Matthew Burrows MBE on Haruki Murakami's 'What I Talk About When I Talk About Running'

‘Emotional hurt is the price a person has to pay in order to be independent’ - Haruki Murakami

Talking about running might be a good place to explore our experience of hurt and pain, but this is a book read by all, not just runners, for Murakami ‘…running is both exercise and metaphor’. 

What I talk about when I talk about running by Haruki Murakami is a story of a life, the life of a writer lived through the daily practice of running. Running, it seems, is his metronome of living and writing, his means with which to make sense of experience. It is in part a love affair with running, starting with his admission that he had for sometime grown tired of it, and charting his way back to the rhythm and beat of the daily ritual of one foot in front of the other.  

I first read this short book when I had been ‘seriously running’ (36 miles per week - Murakami’s definition), for five or more years. I had over a period of decades acclimatised to becoming ‘a runner’. I am now a ‘rigorous runner’ (more than 36 miles per week). It wasn’t something I talked about or considered an integral part of my own work as an artist, that is, until I read Murakami.

 I have found solace and wisdom in running, I run because I’m happy or sad, confused or focused, thoughtful and thoughtless. It is in effect what I do, to do everything else. To talk about running is to talk about everything, but it is everything seen through the pulse of a heart beat, the pace and rhythm of movement and acclimatising of the body and mind to discomfort and pain. I hadn’t until reading this book found anyone who had attempted to make sense of this in art. There are plenty of books on walking and despite the fact that both are a movement in and through space, by your own propulsion, they do illicit quite different responses to experience.

 Murakami does not walk at least he doesn’t when he is running. That might seem self-evident, but at some point, in a run, most runners will walk, especially on hills. For Murakami consistency of movement is everything. 

 His approach to training is basic yet effective, at least he has run for more than 30 years without injury. You wouldn’t find it recommended in any training manual, but it does highlight one key issue. Most novice runners fail to develop the habit of running. It is that habitual engagement with daily discomfort that builds fitness as much as it is our creative habits that form the basis for who we are as artists. Throughout the book we repeatedly return to the condition of solitude that is the condition of runner and writer. People usually do not stop runners mid-flight, and this respect for your efforts, is a worldly solitude that allows Murakami to observe his surrounding and the people he sees with a reflective distance, putting himself into the position of reader observing the world of his fiction. He is runner as reader, reading the everyday as practice for creating the meta-worlds of the ordinary.

Running connects Murakami to the wonders of the everyday, he writes of his editors removing the “…ordinary that doesn’t amount to much”, with the compassion of someone who has experienced the hurt of the ordinary and a knowledge that what things amount to is never that straight forward, especially to the creative mind. Perhaps Murakami’s great gift as a writer and his insight as runner is that the physical and emotional hurt of running sharpens our awareness to ourselves and the unfolding drama of the world around us, no matter how ordinary.

 I remember the day I first confessed publicly to being ‘a runner’. I wasn’t ashamed of it, it wasn’t a transgression in the traditional sense. It just didn’t seem appropriate to mention my physical endeavours as relevant to the more mindful ones of making art. This is a mistake and one that Murakami makes evident. He is someone who ‘…has to experience something physically,’ it is language and art connected to body and mind. Murakami taps into this vein in running, as most ‘serious runners’ do. The desire to see Sport as a pursuit of the body and Art of the mind is a false dichotomy. The hurt experienced in running is not merely a metaphor but a heightened engagement in the ordinary. Being present to the ordinary, being aware of this as a creative catalyst, it seems, works best when it hurts a little.

Matthew Burrows MBE - 'Sleepscape' 2019 Oil on linen 182 x 242 cm 71 5/8 x 95 1/4 inches. Photo credit -Jonathan Bassett