Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.
EmilyI am a few days into a much-needed week away in the sunshine of Nice and have had enough time off to finish the book I have been reading - Haruki Marukami’s What I talk about when I talk about running.
First of all thanks to big bro for giving it to me for Christmas – good present. I would recommend it to any runners. Actually, I would suggest it to anyone, it’s a very easy read and more than just a book about running.
Murakami (a Japanese novelist and frequent marathon-runner) says that the book is a “memoir centred on running” – he talks about his life, training and races in a series of essays and what he calls “life lessons”. It’s a meditative mixture of anecdotes and thoughts. One day, at the age of 33, he just decided to start running, and at about the same time he started writing novels too.
One of the stand-out bits for me is his account of the ultramarathon he did (62 miles in one day. Mental.) which he reckons gave him “runners blues” and put him off for a bit. After this event he stopped running as much (he had been going out every single day) and got into triathlons. Which leads him to another story – about how in one triathlon he scuppered his swimming leg by cleaning the lenses of his goggles with fingers that were covered in Vaseline (he’d lubed himself up to get out of his wetsuit easily) so that they were rendered completely useless.
Although it’s been translated from the Japanese into sometimes quite stilted American-English, it is a good read with these stories and his contemplations on such things as the people he meets running, the pain of sports massages, and running mantras. Try this mantra for size the next time a stitch has hit – “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional”.
Like this? Try this.
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