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- Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.
- Somerset Maugham once wrote that in each shave lies a philosophy. I couldn’t agree more. No matter how mundane some action might appear, keep at it long enough and it becomes a contemplative, even meditative act.
- There were interviews with several famous marathon runners, and they were asked what special mantra goes through their head to keep themselves pumped during a race. An interesting question, I thought I was impressed by all the different things these runners think about as they run 26.2 miles. It just goes to show how grueling an event a marathon really is. If you don’t keep repeating a mantra of some sort to yourself, you’ll never survive.
- They might not amount to much, but they are personal lessons I’ve learned through actually putting my own body in motion, and thereby discovering that suffering is optional.
- I spend a lot of time in Cambridge, Ma, and compared to Cambridge—so muggy and hot with all its bricks and concrete it’s like a form of torture—summer in Hawaii is a veritable paradise. No need for an air conditioner here—just leave the window open, and a refreshing breeze blows in. People in Cambridge are always surprised when they hear I’m spending August in Hawaii. “Why would you want to spend summer in a hot place like that?” they invariably ask. But they don’t know what it’s like. How the constant trade winds from the northeast make summers cool. How happy life is here, where we can enjoy lounging around, reading a book in the shade of trees, or, if the notion strikes us, go down, just as we are, for a dip in the inlet.
- Right now I’m aiming at increasing the distance I run, so speed is less of an issue. As long as I can run a certain distance, that’s all I care about. Sometimes I run fast when I feel like it, but if I increase the pace I shorten the amount of time I run, the point being to let the exhilaration I feel at the end of each run carry over to the next day. This is the same sort of tack I find necessary when writing a novel. I stop every day right at the point where I feel I can write more. Do that, and the next day’s work goes surprisingly smoothly. I think Ernest Hemingway did something like that. To keep on going, you have to keep up the rhythm. This is the important thing for long-term projects. Once you set the pace, the rest will follow.
- It rained for a short time while I was running, but it was a cooling rain that felt good. A thick cloud blew in from the ocean right over me, and a gentle rain fell for a while, but then, as if it had remembered, “Oh, I’ve got to do some errands!,” it whisked itself away without so much as a glance back. And then the merciless sun was back, scorching the ground. It’s a very easy-to-understand weather pattern. Nothing abstruse or ambivalent about it, not a speck of the metaphoric or the symbolic.
- Long-distance running suits my personality, though, and of all the habits I’ve acquired over my lifetime I’d have to say this one has been the most helpful, the most meaningful. Running without a break for more than two decades has also made me stronger, both physically and emotionally.
- ...I’m not totally uncompetitive. It’s just that for some reason I never cared all that much whether I beat others or lost to them. (...) I’m much more interested in whether I reach the goals that I set for myself, so in this sense long-distance running is the perfect fit for a mindset like mine.
- In the novelist’s profession, as far as I’m concerned, there’s no such thing as winning or losing. Maybe numbers of copies sold, awards won, and critics’ praise serve as outward standards for accomplishment in literature, but none of them really matter. What’s crucial is whether your writing attains the standards you’ve set for yourself. Failure to reach that bar is not something you can easily explain away. When it comes to other people, you can always come up with a reasonable explanation, but you can’t fool yourself. In this sense, writing novels and running full marathons are very much alike. Basically a writer has a quiet, inner motivation, and doesn’t seek validation in the outwardly visible.
- For me, running is both exercise and a metaphor. Running day after day, piling up the races, bit by bit I raise the bar, and by clearing each level I elevate myself. At least that’s why I’ve put in the effort day after day: to raise my own level. I’m no great runner, by any means. I’m at an ordinary—or perhaps more like mediocre—level. But that’s not the point. The point is whether or not I improved over yesterday. In long-distance running the only opponent you have to beat is yourself, the way you used to be.
- But the river has remained unaltered. The water still flows swiftly, and silently, toward Boston Harbor. The water soaks the shoreline, making the summer grasses grow thick, which help feed the waterfowl, and it flows languidly, ceaselessly, under the old bridges, reflecting clouds in summer and bobbing with floes in winter—and silently heads toward the ocean.
