First Thoughts

Young love, aging love, my half-a-life love affair with Haruki Murakami, and the California International Marathon

The tall shadows of the pines peaked through the large windows above the deck, stretching onto the berber carpet before us. The fire in the formidable stone fireplace hissed and popped. We were in the Black Hills of South Dakota. It was spring break ‘07, and we were 21 and 22, Bible-college virgins as pent up as peak-fitness athletes prancing around the Olympic village. Our friends had gone to bed, and we were taking turns playing guitar, lazily tending to the fire. She told me she’d smoked Marlboro Reds in high school because, “I wanted to sound like Janis Joplin.” She sang “Me and Bobby McGee,” a song she still sings 16 years later. Her alto grated in that slightly squeaky way—like a grocery cart wheel rubbing rust on steel—when she topped out her range. We’d traded mixed CDs and played music together for her Performance Prep class. Otherwise, we’d been study buddies since our first date which wasn’t really a date on a deathly cold day during Christmas break at a coffee shop downtown. As the wind yowled outside, she handed me the guitar, and I sang Counting Crows and Damien Rice, then made fun of Dashboard Confessional. We put the guitar down, and I pulled out my book, Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami, a dreamy, lusty novel about a 15-year-old boy who tries to outrun an Oedipal curse. She grabbed a blanket, asking if she could sit next to me on the love seat. I said sure, and then she asked if I wanted to read aloud. I said she didn’t really know the story—I was 200 pages in—and she said she didn’t care. I read as the fire fell to a whisper for about half-an-hour before she laid her head on my lap and dozed off. I wasn’t sure what to do when I got tired, so I just folded up the book and tilted my head back and dozed off until she woke up and woke me up and we both went to our separate beds in the basement.

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At mile six, I peed. I’d been contemplating stopping at a porta-potty for a few miles but didn’t want to lose any time time (seconds were precious—this was my third attempt at a Boston Qualifier), and I was just starting to settle into a rhythm, so I let it go, a little squirt at first, tentatively, and then (ah, what the heck) the whole canteen. It was warmer than I remember pee feeling as it ran down my leg and splattered up from my shoe. The pale yellow left its mark in that conspicuous, unmistakable V-shape on my half tights. At the next aid stations, I would grab an extra water and douse myself. Till then, I rolled on.

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After a snowy hike in the hills, after foosball in the basement, after Vietnamese coffee, we watched Murder by Numbers, which neither of us had been terribly interested in. Everyone else, one by one, had gone to bed. As the movie went on, we sat closer, and again she inched closer to me on the love seat, and (oh, what the heck) I put my arm around her. We sat like that for a while and then she asked if I could play with her hair. I did, and then it happened. I remember she had softer lips than I expected. We did that for a while and then went to our separate beds in the basement. I read more Kafka on the Shore after doing some writing and then fell asleep with the light on.

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The plan had been: 7-flat for the first 5 miles, 6:55, give or take a few seconds after that to the half, hopefully hitting the half around 1:31:30, give or take fifteen seconds; 6:51 till 20, and everything I had left in the tank after that, 6:45s, 6:40s, and, if the stars aligned, catching the 3-hour pacers and coming across the finish line at 2:59:59. I rubbed the Sharpied ballerina slipper Frankie had drawn on my hand before I left home for good luck and looked up at the overcast sky and tried to stay calm, saying a few thank yous and rolling on.

I came across the 5k mark in 21:40, 10k in 43:00, right on target but speeding up a little too much, so I backed off, edging closer to 7-flat, keeping the pace conservative on the hilly first half. I didn’t want to bonk—the dreaded slow down in the latter miles that often occurs after burning through your glycogen stores. I’d been there, and I’d trained to overpower it, to keep the pace relaxed enough while consuming as many calories as I could, so I kept to the plan, finishing my bottle at around mile eight and tossing it then getting my bottle of LMNT— salty electrolytes—from Coach Danny at mile 9. “I peed!” I yelled. He laughed and said, “Nice!” the miles started to click off smoothly. I leaned into the tangents, steadied my breathing, hit each water stop along the way, pointer finger snaked into the cup to snatch it easily and pinching it to get down at least a few ounces and rolled on. 7:00, 7:01, 6:56, 6:57. “Is your watch off?” I asked a gal I’d been yo-yoing since the start. “Yeah, it’s off. About 100 meters.” OK, I thought. Relax.

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During out honeymoon in Door County, after lots of buttery pastries and fresh fruit drizzled with cream—the breakfast came delivered each morning to our via these cute little wooden trays—I read Murakami’s The Wind Up Bird Chronicle. Time dragged on in that pleasant way time drags on when you have nothing to do. Toru Okada goes in search of his wife’s cat, down surreal alleyways, into old wells, through subterranean wonderlands. Like many Murakami characters, he’s passive. Life happens to him. You get the sense that he’s rather be boiling pasta than, well, anything else.

