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English School Articles · March 30, 2011

Running With Murakami

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Since I first came to Japan I have enjoyed reading the works of several Japanese writers inclucing Yasunari Kawabata, Yukio Mishima, Banana Yoshimoto and Miyuki Miyabe to name a few. However, until last year I hadn’t gotten around to reading any books by Japan’s best-selling writer Haruki Murakami. I had often seen his books in the bookstores and had been meaning to check him for a long time, and finally read one of his most famous books, Norwegian Wood last spring. I was immediately sucked in and over the last 6 months of the year, I managed to read not only Norwegian Wood, but also about 6 or 7 of his other novels or collections of short stories. During the winter holiday, I read his non-fiction book, What I Think About When I Think About Running where he talks about his 25 plus year love affair with running. I also happen to jog a bit from time to time myself, so I was interested to see what he had to say about it. As usual, I expected an enjoyable read, but what I didn’t expect was to be inspired to train much harder and to become a more avid runner myself.
In the book he talks about such things as how and why he got started on running, his running of marathons (and even his one experience running a 100 km “ultra-marathon”), his training schedule and routine, and how he recently has become interested in triathlons. When he was talking about his training schedule and routine and what it takes to be hard-core runner, I found myself becoming inspired to start training harder. Murakami himself was talking of running 10 km 5 times a week, (a pace that I am not nearly ready for), but I did see the need to start setting some more lofty goals for myself if I was truly going to get in shape. I ended up deciding that I would set the goal of trying to run 100 km a month. Although I was unable to achieve this goal in January, I thought that my prospects for February looked good. In January, I had to start out very small by running only 5 km each time and it was also quite difficult for me to go running on consecutive days. (I once tried running 7.5 km on back-to-back days and thought I was going to die.)
By February however, I had built up my stamina quite well and was able to run around 9 or 10 km each time out. I also started trying again to go out on consecutive days, which actually worked out just fine as long as I would do a long run the first day of 10-12 km and a shorter run the second day of 5-7 km. With this routine I was able to get achieve my goal with a couple of days to spare.
Probably the best part of this has been that I am getting into much better shape after only a couple of short months of training. Although I haven’t weighed myself I know that I am definitely losing weight. About halfway into February, I suddenly noticed one day that a pair of jeans that used to fit me quite snuggly were starting to slide down my waist, forcing me to wear a belt. This is especially pleasing because I can assure you that I made absolutely no change to my diet when I started running harder. If anything, I was probably eating even more since I am usually starving very soon after finishing my runs.
Anyway, thank you Mr. Murakami for the inspiration. Looking forward to the English version of 1Q84 later this year!

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Filed Under: English School Articles Tagged With: Haruki Murakami, jogging, marathons, running, What I Think About When I Think About Running

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