What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

Haruki Murakami’s *What I Talk About When I Talk About Running* is a slim 2007 memoir structured as a series of loosely chronological essays, most of them anchored to specific runs and races between the summer of 2005 and the autumn of 2006. Its organizing framework is Murakami’s own analogy between long-distance running and writing novels: both, he argues, demand endurance, solitude, daily routine, and the patient accumulation of small efforts rather than bursts of talent. He traces how he sold his Tokyo jazz bar, became a novelist, and took up running at thirty-three, eventually completing ultramarathons and more than twenty marathons. The book’s best-known set piece is his account of running a hundred-kilometer ultramarathon on Hokkaido in 1996, where he describes hitting a point around seventy-five kilometers when his body seems to operate independently of his will. Other chapters cover his first marathon, his failed attempt to run the original Marathon-to-Athens route in the summer heat, and a triathlon on a course in Hokkaido. A recurring motif is his “runner’s blues”—a fatigue and loss of motivation that appeared after years of training—and his belief that such slumps are normal cycles to be worked through rather than solved. He also reflects on aging, noting that his marathon times have slowed and that he now cross-trains on a bicycle and swims. The title comes from Raymond Carver’s story collection *What We Talk About When We Talk About Love*, which Murakami translated into Japanese. Throughout, the memoir is deliberately modest in scope: not a training manual or a philosophy of life, but a record of one writer’s ordinary, ongoing practice of putting one foot in front of the other.