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Authors: Haruki Murakami

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BOOK: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
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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.

And this feeling grew particularly strong as I entered the last part of the course, the Natural Flower Garden on the long, long peninsula. It’s a kind of meditative, contemplative stretch. The scenery along the coast is beautiful, and the scent of the Sea of Okhotsk wafted over me. Evening had come on (we’d started early in the morning), and the air had a special clarity to it. I could also smell the deep grass of the beginning of summer. I saw a few foxes, too, gathered in a field. They looked at us runners curiously. Thick, meaningful clouds, like something out of a nineteenth-century British landscape painting, covered the sky. There was no wind at all. Many of the other runners around me were just silently trudging toward the finish line. Being among them gave me a quiet sense of happiness. Breathe in, breathe out. My breath didn’t seem ragged at all. The air calmly went inside me and then went out. My silent heart expanded and contracted, over and over, at a fixed rate. Like the bellows of a worker, my lungs faithfully brought fresh oxygen into my body. I could sense all these organs working, and distinguish each and every sound they made. Everything was working just fine. People lining the road cheered us on, saying, “Hang in there! You’re almost there!” Like the crystalline air, their shouts went right through me. Their voices passed clean through me to the other side.

I’m
me,
and at the same time
not
me.
That’s what it felt like. A very still, quiet feeling. The mind wasn’t so important. Of course, as a novelist I know that my mind is critical to doing my job. Take away the mind, and I’ll never write an original story again. Still, at this point it didn’t feel like my mind was important. The mind just wasn’t that big a deal.

Usually when I approach the end of a marathon, all I want to do is get it over with, and finish the race as soon as possible. That’s all I can think of. But as I drew near the end of this ultramarathon, I wasn’t really thinking about this. 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.

Even so, when I reached the finish line in Tokoro-cho, I felt very happy. I’m always happy when I reach the finish line of a long-distance race, but this time it really struck me hard. I pumped my right fist into the air. The time was 4:42 p.m. Eleven hours and forty-two minutes since the start of the race.

For the first time in half a day I sat down and wiped off my sweat, drank some water, tugged off my shoes, and, as the sun went down, carefully stretched my ankles. At this point a new feeling started to well up in me—nothing as profound as a feeling of pride, but at least a certain sense of completion. A personal feeling of happiness and relief that I had accepted something risky and still had the strength to endure it. In this instance, relief outweighed happiness. It was like a tight knot inside me was gradually loosening, a knot I’d never even realized, until then, was there.

 

Right after this race at Lake Saroma I found it hard to walk downstairs. My legs were wobbly and I couldn’t support my body well, as if my knees were about to give out. I had to hold on to the railing to walk down the stairs. After a few days, though, my legs recovered, and I could walk up and down the stairs as usual. It’s clear that over many years my legs have grown used to long-distance running. The real problem, as I mentioned before, turned out to be my hands. In order to make up for my tired leg muscles, I’d vigorously pumped my hands back and forth. The day after the race my right wrist started to hurt and turned red and swollen. I’d run a lot of marathons, but this was the first time it was my arms, not my legs, that paid the greatest price.

Still, the most significant fallout from running the ultramarathon wasn’t physical but mental. What I ended up with was a sense of lethargy, and before I knew it, I felt covered by a thin film, something I’ve sinced dubbed
runner’s blues.
(Though the actual feeling of it was closer to a milky white.) After this ultramarathon I lost the enthusiasm I’d always had for the act of running itself. Fatigue was a factor, but that wasn’t the only reason. The desire to run wasn’t as clear as before. I don’t know why, but it was undeniable: something had happened to me. Afterward, the amount of running I did, not to mention the distances I ran, noticeably declined.

After this, I still followed my usual schedule of running one full marathon per year. You can’t finish a marathon if you’re halfhearted about it, so I did a decent enough job of training, and did a decent enough job of finishing the races. But this never went beyond the level of
decent enough job.
It’s as if loosening that knot I’d never noticed before had slackened my interest along with it. It wasn’t just that my desire to run had decreased. At the same time that I’d lost something, something new had also taken root deep within me as a runner. And most likely this process of one thing exiting while another comes in had produced this unfamiliar runner’s blues.

