Posted by Damjan DeNoble

I bought Haruki Murakami’s lithe volume  on the interconnectedness of running and writing this past Wednesday.  I bought two copies, one as a gift for a friend, and another to read myself.  I had never been a runner until I met my fiancée.  Actually, to call myself a runner after I met my fiancée would be a lie, since I didn’t actually start running until I had been with her for two and a third years.  But, I did watch her run that entire time, and she prodded me to come with her almost every time she’d go.  She had been a runner ever since her junior year of high school when she was still a ballet dancer.  After she stopped dancing after her first year of college, I think she started running even more.  I think that her legs simply had to do something intensive after dancing ballet for sixteen years.

So, it is more accurate to say that from about two and a third years into our relationship I became a runner.  I came back from Beijing this past May, and spent a month or so in NC studying my LSATs.  I had been swimming in Beijing at a pretty steady clip and wanted to keep up the training; partly to stay in shape, and partly to stave off smoking.  While living in Beijing I had developed a rather unhealthy smoking habit that my fiancée had helped me break, by constantly threatening to leave me and go back home to the USA if I kept at it.  I stopped, but would sneak in a cigarette every once in a while, and I realized that the only way to really quit was to have some sort of incentive that wasn’t driven by an outside threat.  Pain has always been a great motivator for people.  So, I took up exercising.

Starting to exercise again, after not doing so since high school, is pretty scary for men.  Somewhere along the way, after the last high school practice is over, the typical man starts to believe that he really is getting older physically.   Not more mature, per se, but physically decrepit.  Every little ache and pain that was previously considered normal and systematically brushed off is treated like the end of the world.  He fools himself into thinking that instead of cardiovascular exercise, what he really needs to do is lift weights.  This is when he really gets proficient with excuses, “Man, I just wish there was time in my day to go to they gym.”  Of course, at the same time, it’s easy for him to watch someone like Lebron James or Christiano Ronaldo on television, both around the same age he is, and say something like “It’s amazing what he’s doing for the sport right now for how young he is.”  Or, maybe it’s just me who feels that way.  But I digressed.

I started running this past May.  I stopped running when I went back to Beijing for the final time this past July, and then I started running again when I came back to the states.  But, when I got back, I really started running.  Currently I am running six days a week, and I am quite proud of the fact.

Anyhow, I enjoy running because it organizes my day, when my fiancée is with me it makes for a great date, and it helps me with my work.  Murakami’s book gave me some insight into why things are working out like that for me.