When I left for Japan at the end of December, I found myself killing time in the airport bookstore. Seattle had just had one of its worst ice storms in recent memory, and every single east-bound flight that day was cancelled. Ironically enough, I was heading west to go to the East, so I just had a rather nasty delay awaiting me.
Anywhoozle, whilst killing this aforementioned time, I noticed Haruki Murakami’s “Novelist as a Vocation” on the shelf. Being a bit of a sucker for anything related to Murakami, I picked it up, excited to read it as I settled in for my 6 hour delay and 10 hour flight.
While I would rate the majority of Murakami’s fictional works as some of the greatest novels this world has yet seen, I would give this memoir on his career path a solid 3/5. It’s not great, it’s not bad, it’s aggressively fine. That is, of course, not important nor relevant to the discussion we’re about to have but I figured I would provide that preamble before this turns into a recommendation blog.
There were a few profound takeaways, though, one of which I’d like to discuss as the subject matter of this post.
Murakami talks about his routine as a runner at great length in this book, and why he believes his pursuit of running is one of the key factors that has contributed to his success as an author. Summarizing his points: running builds endurance. It is, at times, mind numbing and painful. As you (seemingly) endlessly and repetitively place one foot in front of the other, as your breathing grows more haggard, as your hips and knees start to ache and your calves start to burn, there is something that also starts changing inside of you. Before the peanut gallery pipes up about the very literal metabolic and physical adaptations that exercises produces, I’m talking about something different here.
Murakami posits that the act of writing a novel is one that requires tremendous physical and mental stamina. It is, ultimately, building something from nothing over the course of weeks, months, years, or even decades. This requires a certain amount of staying power that can be very difficult to cultivate without finding a variety of ways to reinforce it. Of which he believes running to be mayhaps the best way of doing so.
As someone who‘s staying power could be rated solidly between the attention span of a squirrel and the duration of a TikTok video, this idea was immediately appealing to me. If there was a way (short of railing lines of Adderall) to improve my ability to sit and focus on a given task like, say, learning Japanese, I was all ears.
At time of writing, I no longer have an active presence on social media (beyond posting to this blog), I try to be really diligent about only checking e-mail a couple of times a day, I’ve all but entirely ceased consuming alcohol, I limit my caffeine intake, I set 20 minute pomodoro timers, and I try to keep my phone as far away as possible from me when I have something to work on.
I’ve also started running somewhere between 5 and 10 miles, 3-5 times a week.
Now, having seemingly just assailed you with nothing more than a veritable potpourri of reasons why my life is boring, there’s something I want to emphasize as an output of all of these changes.
I have more endurance.
Yes, of course, I can literally run further, faster, and longer than I ever have before in my life. And that’s exceptionally cool! What’s cooler, though, is my rediscovered ability to sit and focus on a task at hand. Whereas previously it felt like I had 25,000 tabs running in my brain’s chrome browser at all times, which inevitably led to a feeling of intense overwhelm and burn out, I’m down to approximately 5,000 tabs and a triflingly moderate sense of overwhelm and burn out.
I’ll take it.
While I do believe that all of the habit and lifestyle adjustments listed above have played a role in helping my mind come off the crack dispensing treadmill of life, I’m not sure any of them have had as much of an impact on me as picking up running has. When I’m running, especially for upwards of an hour to an hour and a half in duration, it feels like something resets in my brain. Where previously I might say fuck it and give up after 5 minutes, now it takes me 20. If it took me 20 minutes to throw in the towel before, maybe now I have more than hour of bandwidth available. When I’m reading an engaging piece of fiction, my brain has once again started to make predictions about it or chew on a particular chapter, instead of immediately bolting to the next task on my to do list.
This is, genuinely, life changing.
I’ve spent most of my life feeling like I am standing in a field littered with 100 one foot deep holes, each one representing the depth to which I took a particular hobby or interest. As soon as I’m past the top soil and I start needing to dig through some actual dirt, or move some rocks out of the way, I would typically give up. This has manifested in my career, in hobbies, in living arrangements, in pretty much anything you can name. Shiny object syndrome doesn’t even begin to encapsulate my level of distractibility, and it is as exhausting as it sounds.
That has, though, ever so gradually began to improve. For every mile I log, I gain another 9-10 minutes of training for my mind and body that says: “Hey. We can stick with things. We can do this. Only another hour to go.”
When I first started, 3 miles felt like a lifetime, 5 miles felt like an eternity, and 10 miles felt like an impossibility. Now, I don’t even feel like I’ve really gotten warmed up until the 3 mile mark, my brain gets into a groove at 5, and I feel excited at the idea of pushing into the upper limits of my endurance at those early double digit numbers.
In my work and in my hobbies, I find that I can sit and focus and that those 20 minute pomodoro timers (where I’m not allowed to do/check/act upon anything besides the task at hand) seem to run themselves to 0 in no time at all. I’m a little less likely to fall victim to my frustrations, and a little bit more likely to keep picking the thing back up again the next day.
Running certainly isn’t the only way to do this. And I’ve added a number of other things to this equation to try to reap as many benefits for my life as I can. But running is most certainly a very effective tool for improving endurance, literal or figurative. And, whichever way you decide to go about doing so, I think actively seeking to cultivate this skill (especially in today’s world) can have a profound impact on your life.
Credit where credit is due: Thanks, Murakami.
Oh! And for a similarly themed post on sticking with stuff that is a lil’ bit tough, check out my homeskillet Cassie’s blog post on the pursuit of making the ever delicious Tamagoyaki.
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