And what about this new thing within me? I can’t find the exact words to describe it, but it might be something close to resignation. To exaggerate a bit, it was as if by completing the over-sixty-mile race I’d stepped into a
different place.
After my fatigue disappeared somewhere after the forty-seventh mile, my mind went into a blank state you might even call philosophical or religious. Something urged me to become more introspective, and this newfound introspection transformed my attitude toward the act of running. Maybe I no longer have the simple, positive stance I used to have, of wanting to run no matter what.

I don’t know, maybe I’m making too much of it. Perhaps I’d just run too much and gotten tired. Plus I was in my late forties and was coming up against some physical barriers unavoidable for a person my age. Perhaps I was just coming to terms with the fact that I’d passed my physical peak. Or maybe I was going through a depression brought on by a sort of general male equivalent of menopause. Perhaps all these various factors had combined into a mysterious cocktail inside me. As the person involved in this, it’s hard for me to analyze it objectively. Whatever it was, runner’s blues was my name for it.

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 I 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. The amount of adrenaline I secreted on the day of a race, too, was ratcheted back a notch. Because of this I eventually turned my focus from full marathons to triathlons and grew more enthusiastic about playing squash at the gym. My lifestyle gradually changed, and I no longer considered running the point of life. In other words, a mental gap began to develop between me and running. Just like when you lose the initial crazy feeling you have when you fall in love.

 

Now I feel like I’m finally getting away from the runner’s-blues fog that’s surrounded me for so long. Not that I’ve completely rid myself of it, but I can sense something beginning to stir. In the morning as I lace up my running shoes, I can catch a faint sign of something in the air, and within me. I want to take good care of this sprout that’s sprung up. Just as, when I don’t want to go in the wrong direction—or miss hearing a sound, miss seeing the scenery—I’m going to focus on what’s going on with my body.

For the first time in a long while, I feel content running every day in preparation for the next marathon. I’ve opened a new notebook, unscrewed the cap on a new bottle of ink, and am writing something new. Why I feel so generous about running now, I can’t really explain systematically. Maybe coming back to Cambridge and the banks of the Charles River has revived old feelings. Perhaps the warm feelings I have for this place have stirred up memories of those days when running was so central to my life. Or maybe this is simply a matter of time passing. Maybe I just had to undergo an inevitable internal adjustment, and the period needed for this to happen is finally drawing to a close.

As I suspect is true of many who write for a living, as I write I think about all sorts of things. I don’t necessarily write down what I’m thinking; it’s just that as I write I think about things. As I write, I arrange my thoughts. And rewriting and revising takes my thinking down even deeper paths. No matter how much I write, though, I never reach a conclusion. And no matter how much I rewrite, I never reach the destination. Even after decades of writing, the same still holds true. All I do is present a few hypotheses or paraphrase the issue. Or find an analogy between the structure of the problem and something else.

To tell the truth, I don’t really understand the causes behind my runner’s blues. Or why now it’s beginning to fade. It’s too early to explain it well. Maybe the only thing I can definitely say about it is this: That’s life. Maybe the only thing we can do is accept it, without really knowing what’s going on. Like taxes, the tide rising and falling, John Lennon’s death, and miscalls by referees at the World Cup.

At any rate, I have the distinct feeling that time has come full circle, that a cycle has been completed. The act of running has returned as a happy, necessary part of my daily life. And recently I’ve been running steadily, day by day. Not as some mechanical repetition anymore, or some prescribed ceremony. My body feels a natural desire now to get out on the road and run, just like when I’m dehydrated and crave the juice from a fresh piece of fruit. I’m looking forward now to the NYC Marathon on November 6, to seeing how much I can enjoy the race, how satisfied I’ll be with the run, and how I’ll do.

