morning, while it was still dark, and reaching Marathon before the sun was high. The later it got, the hotter it would be. It was turning out to be exactly like the story “Run, Melos!,” about a competition to outrun the sun.

The photographer from the magazine, Masao Kageyama, would ride along in the van that accompanied me. He’d take pictures as they drove along. It wasn’t a real race, and there weren’t any water stations, so I’d occasionally stop to get water from the van. The Greek summer is truly brutal, and I knew I’d have to be careful not to get dehydrated.

“Mr. Murakami,” Mr. Kageyama said, surprised as he saw me getting ready to run, “you’re not really thinking of running the whole route, are you?”

“Of course I am. That’s why I came here.”

“Really? But when we do these kinds of projects most people don’t go all the way. We just take some photos, and most of them don’t finish the whole route. So you really are going to run the entire thing?”

Sometimes the world baffles me. I can’t believe that people would really do things like that.

At any rate, I started off my run at five thirty a.m. at the stadium later used in the 2004 Athens Olympics, and set off down the road to Marathon. There’s just the one main highway. Once you run roads in Greece you’ll understand, but they’re paved differently. Instead of gravel, they mix in powdered marble, which makes the road shiny in the sunlight and quite slippery. When it rains you have to be very careful. Even when it isn’t raining the soles of your shoes make a squeaky sound, and your legs can feel how smooth the road surface is.

The following is a shortened form of the article I wrote for the magazine covering my Athens–Marathon run.

The sun’s climbing higher and higher. The road within the Athens city limits is very hard to run on. It’s about three miles from the stadium to the highway entrance, and there are way too many stoplights along the way, which messes up my pace. There are also a lot of places where construction and double-parked cars block the road, and I have to step out into the middle of the street. What with the cars zooming around early in the morning, running here can be dangerous.

The sun starts to come up just as I enter Marathon Avenue, and the streetlights all go out at once. The time when the summer sun rules over the earth is swiftly approaching. People have started to appear at bus stops. Greeks take a siesta at noon, so they tend to commute to work pretty early. They all look at me curiously. Can’t imagine many of them have ever seen an Oriental man running down the pre-dawn streets of Athens before. Athens isn’t the kind of town with many joggers to begin with.

Four miles into the run I strip off my running shirt and am naked from the waist up. I always run without a shirt, so it feels great to take it off (though later I’ll wind up with a terrible sunburn). Until the eighth mile I’m running up a gradual slope. Hardly a breath of air. When I get to the top of the slope it feels like I’ve finally left the city. I’m relieved, but at the same time this is where the sidewalk disappears, replaced only by a white line painted along the road, marking off a narrow lane. Rush hour has begun, and the number of cars has increased. Large buses and trucks whiz right by me, at about fifty miles per hour. You do get a vague sense of history with a road named Marathon Avenue, but it’s basically just an ordinary commuter highway.

It’s at this point that I encounter my first dead dog. A large, brown dog. I don’t see any external injuries. It’s just laid out in the middle of the road. I figured it’s a stray that got hit by a speeding car in the middle of the night. The body still looks warm, so it doesn’t seem dead. It looks more like it’s just sleeping. The truck drivers zooming past don’t give it a glance.

A little further on I run across a cat that’s been flattened by a car. The cat is totally flat, like some misshapen pizza, and dried up. It must have been run over quite a while ago.

That’s the kind of road I’m talking about.

At this point I really start to wonder why, having flown all the way from Tokyo to this beautiful country, I have to run down this dreary commuter road. There must have been other things I could be doing. The body count for all these poor animals who lost their lives on Marathon Avenue is, on this day, three dogs and eleven cats. I count them all, which is kind of depressing.

I run on and on. The sun reveals all of itself, and with unbelievable speed rises in the sky. I’m dying of thirst. I don’t have time to get sweaty, since the air is so dry that perspiration immediately evaporates, leaving behind a layer of white salt. There’s the expression
beads of sweat,
but here the sweat disappears before it can even form beads. My whole body starts to sting from the salty residue. When I lick my lips they taste like anchovy paste. I start to dream about an ice-cold beer, one so cold it burns. No beers around, though, so I make do with getting a drink from the editors’ van about every three miles or so. I’ve never drunk so much water while running.

I feel pretty good, though. Lots of energy left. I’m only going at about 70 percent of capacity, but am managing a decent pace. By turns the road goes uphill, then down. Since I’m heading from inland toward the sea, the road is, overall, slightly downhill. I leave behind the city, then the suburbs, and gradually enter a more rural area. As I pass through the small village of Nea Makri, old people sitting at an outdoor café sipping morning coffee from tiny cups silently watch me as I run by. Like they’re witnessing a scene from the backwaters of history.