- The farther I ran, the more weight I lost, too. In two and a half months I dropped about seven pounds, and the bit of flab I was starting to see around my stomach disappeared. Picture going to the butcher shop, buying seven pounds of meat, and carrying it home. You get the idea. I had mixed emotions about carrying around that extra weight with me every day. If you live in Boston, Samuel Adams draft beer (Summer Ale) and Dunkin’ Donuts are essentials of life. But I discovered to my delight that even these indulgences can be offset by persistent exercise.
- I’m the kind of person who likes to be by himself. To put a finer point on it, I’m the type of person who doesn’t find it painful to be alone. I find spending an hour or two every day running alone, not speaking to anyone, as well as four or five hours alone at my desk, to be neither difficult nor boring. I’ve had this tendency ever since I was young, when, given a choice, I much preferred reading books on my own or concentrating on listening to music over being with someone else. I could always think of things to do by myself.
- By sticking my nose into all sorts of places, I acquired the practical skills I needed to live. Without those ten tough years I don’t think I would have written novels, and even if I’d tried, I wouldn’t have been able to.
- I just run. I run in a void. Or maybe I should put it the other way: I run in order to acquire a void. But as you might expect, an occasional thought will slip into this void. People’s minds can’t be a complete blank. Human beings’ emotions are not strong or consistent enough to sustain a vacuum. What I mean is, the kinds of thoughts and ideas that invade my emotions as I run remain subordinate to that void. Lacking content, they are just random thoughts that gather around that central void.
- In certain areas of my life, I actively seek out solitude. Especially for someone in my line of work, solitude is, more or less, an inevitable circumstance. Sometimes, however, this sense of isolation, like acid spilling out of a bottle, can unconsciously eat away at a person’s heart and dissolve it. You could see it, too, as a kind of double-edged sword. It protects me, but at the same time steadily cuts away at me from the inside. I think in my own way I’m aware of this danger—probably through experience—and that’s why I’ve had to constantly keep my body in motion, in some cases pushing myself to the limit, in order to heal the loneliness I feel inside and to put it in perspective. Not so much as an intentional act, but as an instinctive reaction.
- When I’m criticized unjustly (from my viewpoint, at least), or when someone I’m sure will understand me doesn’t, I go running for a little longer than usual. By running longer it’s like I can physically exhaust that portion of my discontent. It also makes me realize again how weak I am, how limited my abilities are. I become aware, physically, of these low points. And one of the results of running a little farther than usual is that I become that much stronger. If I’m angry, I direct that anger toward myself. If I have a frustrating experience, I use that to improve myself. That’s the way I’ve always lived. I quietly absorb the things I’m able to, releasing them later, and in as changed a form as possible, as part of the story line in a novel.
- All I do is keep on running in my own cozy, homemade void, my own nostalgic silence. And this is a pretty wonderful thing. No matter what anybody else says.
- Up till then, it had been a question of sheer survival, of keeping my head above water, and I didn’t have room to think of anything else. I felt like I’d reached the top of some steep staircase and come out to a fairly open place and was confident that because I’d reached it safely, I could handle any future problems that might crop up and I’d survive. I took a deep breath, slowly gazed around me, glanced back at the steps I’d taken here, and began to contemplate the next stage.
- I still can remember the wide open sky, the feel of the new grass, the satisfying crack of the bat. Something flew down from the sky at that instant, and whatever it was, I accepted it.
- It was a particularly gorgeous autumn, with wonderful sunny weather. The sky was perfectly clear, and the ginkgo trees in front of the Meiji Memorial Gallery were more golden than I’d ever seen them. This was the last fall of my twenties.
- Running a service-oriented business means you have to accept whoever comes through the door. No matter who comes in, unless they’re really awful, you have to greet them with a friendly smile on your face. Thanks to this, though, I met all kinds of offbeat people and had some unusual encounters. Before I began writing, I dutifully, even enthusiastically, absorbed a variety of experiences. For the most part I think I enjoyed these and all the stimuli that they brought.
- I never could stand being forced to do something I didn’t want to do at a time I didn’t want to do it. Whenever I was able to do something I liked to do, though, when I wanted to do it, and the way I wanted to do it, I’d give it everything I had.
