What I Run About When I Talk about Talking

Starting Slow.

Track ID#72JL (Running) | Brooklyn, NY, USA

Running is annoying and painful.  There is nothing about it that one should like.  It takes time, requires expensive shoes, isn’t good for the knees or back, and did I mention that it hurts?

It is for these reasons that I have decided to start running.  I have never understood runners, why they would take the time and deal with the pain.  In school I learned to hate running because I was told to do it before baseball and tennis practice.  I was subjected to Presidential Fitness Programs that told me I could run faster.

Running became symbolic of everything I hated: compliance, buying in, and obediance.

And then I read Haruki Murakami’s Everything I Talk About When I Talk About Running.  He explains how he uses running as a side dish for his writing, how running until you can’t think is a cathartic escape from the complex world that is the writer’s mind and emotions.  Running, he said, wasn’t about the pain, but about not feeling the pain.  About being aware of it, but choosing to not give in to it.

It is the ultimate lonely act, the ultimate way to train one’s body who is boss, and, for some reason, I’m suddenly on board.

Hopefully for good.  Writing, like marathons (or is it marathons, like writing?) require endurance.  As I try to finish this post, I see the Publish button beckoning me to finish, to quit, to say “Okay, this was enough.”

I’m not about to get into why writers or runners choose to do what they do, why they look past the pain, why they accept it, why they don’t just go and get a real job (or an elliptical machine), but those questions are certainly interesting.

Okay.  Publish.  I’ll run a bit more next time.