What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

Several months ago, I read a piece in The New Yorker by Haruki Murakami, one of my favorite writers. It was about running, specifically, him as a runner. I was surprised to learn that he was not only a runner, but someone who has been running for decades now and has competed in one marathon a year since he started running about 20 years ago.

This weekend, Justin presented me with What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, the book from which that piece was excerpted, for my birthday. It was such a thoughtful gift.

I've been reading this memoir of sorts of Murakami's on the bus. Though the prose isn't what I would hope for from someone whose writing I've admired and enjoyed, it's captivating enough (and easy enough to plow through the pages) that I've almost missed my stop once.

Murakami makes several points about running and why it suits him, which, are some of the reasons why running is growing on me (I wish I was a better runner so that my body wouldn't struggle so much though). It's easy to do; you just put on your shoes, step out the door, and start running. You can do it almost anywhere. And, a point he makes several times, is that you can run alone. You don't need a team or a partner. It's just you and the road. He likes that, and so do I.

I run in the mornings when it's still dark and very quiet, almost eerily so. I wake up at 5:37am and am out the door a little after 6am. There's almost no one out, except for a few people waiting for the bus. It's just me, jogging slowly along the neighborhood, quietly motivating myself to keep going until the next light, the next stop sign, the next lamp post. It's just me and the thoughts circling in my head and the music that I sing to myself. For those forty minutes that I'm jogging, it's just me.