Memoir of a Long Distance Runner

In his former life, Haruki Murakami used to be a  jazz club owner in Tokyo who smoked 60 cigarettes a day. In his current avatar, he is a passionate long distance runner who quit smoking when he started running. By his own confession, he runs 10k everyday, and a half marathon and a marathon every year. From New York City to Boston Marathon, he has done it all. Many times. And he once ran a soul-sapping 100k ultramarathon.

In 1982, he ran his first unofficial marathon, in the original marathon course in Greece in sweltering summer heat, from Athens to the eponymous village of Marathon. It was near this small village that a small army of Athenians defeated the invading Persian force of Darius in 490 BC (British author Tom Holland's 2005 book Persian Fire re-tells the story of this battle in a colorful style although his barely disguised contempt for orientals might put off some readers). On the busy straight highway that links Athens to Marathon, Murakami kept the count of roadkill: three dogs and eleven cats flattened against the bitumen.

Murakami also happens to be a world famous writer. Everyday, before hitting the road for his daily 10k run, he sits at his desk for four hours,  applying the same intensity, focus and perseverance to writing that he cultivates during long solitary runs. In fact, Murakami claims that he learned everything about writing from long distance running. These two key preoccupations of his life, writing and running, furnish the subject matter of his slim memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running published by Vintage in 2008.

I bought Murakami's memoir to seek inspiration and concrete advice on training, strategy, race-day tactics, etc, in order to rekindle my own flagging running motivation. On these counts, the book was a bit disappointing. Sure, Murakami takes readers through his elaborate preparations for 2005 New York City Marathon and triathlons held in Japan and Hawaii, and how he fared in them. However, they come between extended meditations on aging and its corrosive effects on creativity and physical abilities. After a certain age, just as the wellspring of creativity starts to dry up, so does distance running increasingly become an exercise in diminishing returns.

This is not to say that the book was not a pleasure to read. It is just that it dwells less on the mundane details of distance running and more on its metaphysics. If you are after a distance running training manual, you have to look somewhere else.