- So, like my three meals a day—along with sleeping, housework, and work—running was incorporated into my daily routine. As it became a natural habit, I felt less embarrassed about it. I went to a sports store and purchased running gear and some decent shoes that suited my purpose. I bought a stopwatch, too, and read a beginners’ book on running. This is how you become a runner.
- I’m no great runner, but I’m definitely a strong runner. That’s one of the very few gifts I can be proud of.
- For the reasons I give above, I think this physical nuisance should be viewed in a positive way, as a blessing. We should consider ourselves lucky that the red light is so clearly visible.
- Writers who are blessed with inborn talent can freely write novels no matter what they do—or don’t do. Like water from a natural spring, the sentences just well up, and with little or no effort these writers can complete a work. Occasionally you’ll find someone like that, but, unfortunately, that category wouldn’t include me. I haven’t spotted any springs nearby. I have to pound the rock with a chisel and dig out a deep hole before I can locate the source of creativity. To write a novel I have to drive myself hard physically and use a lot of time and effort. Every time I begin a new novel, I have to dredge out another new, deep hole. But as I’ve sustained this kind of life over many years, I’ve become quite efficient, both technically and physically, at opening a hole in the hard rock and locating a new water vein. So as soon as I notice one water source drying up, I can move on right away to another. If people who rely on a natural spring of talent suddenly find they’ve exhausted their only source, they’re in trouble.
- The weather in Kauai in August is wonderful, and I wasn’t rained out even once. When it did rain, it was a pleasant shower that cooled down my overheated body.
- And eat more fruits and vegetables. When it comes to food, Hawaii is the ideal place for me to live in the summer because I can easily get lots of fresh fruits—mangoes, papayas, avocados—literally right across the street. I’m not eating these, though, simply to stave off the summer blahs, but because my body just naturally craves them. Being active every day makes it easier to hear that inner voice.
- In this way August waved good-bye (it really did seem like it waved), September rolled around, and my style of training has undergone another transformation.
- No matter how much you might command your body to perform, don’t count on it to immediately obey. The body is an extremely practical system. You have to let it experience intermittent pain over time, and then the body will get the point.
- Other runners kept passing me, but I limped on, grimacing in pain. The numbers on my digital watch kept mercilessly ticking away. Wind blew in from the ocean, and the sweat on my shirt got cold and felt freezing. This was a winter race, after all. You’d better believe it’s cold hobbling down a road with the wind whipping by while you’re dressed only in a tank top and shorts. Your body warms up considerably as you run, and you don’t feel the cold; I was shocked by how cold it was once I stopped running. But what I felt much more than the cold was wounded pride, and how pitiful I looked tottering down a marathon course.
- It’s pretty thin, the wall separating healthy confidence and unhealthy pride.
- Once you run roads in Greece you’ll understand, but they’re paved differently. Instead of gravel, they mix in powdered marble, which makes the road shiny in the sunlight and quite slippery. When it rains you have to be very careful. Even when it isn’t raining the soles of your shoes make a squeaky sound, and your legs can feel how smooth the road surface is.
- The time when the summer sun rules over the earth is swiftly approaching. People have started to appear at bus stops. Greeks take a siesta at noon...
- A little further on I run across a cat that’s been flattened by a car. The cat is totally flat, like some misshapen pizza, and dried up. It must have been run over quite a while ago. That’s the kind of road I’m talking about.
- I run on and on. The sun reveals all of itself, and with unbelievable speed rises in the sky. I’m dying of thirst. I don’t have time to get sweaty, since the air is so dry that perspiration immediately evaporates, leaving behind a layer of white salt. There’s the expression beads of sweat, but here the sweat disappears before it can even form beads. My whole body starts to sting from the salty residue. When I lick my lips they taste like anchovy paste. I start to dream about an ice-cold beer, one so cold it burns.
- 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.
- 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.
- Even now, when I run along Jingu Gaien or Asakasa Gosho, sometimes I remember these other runners. I’ll round a corner and feel like I should see them coming toward me, silently running, their breath white in the morning air. And I always think this: They put up with such strenuous training, and where did their thoughts, their hopes and dreams, disappear to? When people pass away, do their thoughts just vanish?
