What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

Napping

THE JAPANESE NOVELIST Haruki Murakami’s intensely engrossing novels and stories are almost always dreamlike and often include fantastical ingredients: a man possessed by sheep, a glowing unicorn skull, alternate universes. They also often feature characters who have dropped out of society for one reason or another. After the international success of his third novel, A Wild Sheep Chase, which was published in 1982 when he was thirty-three years old, Murakami went on to publish ten more novels to date, all international bestsellers, including The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore and 1Q84. Murakami has won just about every literary prize you can win short of the Nobel Prize for Literature, for which he is most bookies’ favorite. He also writes short stories; translates other writers’ books from English into Japanese; travels often; collects vinyl records; and sometimes teaches.

Murakami is a runner. He runs every day. And he runs marathons. In the introduction to his memoir of running and writing, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Murakami writes that running is “both exercise and a metaphor. Running day after day, piling up the races, bit by bit I raise the bar, and by clearing each level I elevate myself. At least that’s why I’ve put in the effort day after day: to raise my own level. I’m no great runner, by any means. I’m at an ordinary—or perhaps more like mediocre—level. But that’s not the point. The point is whether or not I improved over yesterday. In long-distance running the only opponent you have to beat is yourself, the way you used to be.”

And Murakami is also a napper. As he writes later in this book, “One other way I keep healthy is by taking a nap. I really nap a lot. Usually I get sleepy right after lunch, plop down on the sofa, and doze off. Thirty minutes later I come wide-awake. As soon as I wake up, my body isn’t sluggish and my mind is totally clear. This is what they call in southern Europe a siesta. I think I learned this custom when I lived in Italy, but maybe I’m misremembering, since I’ve always loved taking naps.”

It’s an anomalous passage in a book filled with descriptions of feats of physical strength and endurance. Murakami (translated by Philip Gabriel) chronicles a lifetime of running and writing, leading up to the New York marathon of 2006. It’s a very personal work—not a self-help book as such, but one in which Murakami lets us see inside his head as he trains for marathons and runs in them, and as he writes. He shares the music he listens to when he’s running (occasionally jazz, but more often rock, including Red Hot Chili Peppers, Beck, the Beach Boys, and the Rolling Stones), his weight, what he drinks and eats (Sam Adams and Dunkin’ Donuts while living and running in Boston), and the running shoes he wears (Mizuno).

More deeply, Murakami tackles the need for solitude, but also its corrosive dangers. He writes about anger, and how he handles it (he runs a little longer). He tells us something of his life, and the moment he chose to become a novelist—at a baseball game at 1:30 p.m. on April 1, 1978, right after a young American player named Dave Hilton hit a double. He writes, “And it was at that exact moment that a thought struck me: You know what? I could try writing a novel. I can still remember the wide open sky, the feel of the new grass, the satisfying crack of the bat. Something flew down from the sky at that instant, and whatever it was, I accepted it.”

That was when Murakami was twenty-nine. He didn’t start running until he was thirty-three: “The age that Jesus Christ died. The age that Scott Fitzgerald started to go downhill. That age may be a kind of crossroads in life.”

In a particularly vivid section early in the book, Murakami recounts running between Athens and Marathon, the original marathon, the twenty-six-mile route a Greek messenger is said to have run in 490 BCE to let the government in Athens know about the victory over the Persians in the Battle of Marathon. Murakami runs it in reverse, ending where the messenger began. It’s the first time he’s run that length, and it’s a grueling three-and-a-half-hour slog on a “dreary” commuter road with rush-hour cars and trucks speeding past. Murakami keeps track of the roadkill he encounters: a depressing total of three dogs and eleven cats. As he runs, he struggles with the heat, the wind, his thirst, and his own hatred of everyone and everything, including the sheep by the side of the road. But he finishes.

When we leave Murakami at the end of the book, he’s run many more marathons, and even competed in his first triathlon. And of course he’s still writing. And, one presumes, napping.

But all the descriptions of running and writing and training are both story and metaphor and, as Murakami somewhat sheepishly admits, the book “does contain a certain amount of what might be dubbed life lessons.”

