Catching up on writing about running

What I talk about when I talk about running

by Haruki Murakami, Philip Gabriel (Translator)

 

Recreative.
I wrote that word for all you people who only read the first word of an article.  Sums it up. I didn't write 'meh' or 'blah', nor did I write 'superb' or 'deep and thought-provoking'. But I really did want to write 'deep and thought-provoking', and therein lies my problem.

See, I'd read the title and thought it was going to be about the odd and crazy thoughts that flowed through a runner's head in the twelfth mile of a twenty-mile run, when your brain begins thinking thoughts that go beyond the instructions for putting one foot down and lifting the other. I wanted it to be about insights he's discovered in talking with buddies about how they run--and then realized at some late hour they were really talking about why they run.  I built up my expectations based on a title--

And I found out, in the afterword, that the title was borrowed from a book of short stories called, What we talk about when we talk about love. There appears to be no corollary between the two, just an author's to do homage to a book that meant a lot to him.

With all that build-up--self-induced, darn me!--I couldn't help but be disappointed. This is a simple memoir with a touch of how-to. It's good. It's pretty honest. It has some great insights and some highly quotable quotes. Read it--especially if you like to read about running and writing.

There are a couple of things that bugged me and I want to talk them through, just to figure out what I'm bugging about. One is his use of absolutes. I know that as a fiction writer, he's learned that people don't want to read fuzziness. A fiction writer doesn't write things like, "a lot of people feel", or "sometimes muscles need". He doesn't write, "If you're from the Midwest farming region, you might say the moon rose out of the pumpkin patch like a faded orange demon."  No way!  You write: "the moon demon rose as a fading pumpkin dies from the patch."

But he's writing about sports training, not demons. He says things about training that flatly contradict recommendations of experienced sports trainers. He says, "you must run every day" and then later admits that he, himself doesn't run every day.

That's my other beef--contradictions. Pretty much anything (notice my use of qualifiers?) he says in one part of the book is contradicted in other parts.  The worst one is his insistence early on that he is not a competitive person--he doesn't measure himself against others, but rather, his own previous performance.  I was intrigued. A truly, non-competitive runner? I wanted to hear this.

But later he describes races where he clearly is, and does, exhibit competitive behavior.  Nothing wrong with that--it's normal. It's human. But why insist you're not competitive when you have just as much of a place on the scale of competitive nature as any other human being?

And my last beef is that I really couldn't figure out why he ran races at all. Why does he run? He eventually says that it's to stay fit for writing. But if that's the only reason...why run marathons or do triathlons?  If he wants a motivation to keep running, he can surely find an easier one. Why bother with the racing? What are you getting from this torture? You say it's torture yet you say you like it. Why?

I haven't a clue.