I don’t care about the time I run. I can try all I want, but I doubt I’ll ever be able to run the way I used to. I’m ready to accept that. It’s not one of your happier realities, but that’s what happens when you get older. Just as I have my own role to play, so does time. And time does its job much more faithfully, much more accurately, than I ever do. Ever since time began (when was that, I wonder?), it’s been moving ever forward without a moment’s rest. And one of the privileges given to those who’ve avoided dying young is the blessed right to grow old. The honor of physical decline is waiting, and you have to get used to that reality.

Competing against time isn’t important. What’s going to be much more meaningful to me now is how much I can enjoy myself, whether I can finish twenty-six miles with a feeling of contentment. I’ll enjoy and value things that can’t be expressed in numbers, and I’ll grope for a feeling of pride that comes from a slightly
different place.

I’m not a young person who’s focused totally on breaking records, nor an inorganic machine that goes through the motions. I’m nothing more or less than a (most likely honest) professional writer who knows his limits, who wants to hold on to his abilities and vitality for as long as possible.

One more month until the New York City Marathon.

Seven

OCTOBER
30, 2005

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS

Autumn in New York

A
s if to lament
the defeat of the Boston Red Sox in the playoffs (they lost every game in a Sox vs. Sox series with Chicago), for ten days afterward a cold rain fell on New England. A long autumn rain. Sometimes it rained hard, sometimes softly; sometimes, it would let up for a time like an afterthought, but not once did it clear up. From beginning to end the sky was completely covered with the thick gray clouds particular to this region. Like a dawdling person, the rain lingered for a long time, then finally made up its mind to turn into a downpour. Towns from New Hampshire to Massachusetts suffered damage from the rain, and the main highway was cut off in places. (Please understand I’m not blaming the Red Sox for all this.) I had some work to do at a college in Maine, and all I recall from the trip was driving in this gloomy rain. Except for the middle of winter, traveling in this region is usually fun, but unfortunately my trip this time wasn’t very enjoyable. Too late for summer, too early for the fall colors. It was raining cats and dogs, plus the windshield wiper on my rental car was acting up, and by the time I returned to Cambridge late at night I was exhausted.

 

On Sunday, October 9, I ran an early-morning race, and it was still raining. This was a half marathon held every year at this time by the Boston Athletic Association, the same organization that holds the Boston Marathon in the spring. The course starts at Roberto Clemente Field, near Fenway Park, goes past Jamaica Pond, then winds back inside the Franklin Park Zoo and ends up right where it started. This year some 4,500 people participated.

I ran this race as a kind of warm-up for the New York City Marathon, so I only gave it about 80 percent, really getting fired up only in the final two miles. It’s pretty hard, though, to not give it your all in a race, to try to hold back. Being surrounded by other runners is bound to have an influence on you. It’s a lot of fun, after all, to be with so many fellow runners when the starters shout
Go!,
and before you know it the old competitive instinct raises its head. This time, though, I tried my best to suppress it and keep my cool:
I’ve got to save my energy, so I can bring it as a carry-on when I board the plane for New York.

My time was one hour and fifty-five minutes. Not too bad, and about what I expected. The last couple of miles I floored it, passing about a hundred runners and making it to the finish line with energy to spare. The other runners around me were mainly Caucasians, especially a lot of women. For whatever reason, there weren’t many minority runners. It was a cold Sunday morning, with a mistlike rain falling the entire time. But pinning a number on my back, hearing the other runners’ breathing as we ran down the road, I was struck by a thought:
The racing season is upon us.
Adrenaline coursed through me. I usually run alone, so this race was a good stimulus. I got a pretty good feeling for the pace I should maintain in the marathon next month. For what will happen in the second half of that race, I’ll just have to wait and see.

When I’m training I regularly run the length of a half marathon, and often much farther, so this Boston race seemed over before it began.
Is that all?
I asked myself. This was a good thing, though, since if a half marathon left me exhausted, a full marathon would be hellish.