I read Murakami’s book on running while I was lying fully clothed on my bed on top of my covers one hot summer day, preparing to take a nap. But the book was too fascinating to allow me to sleep, and I underlined furiously. The book is indeed full of life lessons. One has to do with knowing when to end a day’s work: In running and writing, Murakami realizes, there is a real benefit to stopping before, and not after, you find yourself depleted. “Do that,” he writes, “and the next day’s work goes surprisingly smoothly. I think Ernest Hemingway did something like that. To keep on going, you have to keep up the rhythm. This is the important thing for long-term projects.” I underlined the next sentence: “Once you set the pace, the rest will follow.”

A few pages later, I underscored the observation, “I don’t know why, but the older you get, the busier you become.” Later Murakami writes about the need, as you get older, to prioritize your life. When he was young, he had endless time for everyone—he and his wife owned and ran a small bar back then. Now, though, he needs to ration whom he sees and what he does.

Still, he’s careful to mention that even when he owned the bar, he never worried about pleasing everyone. If ten people came and nine of them didn’t care for his bar, that didn’t matter at all. He just needed one in ten to like it—well, to love it, to come back and be a regular. In order to make sure of that, he explains, “I had to make my philosophy and stance clear-cut, and patiently maintain that stance no matter what.”

So it was with his books. Some readers may not have liked his first two novels, but he stuck with writing until the explosive success of A Wild Sheep Chase. He had to build an audience of people who loved what he did, to cultivate “devoted readers, the one-in-ten repeaters.”

While reading this book in bed, I found myself thinking about Murakami’s “life lessons,” but I kept returning to the bit about napping. It’s ironic, I know, to read a whole book about running, and to come away thinking mostly about one paragraph on sleep. But the more time I spent lying in bed pondering Murakami’s book, the more I came to see the parallels between the two.

Murakami doesn’t have a clue what he thinks about when he runs but instead describes the thoughts that go through his head when he is running as being like clouds: “Clouds of all different sizes. They come and they go, while the sky remains the same sky as always. The clouds are mere guests in the sky that pass away and vanish, leaving behind the sky. The sky both exists and doesn’t exist. It has substance and at the same time doesn’t. And we merely accept that vast expanse and drink it in.”

When I nap I may dream, and may even remember some of those dreams vividly, but the balance of my sleeping thoughts are also like clouds, images that “pass away and vanish.”

Murakami relies on the quiet time of running, the time by himself, to maintain his “mental well-being” as well as his physical well-being, which gives him the stamina to keep doing what he does: sitting down to write and focusing on his work.

Napping, too, is a form of withdrawing. You may nap next to someone, but you nap alone—just as you can run alongside others, but you run by yourself. And napping, like running, produces a dream state—a trance, an out-of-body experience of the type that many chase through drugs and raves but that for the lucky are as near as the road or the bed.

Napping also has benefits that running doesn’t.

The greatest thing about a nap is that it gives you two days for the price of one. You have the whole day before the nap, and when you wake up you have a whole day ahead of you.

For me, a perfect weekend day begins with a careful reading of the newspaper in the morning; an early lunch, perhaps with a Bloody Mary, if someone insists; then time with a book. After about forty minutes or so, my eyelids usually grow heavy and the book heavier. So I will certainly doze off.

Reading and naps, two of life’s greatest pleasures, go especially well together. The best thing about a nap that interrupts my reading is that it often enriches my experience of a book by allowing my subconscious to place me in it. During these naps I might find myself galloping across the moors with Heathcliff or spending Mondays and Wednesdays with Morrie. When I wake, an hour or so later, I find the book I was reading splayed open on my chest with a new chapter lodged in my brain. I have all the benefits of time without thought and some new scenes and images as well.

If it’s really a good day I can return to the book for another hour or so. Then I’ll get up, splash some cold water on my face, and take care of some emails or pay some bills until 6:00 p.m., when it’s time for a drink. All week I dream about just this kind of Saturday and Sunday.

I cherish memories of great naps—from my childhood, at my grandmother’s house, resting my head on a needlepoint pillow that said BLESS THIS MESS, and from just days ago.

Sadly, we live in a world that is increasingly intolerant of naps and nappers.