- That’s what I mean when I say that without focus you can’t accomplish anything.
- You have to continually transmit the object of your focus to your entire body, and make sure it thoroughly assimilates the information necessary for you to write every single day and concentrate on the work at hand. And gradually you’ll expand the limits of what you’re able to do. Almost imperceptibly you’ll make the bar rise. This involves the same process as jogging every day to strengthen your muscles and develop a runner’s physique. Add a stimulus and keep it up. And repeat. Patience is a must in this process, but I guarantee the results will come.
- You might not move your body around, but there’s grueling, dynamic labor going on inside you. Everybody uses their mind when they think. But a writer puts on an outfit called narrative and thinks with his entire being; and for the novelist that process requires putting into play all your physical reserve, often to the point of overexertion.
- Most of what I know about writing I’ve learned through running every day. These are practical, physical lessons. How much can I push myself? How much rest is appropriate—and how much is too much? How far can I take something and still keep it decent and consistent? When does it become narrow-minded and inflexible? How much should I be aware of the world outside, and how much should I focus on my inner world? To what extent should I be confident in my abilities, and when should I start doubting myself? I know that if I hadn’t become a long-distance runner when I became a novelist, my work would have been vastly different. How different? Hard to say. But something would have definitely been different.
- And I feel that this type of muscle is connected to the way my mind works. What I mean is, a person’s mind is controlled by his body, right? Or is it the opposite—the way your mind works influences the structure of the body? Or do the body and mind closely influence each other and act on each other?
- In America whenever a nurse takes my pulse, she invariably says, “Ah, you must be a runner.” I imagine most long-distance runners who have run a long time have had a similar experience. When you see runners in town it’s easy to distinguish beginners from veterans. The ones panting are beginners; the ones with quiet, measured breathing are the veterans. Their hearts, lost in thought, slowly tick away time. When we pass each other on the road, we listen to the rhythm of each other’s breathing, and sense the way the other person is ticking away the moments. Much like two writers perceive each other’s diction and style.
- My muscles can be as stubborn as—or more stubborn than—I am. They remember things and endure, and to some extent they improve. But they never compromise. They don’t give up. This is my body, with all its limits and quirks. Just as with my face, even if I don’t like it it’s the only one I get, so I’ve got to make do.
- The lingering heat of the summer in the city is something else. I silently run, my whole body sweaty. I can feel even my cap steadily getting soaked. The sweat is part of my clear shadow as it drips onto the ground. The drops of sweat hit the pavement and immediately evaporate.
- The special New England fall—short and lovely—fades in and out, and finally settles in. Little by little the deep, overwhelming green that surrounds us gives way to a faint yellow. By the time I need to wear sweatpants over my running shorts, dead leaves are swirling in the wind and acorns are hitting the asphalt with a hard, dry crack.
- Once Halloween is over, winter, like some capable tax collector, sets in, concisely and silently. Before I realize it the river is covered in thick ice and the boats have disappeared. If you wanted to, you could walk across the river to the other side. The trees are barren of leaves, and the thin branches scrape against each other in the wind, rattling like dried-up bones.
- As if pulled in by a magnet, people gather on the banks of the (Charles) River. Seeing a lot of water like that every day is probably an important thing for human beings.
- The surface of the water changes from day to day: the color, the shape of the waves, the speed of the current. Each season brings distinct changes to the plants and animals that surround the river. Clouds of all sizes show up and move on, and the surface of the river, lit by the sun, reflects these white shapes as they come and go, sometimes faithfully, sometimes distortedly.
- In the midst of this flow, I’m aware of myself as one tiny piece in the gigantic mosaic of nature. I’m just a replaceable natural phenomenon, like the water in the river that flows under the bridge toward the sea.
- Still, runners sense small details that set one shoe off from another, and are always looking for this psychological edge.
