What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (2007) is a memoir by the award-winning Japanese author Haruki Murakami. Beloved for novels like The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Norwegian Wood, Murakami here combines elements of a traditional memoir with philosophical musings about running and writing. Murakami began his love affair with running in the 1980s and has since completed more than twenty-five marathons along with a sixty-two-mile "ultramarathon."

Most of the book is adapted from journal entries Murakami wrote while training three months before the 2005 New York marathon. "I've never able to keep a regular diary for very long," Murakami writes, "but I've faithfully kept up my runner's journal." The author's training regimen consists of running six days a week, never for less than an hour at a time. His favorite band to listen to while running is the Lovin' Spoonful who are most famous for their song, "Do You Believe in Magic?" He also enjoys listening to Eric Clapton on runs.

Murakami is quick to agree that running is not for everybody: "No matter how strong a will a person has, if [running] is an activity he doesn't really care for, he won't keep it up for long." Rather than evangelize to non-believers, Murakami focuses on running as a metaphor for novel writing. Many novelists, he says, have talent. Nevertheless, focus and endurance, arguably even more important to a novelist's success, are perhaps qualities best developed through running.



Building this endurance—either as a runner or a novelist or both—Murakami says, is a matter of treating your muscles as a teacher might behave toward unruly students, or perhaps as a pit boss might behave toward lazy workers: "As long as you explain your expectations to them by actually showing them examples of the amount of work they have to endure, your muscles will comply and gradually get stronger. If, however, the load halts for a few days, the muscles automatically assume they don't have to work that hard anymore."

Aside from listening to the Lovin' Spoonful and Eric Clapton, Murakami frequently busies his mind on runs by rehearsing upcoming speeches. He says that he prefers to speak in halting English rather than his native Japanese tongue because, in Japanese, he becomes overwhelmed with the possibilities of the language. He speaks more simply and directly in English, a language he does not know nearly as well.

Not unlike an author struggling with writer's block, Murakami talks in detail about the dreaded "wall" marathon-runners frequently hit a few miles from the finish line. During these moments, small hills that the brain and legs would hardly register as such on a shorter run feel like mountains. It is useful to remind oneself that it is not a mountain; it only feels like one, a lesson Murakami carries over when he's stuck as a writer.



Murakami also shares a bit of his personal history, particularly the time he spent in his youth as a nightclub entrepreneur and his anxieties as a writer early in his career. While running has helped him become a better writer, Murakami says he rarely gets ideas for stories or sentences while running. Rather, the act helps clear whatever mental blockages he is experiencing so he is better equipped when he does sit down to write.

In one entry, Murakami discusses the ways in which running is a tonic to the "unhealthy type of work" that is writing. Writing, he says, forces a person to confront the "toxin that lies deep down in all humanity." He adds that despite its toxicity, "no creative activity in the real sense can take place" without facing these hard truths.

As Murakami moves further into his fifties, he is sad to admit that his marathon-running days won't last forever. Of late, he has become a big proponent of triathlons, the most common of which includes a 1.5-kilometer swim, a 40-kilometer bicycle ride, and a 6.2-mile run. The last third of the book covers his training for a triathlon. In ruminating on his aging body, Murakami reveals what he hopes his tombstone will read:



Haruki Murakami
1949-20**
Writer (And Runner)
At Least He Never Walked

While it is sure to be too loose and unfocused for some readers, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is a book of rare frankness—required reading for running-junkies and Murakami enthusiasts alike.