We made love and read by the fire and went for lazy bike rides along the path out the back door of our bed and breakfast beyond the goat pasture. The days leading up to our smallish wedding were clipped and full, chalk full of hangouts and bonfire whiskey and cigars and last minute planning. We opened cards from friends and family on the drive to Door County, eking out just enough to pay for our bed and breakfast. We had vague ambition but no real plans.

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"In long-distance running the only opponent you have to beat is yourself, the way you used to be,” says Murakami in What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. I didn’t read this until I started running in earnest in 2016. I was training for my first marathon, and I was trying to soak up everything I could about the distance. My opponent was my anxiety, which had been jump-started by a disastrous job as a restaurant manager. I lasted a year on the job but only three months of actual service.

I felt like everything had bottomed out, and I could hardly get out of bed for a few months. I had no job, no ambitions—other than get up and try to write—and very little motivation. Then a friend asked me if I’d run Twin Cities marathon with him, and I said yes. I needed something big, some monstrous wake up call. I set out to banish my anxiety, build confidence, and finish with some semblance of self-respect, knowing I’d set out to do a hard thing, had trained for it, and completed it. The restaurant gig knocked my writing aspiration back by about three years, I’d say, and was a huge blow to my confidence in general. The marathon went terribly. I said my goal was 3:30, which was about an 8:00/mile pace—I’d been running virtually every training run around 8:20 pace, so you can imagine how poorly this went.

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We’d been friends, study buddies, frequenting coffee shops all over the city, her actually studying while I tried to do my reading for Lit Theory and pretended to articulate to her what was so mind blowing about the Lacan’s mirror stage, Derrida’s deconstruction, Cixous’ “Woman must put herself into the text.” Truth is, I had no idea what the hell I was talking about. (I still don’t.) I didn’t have texting capabilities on my ancient Nokia, but she texted me anyway, knowing I’d never text her back. We met, sometimes with others, sometimes not. After we had met at a Dunn Bros coffee shop downtown one bitterly cold day during Christmas break, we had talked every day. Deep down, we knew it was never “just friends,” and, after we made out a few times, we tried to convince our other virginal Bible college friends that we didn’t need to operate under the structures of conventional romance, and that we were “friends with benefits.” Put this among the top on a list of “How to Make Young Adult Christians Feel Uncomfortable.” After a few weeks of said benefits, we caved, made it official for the sake of conversational ease, but the reality was that I had already met her parents, and ever since they brought us that crockpot of meatballs after her Performance Prep concert —we ate it on paper plates on the curb outside her campus apartment—we kind of both knew intuitively that this more than friends, and the benefits were beyond heavy petting.

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The plan, the plan, I kept telling myself: Stick to the plan. When I saw a teammate from back home, and he surged ahead, I reminded myself of the plan. 26 miles is a lot of miles, and it’s easy to feel good in the first fifteen. Easy now. When I hit the half in 1:31:16, part of me wanted to flash back to the Twin Cities Marathon a year earlier, when I’d hit the half at around the same time only to fade in the late miles, missing the Boston Qualifying mark by 1:21. I said, “No!” out loud, and then I looked around. My two bottles of Maurten had gone down easy, and my first gel (caffeinated!) made my brain buzz, and the early stomach cramp never reared its ugly head, and the sun was coming out. I smiled big, taking the tangent by the relay exchange, and looked around for some camaraderie. “Let’s go! Halfway, baby!” I said to a random guy in a black singlet, I said to a gal in white, I said to a guy in blaze orange. Nobody responded. I squinted into the sun, rubbed the ballerina slipper on my palm for good luck, and rolled on.

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In What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Haruki Murakami meditates on the running process and how it relates to his approach to writing. “Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that’s the essence of running, and a metaphor for life—and for me, for writing as well.” He didn’t take up running until later in life. He ran his first marathon at 33, (I ran mine at 31) and he’s run one every year since, including New York, Boston, and Honolulu many times. He’s currently 73. “I'll be happy if running and I can grow old together,” he says.

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“I’m the kind of person who likes to be by himself. To put a finer point on it, I’m the type of person who doesn’t find it painful to be alone. I find spending an hour or two every day running alone, not speaking to anyone, as well as four or five hours alone at my desk, to be neither difficult nor boring. I’ve had this tendency ever since I was young, when, given a choice, I much preferred reading books on my own or concentrating on listening to music over being with someone else. I could always think of things to do by myself.” After years of reading Murakami’s novels, it was as if he was speaking straight to me.

Though I loved being married, loved the partnership, I also love being alone. When I was young my mom took me to the doctor because, “I thought you were special.” I would sit under the coffee table and play by myself for hours, content and quiet, while my sister raged and threw herself from the crib.

“I'm often asked what I think about as I run,” Murakami says. “Usually the people who ask this have never run long distances themselves. I always ponder the question. What exactly do I think about when I'm running? I don't have a clue.”