- As I run in the morning along the river I often see the same people at the same time. One is a short Indian woman out for a stroll. She’s in her sixties, I imagine, has elegant features, and is always impeccably dressed. Strangely—though maybe it’s not so strange after all—she wears a different outfit every day. One time she had on an elegant sari, another time an oversize sweatshirt with a university’s name on it. If memory serves, I’ve never seen her wearing the same outfit twice. Waiting to see what clothes she has on is one of the small pleasures of each early-morning run.
- When we set off to write a novel, when we use writing to create a story, like it or not a kind of toxin that lies deep down in all humanity rises to the surface. All writers have to come face-to-face with this toxin and, aware of the danger involved, discover a way to deal with it, because otherwise no creative activity in the real sense can take place. (Please excuse the strange analogy: with a fugu fish, the tastiest part is the portion near the poison — this might be something similar to what I’m getting at.)
- Today as I was running I saw a plump Canada goose lying dead by the shore of the Charles. A dead squirrel, too, lying next to a tree. They both looked like they were fast asleep, but they were dead. Their expressions were calm, as if they’d accepted the end of life, as if they were finally liberated. Next to the boathouse by the river was a homeless man wearing layers of filthy clothes. He was pushing a shopping cart and belting out “America the Beautiful.” Whether he really meant it or was being deeply ironic, I couldn’t tell.
- In the early morning, when the race starts, it’s still freezing, and you have to wear heavy clothes. As the sun gets higher in the sky, you gradually warm up, and the runners, like bugs going through metamorphosis, shed one layer of clothes after another.
- Beside the road cows are lazily chewing grass. They show zero interest in the runners. They’re too busy eating grass to care about all these whimsical people and their nonsensical activities.
- At 26.2 miles there’s a sign that says, “This is the distance of a marathon.” There’s a white line painted on the concrete indicating the exact spot. I exaggerate only a bit when I say that the moment I straddled that line a slight shiver went through me, for this was the first time I’d ever run more than a marathon. For me this was the Strait of Gibraltar, beyond which lay an unknown sea. What lay in wait beyond this, what unknown creatures were living there, I didn’t have a clue. In my own small way I felt the same fear that sailors of old must have felt.
- I’m not a human. I’m a piece of machinery. I don’t need to feel a thing. Just forge on ahead. That’s what I told myself. That’s about all I thought about, and that’s what got me through. If I were a living person of blood and flesh I would have collapsed from the pain. There definitely was a being called me right there. And accompanying that is a consciousness that is the self. But at that point, I had to force myself to think that those were convenient forms and nothing more. It’s a strange way of thinking and definitely a very strange feeling—consciousness trying to deny consciousness. You have to force yourself into an inorganic place. Instinctively I realized that this was the only way to survive. I’m not a human. I’m a piece of machinery. I don’t need to feel a thing. Just forge on ahead.
- My muscles are as hard as week-old cafeteria bread.
- I didn’t think about anything. I didn’t feel anything. I realized all of a sudden that even physical pain had all but vanished. Or maybe it was shoved into some unseen corner, like some ugly furniture you can’t get rid of.
- And this feeling grew particularly strong as I entered the last part of the course, the Natural Flower Garden on the long, long peninsula. It’s a kind of meditative, contemplative stretch. The scenery along the coast is beautiful, and the scent of the Sea of Okhotsk wafted over me. Evening had come on (we’d started early in the morning), and the air had a special clarity to it. I could also smell the deep grass of the beginning of summer. I saw a few foxes, too, gathered in a field. They looked at us runners curiously. Thick, meaningful clouds, like something out of a nineteenth-century British landscape painting, covered the sky. There was no wind at all. Many of the other runners around me were just silently trudging toward the finish line. Being among them gave me a quiet sense of happiness. Breathe in, breathe out. My breath didn’t seem ragged at all. The air calmly went inside me and then went out. My silent heart expanded and contracted, over and over, at a fixed rate. Like the bellows of a worker, my lungs faithfully brought fresh oxygen into my body. I could sense all these organs working, and distinguish each and every sound they made. Everything was working just fine. People lining the road cheered us on, saying, “Hang in there! You’re almost there!” Like the crystalline air, their shouts went right through me. Their voices passed clean through me to the other side.
