Time & Motion

"Joy in his blood bursting his heart, - the bliss!"

It took Haruki Murakami 11 hours and 42 minutes to run 100 km. It takes me about half an hour to run five. Running every day, then, for thirty minutes I would cover the same distance in 20 days that Murakami covered in one. But notice that it would only take 10 hours of running, where it took Murakami almost twelve.

The fastest marathon runners complete the race in just over two hours. I could cover the same distance in about 4 hours, running 30 minutes every day for 8 days. "In 2005, the average marathon time in the U.S. was 4 hours 32 minutes 8 seconds for men," Wikipedia tells us.

But running for a whole day broke Murakami's heart. Afterwards, "the desire to run wasn't as clear as before," he tells us. It took ten years to get over it. By contrast, my current regimen of running between 2.5 and 7.5 kilometers every day is getting increasingly addictive. While Murakami "lost the enthusiasm [he]'d always felt for the act of running," mine is growing day by day.

"Recent studies have shown that pushing your body to run 26.2 miles can cause at least minor injury to your heart," Men's Health explains. That ultramarathon, then, may quite literally have broken Murakami's heart. Let's remember that Pheidippides, the original hero of the marathon, died in the process.