In some ways, I try to think about nothing while running. Sure, it can be helpful to blow off steam, rehearse a conversation, resolve all your daddy issues, say what you’d actually want to say to someone tomorrow or the next day, but as time goes on, I feel the opposite. I’m just trying to feel the moment and think about nothing in particular. That’s the ultimate goal, not unlike meditation. A thought comes in, and you let is slide on by, step, step, step, Aspen, spruce, birch, “Good morning,” “good morning,” cardinal, cumulus, step, step, step.

The ugly side of zen shows a history of monks starving in the Zendo, whipping or getting whipped, sitting for ten hours straight, despite the screaming back, neck, tailbone, the intruding thoughts begging for relief. That is the long-distance run. At some point the fatigue always comes, or the aching hamstring, or the too-tight shoulders, or the hunger pangs, or thirst, and you have to keep on.

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The day lockdowns began in Minnesota, I reached for Murakami’s 1Q84, an 1,100 page mammoth about religious cult leaders, secret assassins, a love affair, a literary scheme, and the omnipotent “Little People,” who emerge from a goat’s mouth and control all of Tokyo, among other things. I knew we’d be inside for a while, so why not embrace it? I nursed the book throughout the pandemic, taking in 10-20 pages at a time between kindergarten Zoom and Mo Willem’s lunchtime doodles and family walks/bike rides. We learned to love each other all over again, feeling the fine edges of our anxious minds spill over onto the dinner table. Nothing was private. Like the characters in all of Murakami’s novels, there was no space to understand the moment. There were simply portals (Zoom) and stories and music, and we were living in an unreality for an unforeseen amount of time.

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I remember less about the California International Marathon than any other race I’ve ever run. That is, I remember less detail. It was a complete whirl, a vortex, a black hole of the most immaculate flow state I’ve ever been in. Everything clicked. The gels, the paces, the spring in my legs came to life. At around mile twenty, I stared down the parkway lined with trees on J Street, and I felt an entire world open up before me, a new portal of self unlocked, and it was just me and the road and the trees and the sky, and I was floating, and there was nothing in my way—not even myself.

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In recent years, after Rebekah asks what I want for Christmas, I’ll shrug, “A book’s fine.” The other night, while flipping through Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World—another bizarro subterranean quest that involves a split consciousness and laundering sonic data—I found a hand-written note at the beginning: “Happy 22nd birthday, Josh! You’re a treasure.” I showed Rebekah. “Now you can’t say I never buy you books,” she joked.

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As I got to mile 24, I knew I had it—the Boston Qualifier—the thing I’d worked for three years and three marathons to get. I was better than I used to be. And while I do think running is an individual sport, it’s also not, because you need teammates for grueling training days, the energy of other competitors, crowds, and loved ones who aren’t present. I had Rebekah and Frankie back home, who’d rooted for me and endured (albeit in different ways) with me through it all. “Let’s race!” Frankie would say as we were out walking the dog, and I’d say no, no, I’m too tired. I’d nod off while waiting TV with Rebekah. I’d forget things at the store, fatigued and wanting only to go home and put my feet up.

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In Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, Tsukuru, the 36-year-old protagonist retraces steps to find out what went wrong during his college years when his close-knit group of friends cut him off without warning. I read this while we were pregnant with Frankie, in between visits to maternal fetal medicine, in between taking care of Rebekah while she was on bedrest, while friends helped us move late one summer night, while we were crying on the floor of her future bedroom after putting the crib together, reflecting on all the relationships that had taken a wrong turn, imagining ourselves as parents, imagining the “why” that drives us.

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Leading up to the race, when imagining the time on the clock, practicing visualization during training, one thing I would tell my self—one “why”—had to do with belonging. I wanted to join the club, to be among the other 30,000 people who toe the line in Hopkinton every year, the fastest marathoners in the world. I thought it would make me feel different, achieved, but the truth is that, as I crossed the finish line at CIM on December 4th, all I did for the moments afterward was look around for my family, for my friends who weren’t there. I wanted someone to hug, someone to celebrate with, someone’s shoulder to cry on. Truth was, it was a little disappointing. I shrugged, got my medal and my banana and shuffled through the shoot like everyone else.

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“Nobody cares if you keep writing,” my old writing prof told a group of us, “so you have to care. All they care about is if you’re happy and have health insurance.” In some ways, he’s right. All ambition is arbitrary. Goals are subjective and ever-changing. We make the meaning, assign the meaning, and act it out. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion said. And it’s often misunderstood: we don’t tell ourselves stories in the sense that we need to be entertained by flaming swords or mythological beasts. We tell ourselves stories—we make things up, we delude ourselves—in order to live. And maybe she’s right to a certain extent. But I also I know I wouldn’t take back one story I’ve told myself, not the story of me and Rebekah, not the books I’ve learned to love, and certainly not the feeling of floating down J Street with three miles to go.