At around seventeen miles there’s a slope, and once over that I catch a glimpse of the Marathon hills. I figure I’m about two-thirds finished with the run. I calculate the split times in my head and figure that at this rate I should be able to finish in three and a half hours. But things don’t go that well. After I pass nineteen miles the headwind from the sea starts blowing, and the closer I get to Marathon the harder it blows. The wind is so strong it stings my skin. It feel like if I were to relax at all I’d be blown backward. The faint scent of the sea comes to me as the road gently slopes upward. There is just the one road to Marathon, and it’s straight as a ruler. This is the point when I start to feel real exhaustion. No matter how much water I drink, a few minutes later I’m thirsty again. A nice cold beer would be fantastic.

No—forget about beer. And forget about the sun. Forget about the wind. Forget about the article I have to write. Just focus on moving my feet forward, one after the other. That’s the only thing that matters.

I pass twenty-two miles. I’ve never run more than twenty-two miles, so this is terra incognita. On the left is a line of rugged, barren mountains. Who could ever have made them? On the right, an endless row of olive orchards. Everything looks covered in a layer of white dust. And the strong wind from the sea never lets up. What is up with this wind? Why does it have to be this strong?

At around twenty-three miles I start to hate everything. Enough already! My energy has scraped bottom, and I don’t want to run anymore. 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. I’m dying of thirst but lack the strength to even drink water anymore. As these thoughts flit through my mind I gradually start to get angry. Angry at the sheep happily munching grass in an empty lot next to the road, angry at the photographer snapping photos from inside the van. The sound of the shutter grates on my nerves. Who needs this many sheep, anyway? But snapping the shutter is the photographer’s job, just as chewing grass is the sheep’s, so I don’t have any right to complain. Still, the whole thing really bugs me to no end. My skin’s starting to rise up in little white heat blisters. This is getting ridiculous. What’s
with
this heat, anyway?

I pass the twenty-five-mile mark.

“Just one more mile. Hang in there!” the editor calls out cheerfully from the van. Easy for
you
to say, I want to yell back, but don’t. The naked sun is blazing hot. It’s only just past nine a.m., but I feel like I’m in an oven. The sweat’s getting in my eyes. The salt makes my eyes sting, and for a while I can’t see a thing. I wipe away the sweat with my hand, but my hand and face are salty too, and that makes my eyes sting even more.

Beyond the tall summer grasses I can just make out the goal line, the Marathon monument at the entrance to the village of the same name. It appears so abruptly that at first I’m not sure if that’s really the goal. I’m happy to see the finish line, no question about it, but the abruptness of it makes me mad for some reason. Since this is the last leg of the run, I want to make a last, desperate effort to run as fast as I can, but my legs have a mind of their own. I’ve totally forgotten how to move my body. All my muscles feel like they’ve been shaved away with a rusty plane.

The finish line.

I finally reach the end. Strangely, I have no feeling of accomplishment. The only thing I feel is utter relief that I don’t have to run anymore. I use a spigot at a gas station to cool off my overheated body and wash away the salt stuck to me. I’m covered with salt, a veritable human salt field. When the old man at the gas station hears what I’ve done, he snips off some flowers from a potted plant and presents me with a bouquet.
You did a good job,
he smiles.
Congratulations.
I feel so thankful for these small gestures of kindness from foreigners. Marathon is a small, friendly village, quiet and peaceful. I can’t imagine how this was where, several thousand years ago, the Greeks defeated the invading Persian army at the shore in a ghastly battle. I sit at a café in the village and gulp down cold Amstel beer. It tastes fantastic, but not nearly as great as the beer I’d been imagining as I ran. Nothing in the real world is as beautiful as the illusions of a person about to lose consciousness.

The run from Athens to Marathon took me three hours and fifty-one minutes. Not exactly a great time, but at least I was able to run the whole course by myself, my only companions the awful traffic, the unimaginable heat, and my terrible thirst. I guess I should be proud of what I did, but right now I don’t care. What makes me happy right now is knowing that I don’t have to run another step.

Whew!—I don’t have to run anymore.

This was my first-ever experience running (nearly) twenty-six miles. And, happily, it was the last time I ever had to run twenty-six miles in such grueling conditions. In December of the same year I ran the Honolulu Marathon in a fairly decent time. Hawaii was hot, but nothing compared to Athens. So Honolulu was my first official full marathon. Ever since then it’s been my practice to run one full marathon a year.