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| V V: Murakami's Marathons | |
| BOOKMARK | | V V / New Delhi September 13, 2008, 0:13 IST | |
Much of Haruki Murakami’s book reads like a fitness manual.
Haruki Murakami, Japan’s foremost novelist today, is a self-confessed odd ball. Most writers are as they stand outside themselves and their societies, “at a slight angle to the universe,” as Forster described the Greek poet, Cavafy, but Murakami is the complete outsider. His latest work, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (Harvill Secker, special price, £5.99), is a memoir named after Raymond Carver’s short story What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.
Murakami describes some of his 27 marathons and several triathlons (running, cycling and swimming). The book includes his first marathon in Greece from Athens to Marathon (a little over 26 miles) along an unkempt highway and rounded off with his recent New York marathon. As he trains for the arduous runs, mostly in Japan, he muses on the longevity of life and the pathetic efforts to postpone ageing which takes its toll on racing timings.
He would like to return respectable timings — he could easily do six miles in an hour, pretty good for a man in his late fifties — but senses that these timings won’t be possible for long. He realises that time comes when the body refuses to listen to the mind. These and other observations are banal philosophising which doesn’t tell us much about how the mind pushes the body when it is about to give way. All the philosophy amounts to are simple observations like a healthy body produces a healthy mind. This is not necessarily true because many great writers had sick bodies and writing came to them as ways of escape.
Much of the book reads like a fitness manual like Arnold Schennegger’s Staying Hard, except that here running is central with long descriptions of training schedules and diet and of course philosophising with banal statements like, “Muscles are hard to get and easy to lose. Fat is easy to get and hard to lose.” What is of some interest is Murakami’s observations on the mind-body relationship.
“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. As a result, it will willingly accept (or maybe not) the increased amount of exercise it’s made to do. After this, you very gradually increase the upper limit of the amount of exercise you do. Doing it gradually is important ...
Through modulated exercise — sometimes long, sometimes short, sometimes hard — I’m transitioning from quantity of exercise to quality. The point is to reach the peak of exhaustion about a month before the race ... In order to make any progress, I have to listen very carefully to feedback from my body.”
Murakami has long descriptions of some of his marathon runs but there is one thread that runs through all of them: the struggle of the mind over body specially “when your lungs scream”. But he says it is not “merely willpower that makes you able to do something. The world isn’t that simple. To tell the truth, I don’t even think there’s that much correlation between my running every day and whether or not I have a strong will ... Admittedly, something close to will does play a small part in that. But no matter how strong a will a person has, no matter how much he may hate to lose, if it’s an activity he doesn’t really care for, he won’t keep it up for long.” This could be said about any activity, physical or intellectual: if you don’t like it, you go along some distance and then drop out. It must come from within; it simply can’t be forced.
If jogging today is the rage all over, it is because it is recognised as the most complete exercise for all parts of the body. Besides, you don’t need any one else to do it, no need for special equipment or any special place to do it. As long as you have a pair of running shoes and a nice open road, you can run to your heart’s content. No other sport is like that: not even swimming, where you would have to go to a pool and pay for a swim.
Murakami’s Running is a simple memoir that you can skim through in an hour but if it turns you on to jogging, it would have served its purpose.
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