Never Walked In High Heels

Recently, two of my friends encouraged me to read the book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. The book, written by Haruki Murakami, details his own experience with long distance running and how it connects to his philosophy of life. Everyone I know loves it. Everyone I know owns a pair of running shoes. It is a very strange thing to hear about something as common as running and have absolutely no frame of reference as to what your friends are talking about.

I, of course, could easily have my equivalents. A road racer for several years, I know fully the feeling of wind in my hair combined with the repulsion of seeing a rotting animal on the side of the road which Murakami describes so poignantly. Or I could write What I talk About When I Talk About Tying my Shoes which would detail the two hours it would take me to complete the act and the Zen like state I force myself to go into so I can avoid chucking my Nike’s into the Thames. At the end of the narrative, I would explain how my ticket to inner peace is a pair of $500 Stuart Weissman’s in black leather and with a three inch heel because they slip on so easily. This, most likely, is not what the author was hoping to inspire.

After reading Murakami’s book I had questions, lots of questions. Questions like: why is running uphill difficult? Why doesn’t anyone run down hill? Doesn’t it hurt your knees? What makes a good pair of running shoes? I even asked one of my guy friends to explain to me what chaffing was. Admittedly I was wholly unprepared for the response. There was suddenly this universe that everyone else knew about which was utterly foreign to me. I was totally lost in spin off conversations about the London Marathon or the hardest places to ran in Southwark. And in between the descriptions of the mud and the knee pain, the panting and the roadkill I kept reiterating my original question: why the hell would this put anyone in a zen-like state?

For Murakami,  running (and life) is about the process and the journey along the run. It’s about meeting the goals you set for yourself rather than being the fastest in the race. And on the one hand, I understand that. As someone who didn’t learn to walk until age ten, seeing the milestones is sweeter than whizzing by them.  Coming to what ought to be childhood rights of passage later means the phase of discovery is unending. I love being twenty five and getting to ask stupid questions that everyone thinks they know the answer to. I loved being a university student and finger painting for the first time. But I am still a very ambitious creature, unwilling to let go of being the fastest in the race when it comes to certain competitions.  Maybe because of this I’m not as well balanced as I would like to pretend. Or maybe its what one friend told me about running, “when there’s a road closed, you better make damn sure you know the detours really well.”