What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is Haruki Murakami's 2007 memoir, originally published in Japanese as Hashiru Koto ni Tsuite Kataru Toki ni Boku no Kataru Koto, a title that quietly nods to Raymond Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Murakami opens the book in Kauai in the summer of 2005, training for that fall's New York City Marathon, and circles back through the previous quarter-century of his running life. He took up running in 1982, two years after closing the Tokyo jazz club he and his wife had run for most of their twenties and committing himself to writing full-time. He needed a body that could sit still at a desk for long stretches, and running, he discovered, taught him how to do that. Across short chapters dated like a training log, he reflects on his first sub-three-thirty marathon, his single attempt at a one-hundred-kilometer ultramarathon in Hokkaido, and the relationship he sees between long-distance running and writing fiction.
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What you might want to know about What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Across the year he trains for the November 2005 New York City Marathon at fifty-seven, Haruki Murakami keeps a small notebook of his runs around Cambridge and Hawaii.
Yes. Haruki Murakami's slim 2007 book is a memoir-essay hybrid covering his running practice and how it intersects with his writing life.
No. Many readers find Murakami's reflections on discipline, solitude, and craft as resonant as the running passages themselves.
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is 192 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running takes most readers 3 to 4 hours to finish.
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is a standalone novel by an unknown author, not part of a series.
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
