Haruki Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is half running memoir, half writing manual. His thesis: running and writing are essentially the same activity. Both require daily discipline, tolerance for monotony, and the willingness to continue past the point where it stops being fun.
Every run starts badly. The legs are heavy, the breathing is wrong, the mind is listing reasons to stop. If you judged running by the first mile, you'd never run again. But somewhere around mile two or three, something shifts. The body settles, the breath regulates, and thought changes quality.
Writing works the same way. The first paragraph is always garbage. The first hour is always resistance. But you sit through it because you've learned that the good stuff is on the other side of the bad stuff. Murakami doesn't romanticize this. He presents it as mechanical fact: show up, endure the bad part, arrive at the good part.
There's a specific state of consciousness that emerges during a long run — miles 5 through 10, for me. It's not flow exactly. It's more like a loosening. The analytical mind quiets, and a more associative, wandering mind takes over. Ideas connect that wouldn't connect at a desk. Problems reframe themselves without effort.
Neuroscience explains this partly through endorphins and partly through the default mode network activation that rhythmic movement promotes. But the experience itself defies clinical description. It's thinking without trying to think. It's the mind doing what it does when you stop forcing it to do things.
Murakami runs marathons. He's also written dozens of novels, each one requiring years of sustained effort. The connection he draws isn't about discipline or willpower — it's about relationship with pain. Running teaches you that discomfort is not damage. It's information. "I'm tired" doesn't mean "I should stop." It means "this is the part where it gets hard."
Writing has the same structure. The middle of a novel — when the initial excitement has faded and the ending isn't yet visible — is a marathon's mile 18. Everything hurts. Nothing is fun. You continue not because you want to but because you've been here before and you know what's on the other side.
There's a rich tradition of philosopher-walkers (Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Thoreau), but philosopher-runners are rarer. Perhaps because running is too modern, too athletic, too sweaty for the philosophical tradition. But George Sheehan's Running and Being makes the case that running is a contemplative practice as rigorous as any meditation.
The Japanese concept of shuhari — first learn the form, then break the form, then transcend the form — applies to both running and writing. You start by imitating (following a training plan, copying other writers). Then you adapt (finding your pace, your voice). Then, maybe, you arrive at something that feels like your own.
Murakami's equation of running and writing privileges a specific kind of creative process: solitary, disciplined, endurance-based. Not all creativity works this way. Some writers burst. Some artists collaborate. The running metaphor can make creativity sound more punishing than it needs to be.
I don't run because it makes me a better writer. I run because it makes me a clearer thinker, and clear thinking makes everything better. The miles where nothing happens are the miles where everything changes. Murakami knew this. The rest of us are catching up.
Share your reflections on this piece
Sign in to join the conversation
Sign InNo comments yet. Start the conversation.
Recommendations based on shared topics and recent reading
