What I talk about when I talk about running

I am not a Murakami fan; in fact, I have hardly read any of his novels to completion before. I started reading "Kafka on the Shore", but promptly gave it up as I realized that the genre was not really up my alley.

So why did I decide to purchase a copy of "What I talk about when I talk about running", a memoir by Haruki Murakami? Because I am a runner. At least I try to be one, despite the many obstacles I've faced and keep facing in my attempts.

I started running roughly a year after we moved to Canada. Before then, I had always been a couch potato. I never played any sport as a kid and was used to taking the bus or the "auto" to go places back home in India. I cringed at the thought of physical exercise and I had a particular fondness for the kind of high-fat yogurt that was so thick and creamy that it felt like pudding. I remember the time when, after immigrating to Canada, my husband and I used to take walks to the library, a 3-mile walk from home; before we set out, we would buy a bag of chips and a white Toblerone bar and finish them both as we walked to the library and back, a jaunt with the objective of burning calories. The result of all this: I ended up ballooning to 143 lbs in the year 2000. I don't remember any specific moment of epiphany, but that year, the exercise bug bit me.

I didn't start out running right away; first, I "power-walked" for a few months. Then I signed up for a 10K race and embarked on a run-walk program that started off with a modest 30-second run segment every 5 minutes of so. By the time I had completed my first 10K program, not only had I shed a few pounds and started to look a little more fit, I had also been initiated on the pattern of chronic injury.

My shins are my weak spots and every time I set my sight higher than a 10K run, I end up with repetitive injury in my shins. I have already recovered from 2 bad cases of "stress reactions" in my shins, the first resulting in a 1-year lay-off from running and the second a 3-month lay-off followed by physical therapy.

Despite all these injuries that don't seem to ever leave me alone, I still run. Every time I fall down, I get up and get moving on the path to become a full-time runner. Sometimes, I wonder: there are other ways to stay fit; why do I desire to be runner so much?

Nothing I have tried gives me the kind of joy that I experience right after a long, hard, sweaty, pulse-quickening run. Nothing has helped elevate my level of fitness as running. Nothing is simpler to do, more meditative, more solitary, than running. Nothing gives me the sense of achievement as setting a goal for myself - a 5K or a 10K or a 15K run - and actually training for it and completing the distance. I love running, and that is why, every time I get injured, I have the desire to fix myself and start running again.

And that is exactly why I picked up the book "What I talk about when I talk about running": because I am a runner.

I finished the book, however, with mixed feelings. As a runner, I appreciated it. I imagine I'll even re-read the book over and over again. I enjoyed the sections where he describes his running lifestyle, his thoughts and the feelings he experiences when he runs. Some of my other favourite sections in the book include his lyrical, evocative description of Charles river and his runs along its bank. I could see that he was in love with that river. His musings about the surface of the water in the river, how it changes with the seasona, how clouds are reflected on it, how various birds float and people row their boats on it, were thoroughly enjoyable. I have been to Cambridge, MA once and I could see myself running along the river as I read his words.

But this doesn't mean that his writing is stellar. On the contrary, I was very disappointed by it. Let me give you some reasons why.

Unless an author's writing stuns me utterly, I've always been turned off when he or she waxes poetic about inanimate objects, anthropomorphising them. Murakami is almost obsessed with anthropomorphising clouds and wind and rain and other non-living things. For instance, in page 5, he talks about how a thick cloud moved in during one of his runs, but quickly whisked itself away "as if it had remembered, 'Oh, I've got to do some errands'". A cloud remembering its errands! That was a little too forced and sentimental for my taste.

The book is an undeniable easy read. In fact, it reads like a blog, one not very coherent or thought through. The chronological order is not linear and it is hard to follow his journey as a runner without flipping back a few pages and re-reading some paragraphs every now and then. The narrative, the style and the diction all seem to be pedestrian. There are too many repeated phrases and too many filler words ("sort of", "kind of", "after a fashion" etc.).

Many unoriginal, obvious observations presume to be philosophical musings. For instance, in page 121, you'll encounter this sentence that is wrong on so many different levels: "And one of the privileges given to those who've avoided dying young is the blessed right to grow old." It is a tautology, essentially saying that if you don't die young, you grow old. Isn't that obvious?

Not only that, note in the same sentence: "one of the privileges...is the right". Isn't there a difference between privilege and right - the former being conditionally granted and the latter being something one is born with? How can you put those two words together like that and expect the sentence to flow well? Perhaps the author is just trying to be funny, but the sentence makes one do a double-take, at the very least, before one can move past it.

There are other similar sentences that seem to hiccup on the page: "No matter how much I write, I never reach a conclusion. No matter how much I rewrite, I never reach the destination". I don't see why those sentences are put together like that and to what logical end their pairing tends.

Overall, the book is prosaic, but as a runner, I am sure I'll cherish it and give it a second and a third chance. If you're a non-runner or someone not into endurance activities, however, I'd not recommend this book to you.