In school, I perfected the art of the in-lecture nap, accomplished by placing my elbows on the desk, lacing my fingers together, and then cradling my head between my thumbs as though deep in concentration—but it’s tough to get away with even this kind of nap in a cubicle or at a shared desk. Colleagues and bosses now expect to hear a certain amount of the key-tapping that has become consonant with work. Screens are programmed to sleep, as are computers, if they aren’t fed a steady diet of numbers and letters by keyboard. And nothing betrays a sleeping worker like a sleeping computer. Ironic that we program our computers to do something that we now deny ourselves.

When there were offices, life for nappers was easier. The open-plan office, with everyone in constant sight of everyone else, is a disaster. So off we go to the break room again and again for coffee, that enemy of sleep, or for a quick trip to Starbucks for a sugar- and fat-filled specialty drink to keep us awake until the commute home.

Following Lin Yutang, I can’t help myself from seeing napping, like lounging in bed awake, not just as a human pleasure but as a human right. The freedom to nap or lounge isn’t quite one of Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms (as enshrined by Eleanor Roosevelt in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights), but maybe it should be the fifth. (Eleanor was, by the way, known to take a power nap prior to giving speeches; Sir Winston Churchill was a great napper, too.)

There are scientific journals full of research on the physical benefits of naps, but none of that interests me. Researching napping is antithetical to the spirit of napping. Murakami, I believe, feels similarly. He mentions the health benefits of taking a nap but follows with the simple admission that he’s always loved napping. You don’t need a reason to do what you do for love.

I recently read a moving article by Toby Campbell, MD, a cancer oncologist who works in hospice and palliative care. He wrote an essay for the Journal of the American Medical Association about how he realized one sunny Wisconsin day that he “had bucket lists all wrong” and that his thinking about what was most important at the end of life needed to evolve. He was visiting a patient named Keith, who had been discharged from the hospital to home hospice with the expectation that he had days to live. But Keith was still alive three months later, though his family had reported that he was now “struggling.” Hence the house-call from Dr. Campbell. Keith’s family and friends had rallied around him—first with one celebration of his life and then, when he didn’t die, with another celebration, and then, when he still didn’t die, a third celebration. Keith was definitely dying—there was no doubt about that—just not as quickly as everyone had expected. Now, he was exhausted, he confided in Dr. Campbell, and not just because of his illness. The problem was that everyone around him was trying so hard to make every moment he had left meaningful that he didn’t have a minute to himself.

Dr. Campbell realized that even though he had cared for many hundreds of people who were dying, his thoughts about the end of life might be misguided: “A continuously intense life can be exhausting. Keith had no bucket list of activities to complete before he died. He longed for a minute that didn’t matter: perhaps for time to take a nap or watch something silly on television without feeling guilt or regret. He needed relief from the feeling that he was wasting precious time, not the added pressure of life’s greatest to-do list. I now realize that humans require down time. Quiet time is necessary to process all that happens to us on a daily basis—let alone over the course of a life.”

Of course, napping is also a privilege. My friends with children and multiple jobs rarely find themselves with time for a nap. But that’s what makes napping that much sweeter for them when they do.

A few years back, I was on a business trip to a town where a friend lived. He picked me up after my meeting, and back we went to his apartment. We had lots to catch up on and much to chat about—it had been months since we had seen each other, and there was that pleasurable giddiness that comes when you have so many topics from which to choose and can alight on this one and that one. Your friends in common? Family? Your ailments? Books and movies?

Soon our conversation turned, as it so often does, to how busy life is. And my friend asked, “Would you like a nap?”

In fact I was desperate for a nap. I had flown in early. I had been worried about my business. The meeting had been stressful.

So he left me for twenty minutes to stretch out on the sofa and close my eyes. He went to the kitchen to send some emails.

“Would you like a nap?” is one of those questions we should ask of one another more often. It’s easy. And it costs exactly nothing.

The Importance of Living includes a section called “The Importance of Loafing.” Here Lin Yutang writes about the horrors of “efficiency, punctuality and the desire for achievement and success.” He calls them “Three American Vices.” He writes, “They are the things that make the Americans so unhappy and so nervous. They steal from them their inalienable right of loafing and cheat them of many a good, idle and beautiful afternoon.”

Happily, these three vices can be kept at bay very simply: Whenever you have the chance, you lie down on your bed and close your eyes.