What I Talk About When I Talk About Running - Summary and Book Notes

Sep 1, 2020
Booknotes

Review – What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami

Haruki Murakami is best known for writing surreal novels, but did you know he runs a marathon every year? What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is a sort of memoir-slash-diary Murakami wrote while training for the NYC Marathon. It’s a meandering read, with the author’s thoughts on writing interspersed with flashbacks of his life–operating a bar, running the original marathon route in Greece, the moment he decided to be a writer.

The book is packed with insights, and my summary below can’t do it justice. If you’re at all interested in creative output, this is a must read.

I highly recommend for people who:

  • feel called to creative work
  • are interested in Murakami’s creative process

Skip this book if you:

  • aren’t interested in the premise
  • are looking for a gripping story (check out Murakami’s fiction instead)

Buy What I Talk About When I Talk About Running on Amazon

Key Takeaways from What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

  • Keeping the flywheel going is essential for long-term progress

Murakami writes and runs everyday without fail. But he always stops at the point where he could write more, at the point before his legs are exhausted.

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. The problem is getting the flywheel to spin at a set speed—and to get to that point takes as much concentration and effort as you can manage.

  • You have to do the work for creativity to arise

Unless you’re blessed with talent, writing novels is incredibly hard. The only path for the non-talented is to keep at it until you uncover something great.

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…I’ve become quite efficient, both technically and physically, at opening a hole in the hard rock and locating a new water vein.

  • Don’t try to Appeal to Everyone

Before he was a writer, Murakami ran a jazz bar in Tokyo. Rather than trying to attract every customer, he aimed to attract the right customers.

If one out of ten enjoyed the place and said he’d come again, that was enough. If one out of ten was a repeat customer, then the business would survive. To put it the other way, it didn’t matter if nine out of ten didn’t like my bar. This realization lifted a weight off my shoulders. Still, I had to make sure that the one person who did like the place really liked it. In order to make sure he did, I had to make my philosophy and stance clear-cut, and patiently maintain that stance no matter what.

Murakami applies the same logic to his novels, targeting a specific type of reader.

  • Understanding yourself is difficult but fruitful

Murakami doesn’t want you to start running, or to start running novels. He wants you to figure out what you’re meant to do, even if it’s painful.

The fact that I’m me and no one else is one of my greatest assets. Emotional hurt is the price a person has to pay in order to be independent.

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. I think I’ve been able to run for more than twenty years for a simple reason: It suits me.

Book Notes from What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

The following are rough notes I took while reading. These are mostly paraphrased or quoted directly from the book.

Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. Say you’re running and you start to think, Man this hurts, I can’t take it anymore. The hurt part is an unavoidable reality, but whether or not you can stand any more is up to the runner himself.

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.

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. The problem is getting the flywheel to spin at a set speed—and to get to that point takes as much concentration and effort as you can manage.

Running day after day, piling up the races, bit by bit I raise the bar, and by clearing each level I elevate myself.

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.

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.

the fact that I’m me and no one else is one of my greatest assets. Emotional hurt is the price a person has to pay in order to be independent.

I’m the kind of person who has to totally commit to whatever I do. I just couldn’t do something clever like writing a novel while someone else ran the business. I had to give it everything I had. If I failed, I could accept that. But I knew that if I did things halfheartedly and they didn’t work out, I’d always have regrets.

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.

I’m struck by how, except when you’re young, you really need to prioritize in life, figuring out in what order you should divide up your time and energy. If you don’t get that sort of system set by a certain age, you’ll lack focus and your life will be out of balance.

The main thing was not the speed or distance so much as running every day, without taking a break.

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. I’ve become quite efficient, both technically and physically, at opening a hole in the hard rock and locating a new water vein.

But I don’t think it’s 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. I think I’ve been able to run for more than twenty years for a simple reason: It suits me.

Once, I interviewed the Olympic runner Toshihiko Seko, “Does a runner at your level ever feel like you’d rather not run today, like you don’t want to run and would rather just sleep in?” He stared at me and then, in a voice that made it abundantly clear how stupid he thought the question was, replied, “Of course. All the time!”

The most important task here was to let my body know in no uncertain terms that running this hard is just par for the course.

Just focus on moving my feet forward, one after the other. That’s the only thing that matters.

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 of gas. But after I finish and some time has passed, I forget all the pain and misery and am already planning how I can run an even better time in the next race. The funny thing is, no matter how much experience I have under my belt, no matter how old I get, it’s all just a repeat of what came before. I think certain types of processes don’t allow for any variation. If you have to be part of that process, all you can do is transform—or perhaps distort—yourself through that persistent repetition, and make that process a part of your own

Through repetition you input into your muscles the message that this is how much work they have to perform. Our muscles are very conscientious. As long as we observe the correct procedure, they won’t complain. If, however, the load halts for a few days, the muscles automatically assume they don’t have to work that hard anymore, and they lower their limits.

If I used being busy as an excuse not to run, I’d never run again. I have only a few reasons to keep on running, and a truckload of them to quit. All I can do is keep those few reasons nicely polished.

If I’m asked what the next most important quality is for a novelist, that’s easy too: focus—the ability to concentrate all your limited talents on whatever’s critical at the moment.

I generally concentrate on work for three or four hours every morning. I sit at my desk and focus totally on what I’m writing. I don’t see anything else, I don’t think about anything else.

After focus, the next most important thing for a novelist is, hands down, endurance. If you concentrate on writing three or four hours a day and feel tired after a week of this, you’re not going to be able to write a long work.

Fortunately, these two disciplines—focus and endurance—are different from talent, since they can be acquired and sharpened through training.

Writing itself is mental labor, but finishing an entire book is closer to manual labor.

And while they’re getting by on these, they may actually discover real, hidden talent within them. They’re sweating, digging out a hole at their feet with a shovel, when they run across a deep, secret water vein. It’s a lucky thing, but what made this good fortune possible was all the training they did that gave them the strength to keep on digging. I imagine that late-blooming writers have all gone through a similar process.

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. All I have to go on are experience and instinct. Experience has taught me this: You’ve done everything you needed to do, and there’s no sense in rehashing it. All you can do now is wait for the race. And what instinct has taught me is one thing only: Use your imagination. So I close my eyes and see it all. I imagine myself, along with thousands of other runners, going through Brooklyn, through Harlem, through the streets of New York.

One day, out of the blue, I wanted to write a novel. And one day, out of the blue, I started to run—simply because I wanted to. I’ve always done whatever I felt like doing in life. People may try to stop me, and convince me I’m wrong, but I won’t change.

Sometimes taking time is actually a shortcut.

It’s precisely because of the pain, precisely because we want to overcome that pain, that we can get the feeling, through this process, of really being alive—or at least a partial sense of it. Your quality of experience is based not on standards such as time or ranking, but on finally awakening to an awareness of the fluidity within action itself.

To be able to grasp something of value, sometimes you have to perform seemingly inefficient acts. But even activities that appear fruitless don’t necessarily end up so. That’s the feeling I have, as someone who’s felt this, who’s experienced it.

Buy What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.

Further Reading