- Still, the most significant fallout from running the ultramarathon wasn’t physical but mental. What I ended up with was a sense of lethargy, and before I knew it, I felt covered by a thin film, something I’ve sinced dubbed runner’s blues. (Though the actual feeling of it was closer to a milky white.)
- To exaggerate a bit, it was as if by completing the over-sixty-mile race I’d stepped into a different place. After my fatigue disappeared somewhere after the forty-seventh mile, my mind went into a blank state you might even call philosophical or religious. Something urged me to become more introspective, and this newfound introspection transformed my attitude toward the act of running.
- Perhaps all these various factors had combined into a mysterious cocktail inside me.
- In the morning as I lace up my running shoes, I can catch a faint sign of something in the air, and within me. I want to take good care of this sprout that’s sprung up. Just as, when I don’t want to go in the wrong direction—or miss hearing a sound, miss seeing the scenery—I’m going to focus on what’s going on with my body.
- Like a dawdling person, the rain lingered for a long time, then finally made up its mind to turn into a downpour.
- The summer heat still lingered in the beginning of October, but the weeklong period of rain had quickly ushered in the fall to New England. Until a short while ago I’d been using my air conditioner, but now a chilly breeze blew through the town, and you could see the signs of late autumn everywhere. I had to hurriedly drag some sweaters out of the dresser. Even the faces of the squirrels looked different as they scurried around collecting food. My body tends to have problems during these transitions from one season to another, something that never happened when I was young. The main problem is when it gets cold and damp.
- Reaching the finish line, never walking, and enjoying the race. These three, in this order, are my goals.
- *Still, I feel a bit uneasy. Has the dark shadow really disappeared? Or is it inside me, concealed, waiting for its chance to reappear? Like a clever thief hidden inside a house, breathing quietly, waiting until everyone’s asleep. I have looked deep inside myself, trying to detect something that might be there. But just as our consciousness is a maze, so too is our body. Everywhere you turn there’s darkness, and a blind spot. Everywhere you find silent hints, everywhere a surprise is waiting for you.
- New York in November really does have a special charm to it. The air is clear and crisp, and the leaves on the trees in Central Park are just beginning to turn golden. The sky is so clear you can see forever, and the skyscrapers lavishly reflect the sun’s rays. You feel you can keep on walking one block after another without end. Expensive cashmere coats fill the windows at Bergdorf Goodman, and the streets are filled with the delicious smell of roasted pretzels.
- On the body of the bike is written “18 Til I Die,” the name of a Bryan Adams hit. It’s a joke, of course. Being eighteen until you die means you die when you’re eighteen.
- The weather’s been strange in Japan this summer.
- A hot wind from the Pacific rushes past, grazing my cheeks and making them sting.
- No, all I see is my own nature. My own individual, stubborn, uncooperative, often self-centered nature that still doubts itself—that, when troubles occur, tries to find something funny, or something nearly funny, about the situation. I’ve carried this character around like an old suitcase, down a long, dusty path. I’m not carrying it because I like it. The contents are too heavy, and it looks crummy, fraying in spots. I’ve carried it with me because there was nothing else I was supposed to carry. Still, I guess I have grown attached to it. As you might expect.
- But this wretched sort of feeling I had as I stood in front of the mirror at sixteen, listing all my physical shortcomings, is still a sort of touchstone for me even now. The sad spreadsheet of my life that reveals how much my debts far outweigh my assets.
- No wind, not a wave in the sea. The sun’s bathing the ground in warmth, the temperature at about 73 degrees.
- Sometimes you spend an entire session just turning your shoulders. You end up exhausted and spent, but later, in retrospect, you realize what it all was for. The parts fall into place, and you can see the whole picture and finally understand the role each individual part plays. The dawn comes, the sky grows light, and the colors and shapes of the roofs of houses, which you could only glimpse vaguely before, come into focus.
- One by one, I’ll face the tasks before me and complete them as best I can. Focusing on each stride forward, but at the same time taking a long-range view, scanning the scenery as far ahead as I can. I am, after all, a long-distance runner.
jul 8 2020 ∞
jul 8 2020 +
jul 8 2020 +