 

The rain continued off and on for quite a while, and during this time I had to take a work-related trip, so I wasn’t able to run as much as I’d have liked. But with the New York City Marathon fast approaching, it really isn’t such a problem if I can’t run. Actually, it’s to my advantage to rest. The problem is, I know I should take a break and rest up, but with a race coming up I get excited and end up running anyway. If it’s raining, though, I give up easily enough. I suppose that’s one good side of having it rain so much.

Even though I’m not doing much running, my knee has started to hurt. Like most of the troubles in life it came on all of a sudden, without any warning. On the morning of October 17, I started to walk down the stairs in our building and my right knee suddenly buckled. When I twisted it in a certain direction the kneecap hurt in a peculiar way, a little different from an everyday ache. At a certain point it started to feel unsteady and I couldn’t put any weight on it. That’s what they mean by wobbly knees. I had to hold on to the railing to get downstairs.

I was exhausted from all the hard training, and most likely the sudden dip in temperature was bringing this to the surface. The summer heat still lingered in the beginning of October, but the weeklong period of rain had quickly ushered in the fall to New England. Until a short while ago I’d been using my air conditioner, but now a chilly breeze blew through the town, and you could see the signs of late autumn everywhere. I had to hurriedly drag some sweaters out of the dresser. Even the faces of the squirrels looked different as they scurried around collecting food. My body tends to have problems during these transitions from one season to another, something that never happened when I was young. The main problem is when it gets cold and damp.

If you’re a long-distance runner who trains hard every day, your knees are your weak point. Every time your feet hit the ground when you run, it’s a shock equivalent to three times your weight, and this repeats itself perhaps over ten thousand times a day. With the hard concrete surface of the road meeting this ridiculous amount of weight (granted, there’s the cushioning of the shoes between them), your knees silently endure all this endless pounding. If you think of this (and I admit it’s something I don’t usually think about), it would seem strange if you
didn’t
have a problem with your knees. You have to expect the knees to want to complain sometimes, to come up with a comment like, “Huffing and puffing down the road’s all well and good, but how about paying attention to me every once in a while? Remember, if we go out on you, we can’t be replaced.”

When was the last time I gave my knees any serious thought? As I was pondering this, I started to feel a little remorseful. They’re absolutely right. You can replace your breath any number of times, but not your knees. These are the only knees I’ll ever have, so I’d better take good care of them.

As I said before, I’ve been fortunate as a runner not to have had any major injuries. And I’ve never had to cancel a race or drop out because of illness. Several times in the past, my right knee has felt strange (it’s always the right knee), but I’ve always been able to soothe it and keep it going. So my knee should be okay now too, right? That’s what I’d like to think. But even in bed I still feel uneasy. What’ll I do if after all this I can’t run in the race? Was there something wrong with my training schedule? Maybe I didn’t stretch enough? (Maybe I really didn’t.) Or maybe in the half marathon I ran too hard at the end? With all these thoughts running through my head I couldn’t sleep well. Outside the wind was cold and noisy.

 

The next morning, after I woke up, washed my face, and drank a cup of coffee, I tried walking down the stairs in our apartment building. I gingerly descended the stairs, holding on to the railing and paying close attention to my right knee. The inner part of the right knee still felt strange. That’s the spot where I could detect a hint of pain, though it wasn’t the startling, sharp pain of the day before. I tried going up and down the stairs one more time, and this time I went down the four flights and back up again at close to normal speed. I tried all sorts of ways of walking, testing my knee by twisting it at various angles, and felt a little relieved.

This isn’t connected to running, but my daily life in Cambridge isn’t going that smoothly. The building we’re living in is undergoing some major remodeling, and during the day all you hear is drills and grinders. Every day is an endless procession of workmen passing by outside our fourth-story window. The construction work starts at seven thirty in the morning, when it’s still a little dark outside, and continues until three thirty. They made some mistake in the drainage work on the veranda above us, and our apartment got totally wet from the rain leaking in. Rain even got our bed wet. We mobilized every pot and pan we had, but still it wasn’t enough to catch all the water dripping down, so we covered the floor with newspapers. And as if this weren’t enough, the boiler suddenly gave out, and we had to do without hot water and heating. But that wasn’t all. Something was wrong with the smoke detector in the hall, and the alarm blared all the time. So altogether, every day was pretty noisy.

