On Murakami and Running

I have never really consciously thought about running much. I never thought about how running does so much more than just the physical upside. I say this after having gone through more than half of Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running book and two running sessions in the last week. Murakami is the kind of person who doesn’t do public appearances much. I couldn’t find a video or audio interview of him—there’s just this one audio interview I found where he’s giving an interview in Japanese and the translator is conveying. But yes, there are a bunch of text interviews. I read this one from The New Yorker—one of the best reads of this week. Here’s an excerpt from the interview:

No, not at all. When I’m running, I’m just running. I empty my mind. I have no idea what I’m thinking while I’m running. Maybe nothing. But, you know, you have to be tough to write for a long time. To write one book is not so difficult, but to keep writing for many years is very close to impossible. You need the power of concentration and endurance. I sometimes write very unhealthy things. Weird things. Twisted things. I think you have to be very healthy if you want to write unhealthy things. That’s a paradox, but it’s true. Some writers led very unhealthy lives—like Baudelaire. But, in my opinion, those days are gone. This is a very complicated world, and you have to be strong to survive, to get through the chaos. I became a writer when I was thirty years old, and I started running when I was thirty-two or thirty-three. I decided to start running every day because I wanted to see what would happen. I think life is a kind of laboratory where you can try anything. And in the end I think it was good for me, because I became tough.

But why am I going on about him? Since he likes to keep his life private, my curiosity to know him grew further. I had heard of his running book in some interview, which is sort of like a memoir, so I thought of giving it a read. And every page keeps getting better and better. He shares in this book how he became a writer: he was watching a local baseball game and drinking beer—just another normal day. And during this game, it occurred to him that he could become a writer, out of nowhere. Until then, he was running his own jazz club. Mind-blowing!

A kind of epiphany—that’s what it was. I love baseball, and I go to the ballpark often. In 1978, when I was twenty-nine, I went to the baseball park in Tokyo to see my favorite team, the Yakult Swallows. It was opening day, a very sunny day. I was watching the game and the first batter hit a double, and at that moment I got a feeling I could write. Maybe I’d drunk too much beer—I don’t know—but at that time it was as if I’d had some kind of epiphany. Before that I hadn’t written anything at all. I was the owner of a jazz club, and I was so busy making cocktails and sandwiches. I make very good sandwiches! But after that game I went to the stationery store and bought some supplies, and then I started writing and I became a writer.

He talks about how he adopted running into his routine as a writer. Since he was sitting and writing for a fair part of the day without any form of exercise, he was putting on weight. If he wanted to sustain a long-running career as a novelist, he would have to be in good physical condition—plus have the stamina to sit in one place for long hours. And so, he picked long-distance running. I seem to be at a loss for words to really articulate how thoughtfully and brilliantly he talks about running. I never once realised how running is such a lone sport. You have to talk to yourself, motivate yourself constantly, and just keep going. I mean, apart from the physical upside, there’s so much mental upside to this, as is with any form of workout.

I have done running as well, but it was mostly 100 meters or 200 meters—never long distance. I did two sessions of running last week, one of 20 minutes and the other one 45 minutes. Around the 9–10-minute mark, I just wanted to stop running. I was completely blank in my mind. I was just constantly looking at the timer, sweating, and screaming in my head, “Why did I do this?” This is one of the things that Murakami keeps saying in his book:

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.

This piece I’ve written doesn’t do justice to the book or to him. I tried writing it again and again but couldn’t get it right. I’m not good at this yet—but hopefully, like his running, if I keep at it, I’ll get better.