Read Online What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami - Free Book Online Page A

angry. Angry at the sheep happily munching grass in an empty lot next to the road, angry at the photographer snapping photos from inside the van. The sound of the shutter grates on my nerves. Who needs this many sheep, anyway? But snapping the shutter is the photographer’s job, just as chewing grass is the sheep’s, so I don’t have any right to complain. Still, the whole thing really bugs me to no end. My skin’s starting to rise up in little white heat blisters. This is getting ridiculous. What’s
with
this heat, anyway?
    I pass the twenty-five-mile mark.
    “Just one more mile. Hang in there!” the editor calls out cheerfully from the van. Easy for
you
to say, I want to yell back, but don’t. The naked sun is blazing hot. It’s only just past nine a.m., but I feel like I’m in an oven. The sweat’s getting in my eyes. The salt makes my eyes sting, and for a while I can’t see a thing. I wipe away the sweat with my hand, but my hand and face are salty too, and that makes my eyes sting even more.
    Beyond the tall summer grasses I can just make out the goal line, the Marathon monument at the entrance to the village of the same name. It appears so abruptly that at first I’m not sure if that’s really the goal. I’m happy to see the finish line, no question about it, but the abruptness of it makes me mad for some reason. Since this is the last leg of the run, I want to make a last, desperate effort to run as fast as I can, but my legs have a mind of their own. I’ve totally forgotten how to move my body. All my muscles feel like they’ve been shaved away with a rusty plane.
    The finish line.
    I finally reach the end. Strangely, I have no feeling of accomplishment. The only thing I feel is utter relief that I don’t have to run anymore. I use a spigot at a gas station to cool off my overheated body and wash away the salt stuck to me. I’m covered with salt, a veritable human salt field. When the old man at the gas station hears what I’ve done, he snips off some flowers from a potted plant and presents me with a bouquet.
You did a good job,
he smiles.
Congratulations.
I feel so thankful for these small gestures of kindness from foreigners. Marathon is a small, friendly village, quiet and peaceful. I can’t imagine how this was where, several thousand years ago, the Greeks defeated the invading Persian army at the shore in a ghastly battle. I sit at a café in the village and gulp down cold Amstel beer. It tastes fantastic, but not nearly as great as the beer I’d been imagining as I ran. Nothing in the real world is as beautiful as the illusions of a person about to lose consciousness.
    The run from Athens to Marathon took me three hours and fifty-one minutes. Not exactly a great time, but at least I was able to run the whole course by myself, my only companions the awful traffic, the unimaginable heat, and my terrible thirst. I guess I should be proud of what I did, but right now I don’t care. What makes me happy right now is knowing that I don’t have to run another step.
    Whew!—I don’t have to run anymore.

    This was my first-ever experience running (nearly) twenty-six miles. And, happily, it was the last time I ever had to run twenty-six miles in such grueling conditions. In December of the same year I ran the Honolulu Marathon in a fairly decent time. Hawaii was hot, but nothing compared to Athens. So Honolulu was my first official full marathon. Ever since then it’s been my practice to run one full marathon a year.
    Rereading the article I wrote at the time of this run in Greece, I’ve discovered that after twenty-some years, and as many marathons later, the feelings I have when I run twenty-six miles are the same as back then. Even now, whenever I run a marathon my mind goes through the same exact process. Up to nineteen miles I’m sure I can run a good time, but past twenty-two miles I run out of fuel and start to get upset at everything. And at the end I feel like a car that’s run out