Our apartment was near Harvard Square, close enough that I could walk to the office, so it was convenient, but moving in right when they were doing major remodeling was a bit of bad luck. Still, I can’t spend all my time complaining. I’ve got work to do, and the marathon’s fast approaching.

Long story short: my knee seems to have settled down, which is definitely good news. I’m going to try to be optimistic about things.

There’s one more piece of good news. My public reading at MIT on October 6 went very well. Maybe even
too
well. The university had prepared a classroom that had a 450-person capacity, but about 1,700 people poured in, which meant that most had to be turned away. The campus police were called in to straighten things out. Due to the confusion the reading started late, and on top of that the air conditioner wasn’t working. It was as hot as midsummer, and everyone in the room was dripping with sweat.

“Thank you all very much for taking the time to attend my reading,” I began. “If I’d known there would be this many attending I would have booked Fenway Park.” Everyone was hot and irritated by the confusion, and I thought it best to try to get them to laugh. I took off my jacket and gave my reading wearing a T-shirt. The audience’s reaction was great—most of them were students—and from start to finish I could enjoy myself. It made me really happy to see so many young people interested in my novels.

One other project I’m involved in now is translating Scott Fitzgerald’s
The Great Gatsby,
and things are going well. I’ve finished the first draft and am revising the second. I’m taking my time, going over each line carefully, and as I do so the translation gets smoother and I’m better able to render Fitzgerald’s prose into more natural Japanese. It’s a little strange, perhaps, to make this claim at such a late date, but
Gatsby
really is an outstanding novel. I never get tired of it, no matter how many times I read it. It’s the kind of literature that nourishes you as you read, and every time I do I’m struck by something new, and experience a fresh reaction to it. I find it amazing how such a young writer, only twenty-nine at the time, could grasp—so insightfully, so equitably, and so warmly—the realities of life. How was this possible? The more I think about it, and the more I read the novel, the more mysterious it all is.

 

On October 20, after resting and not running for four days because of the rain and that weird sensation in my knee, I ran again. In the afternoon, after the temperature had risen a bit, I put on warm clothes and slowly jogged for about forty minutes. Thankfully, my knee felt all right. I jogged slowly at first, but then gradually sped up when I saw things were going okay. Everything was okay, and my leg, knee, and heel were working fine. This was a great relief, because the most important thing for me right now is running in the New York City Marathon and finishing it. Reaching the finish line, never walking, and enjoying the race. These three, in this order, are my goals.

The sunny weather continued for three days straight, and the workers were finally able to finish the drainage work on the roof. As David, the tall young construction foreman from Switzerland, had told me—a dark look on his face as he glanced up at the sky—they could finish the work only if it was sunny for three days in a row, and finally it was. No more worrying about leaks anymore. And the boiler’s been fixed and we have hot water again, so I can finally take a hot shower. The basement had been off-limits during the repairs, but now we can go down there and use the washer and dryer again. They tell me that tomorrow the central heating will come on. So, after all these disasters, things—including my knee—are finally taking a turn for the better.

 

October 27. Today I was finally able to run at about 80 percent without any strange sensations in my knee. Yesterday I still felt something weird, but this morning I can run normally. I ran for fifty minutes, and for the last ten minutes picked up the pace to the speed I’ll have to have when I actually run the NYC Marathon. I pictured entering Central Park and getting near the finish line, and it was no problem at all. My feet hit the pavement hard, and my knees didn’t buckle. The danger is over. Probably.

It’s become really cold, and the town is full of Halloween pumpkins. In the morning the path along the river is lined with wet, colorful fallen leaves. If you want to run in the morning, gloves are a must.

BOOK: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
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