Now, this is weird for a couple of reasons. One: I don’t remember being at the peak of anything in my entire life. Even if I were, I’m pretty sure I wasn’t aware of it as it was happening. I may have been, say, at my ultimate peak at buffet eating at age 22, but I wasn’t conscious of that fact while on my 8th plate of fried rice. So the fact that this is happening right now and that I can fully realize and appreciate it is worth noting.
Two: this is the heaviest I’ve been since I started running six years ago. This makes my peak a lot more amazing than it already is – it means I’ve actually performed better despite carrying a heavier load. But most of all, this is so fucking ironic because the reason I got into running was to lose weight (and later on, to maintain the ideal weight I finally achieved, which was ages ago). I really don’t know how it makes any sense that I’m simultaneously running better than ever before while losing lesser pounds than ever before. My body must be simultaneously at its peak and declining precipitously.
Yet, I honestly don’t care anymore that I’m not losing weight despite my marked improvement at running. These two things used to be interdependent but now I think my running has surpassed its original purpose. I now run for running’s sake and it’s as pure a feeling as there is in this world.
I realize that running is a convenient metaphor for a lot of feel-good things, so I’m not sure if I even want to go there. In the movie “Run Fatboy Run”, running was used as an allegory for the lead character’s journey towards maturation. “Finishing the run” was important because it meant “not quitting”. In the movie’s definitive scene, Simon Pegg’s Dennis literally hits what runners call “the wall” – the point when your fatigue seems to be too great to overcome. When he realizes everything that’s at stake – his family, his self-respect, his future – he stands up and dramatically (sorry, spoiler alert) runs through the wall.
Haruki Murakami isn’t interested in metaphors. In his intensely unpretentious memoir “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running”, he discusses his love for running in full exhaustive detail. Where other writers might be tempted to explore their love for something other than writing in parallel to their career or their life, Murakami delves into his running addiction in all its pure mundane niceties without ever running into the trap of allegory. The result is sometimes textbook-boring and, other times, inexplicably beautiful. It is as if by not overtly explaining what his running “means”, his obsession with the nitty-gritties fills us with meaning, only the greater kind – the one that cannot be verbalized.
There is one part of the book where I think he does achieve allegory, only he mentions it in the same casual manner as one of his mundane observations that it sneaks up on you. At the 47th mile of his first and last ever 62-mile ultramarathon, Murakami felt as if his entire body was starting to give in. His thighs and his knees were screaming in pain. But he wanted to finish the race so badly. He had to do something. He writes:
“I am not human. I’m a piece of machinery. I don’t need to feel a thing. Just forge on ahead.”
That’s what I told myself. That’s about all I thought about, and that’s what got me through. If I were a living person of blood and flesh I would have collapsed from the pain. There definitely was a being called me right there. And accompanying that is a consciousness that is the self. But at that point, I had to force myself to think that those were convenient forms and nothing more. It’s a strange way of thinking and definitely a very strange feeling – consciousness trying to deny consciousness. You have to force yourself into an inorganic place. Instinctively I realized that this was the only way to survive.
It worked. For the rest of the race, he was in a trance,; he could no longer feel pain, could no longer hear the voices of people egging the runners on. When he finally finished the race (his time was 11 hours and 42 minutes), one thought filled his mind:
The end of the race is just a temporary marker without much significance. It’s the same with our lives. Just because there’s an end doesn’t mean existence has meaning. An end point is simply set up as a temporary marker, or perhaps as an indirect metaphor for the fleeting nature of existence.
Not only was this highly “meaningful” within the context of his largely literal book, but it was also meaningful within the context of his other books, most notably, “South of the Border, West of the Sun”.
In this very underrated (and incidentally, my all-time favorite) Murakami novel, the dizzyingly and intensely romantic story of Hajime and his one-time-childhood-friend-turned-mistress Shimamoto ends in a rather jarring note. It doesn’t end well, like all postmodern tales, but that’s not what made it so paralyzingly sad. Traditional tragic love stories end with lovers mourning over their lost love; “South of the Border, West of the Sun” ends with cold, unromantic numbness.
The scene where Hajime decides that “Star-Crossed Lovers” – his favorite song, a song that reminds him of Shimamoto way back when they were both kids – no longer be played in his bar was especially ruthless:
I went up to the pianist and told him he no longer needed to play ‘Star-Crossed Lovers’. I mustered up the friendliest smile I could. "You’ve played it for me enough. It’s about time to stop." The reason I didn’t want to hear that tune again had nothing to do with memories of Shimamoto. The song just didn’t do to me what it used to. Why, I can’t say. The special something I’d found ages ago in that melody was no longer there. It was still a beautiful tune, but nothing more. And I had no intention of lingering over the corpse of a beautiful song.
I don’t know when Murakami ran that 62-mile ultramarathon, but I’d like to think that he did so shortly before writing “South of the Border, West of the Sun.”
I suspect that the reason running has become such a huge fad in the Philippines is because it’s culturally counterintuitive. Our society is not a meritocracy – success is less dependent on what you’re capable of and more dependent on who you know, who your parents are, or who your parents know. There is no direct relation between effort and reward, which is the complete and extreme opposite of the dynamics of running.
In life, we are taught lots of “secrets” to “success” that sound so right, they must be true: “just do your best”, “take risks”, “follow your heart”, “just be honest”, “stay true to yourself”, “goodness always prevails”. But these things are only always true in movies. These aren’t truths; they’re just poetic because they are sometimes true.
When Steve Jobs died last year, the zeitgeist was suddenly awash with his romanticism, as his famous quotes, which honestly, were mostly awesome, became the toast of the instantly-nostalgic internet world. My favorite quote of his, by far, is this:
Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
This is one of the most beautiful and righteous things ever said in recorded human history. Unfortunately, it is also grossly misleading. What got lost in the Steve Jobs quotes-lovefest was that Steve Jobs was a fucking genius. We accept this fact only via the fallacy that we could mirror the successes of geniuses by acting like they do. But the real reason Steve Jobs thinks that “following your heart” and “taking risks” are universal truths is because it was true for him – a once-in-a-generation visionary. If you’re an absolute freaking genius, of course you can take risks, of course you can follow your heart; odds are, your heart is always right, because you’re a freaking genius. But if you’re completely untalented, you go to “American Idol” and “X Factor” auditions and tell Randy Jackson and Simon Cowell to “fuck off” because society has taught you that you are always right just by virtue of “following your heart”. It’s not romantic to realize that most of us are nothing like Steve Jobs; it’s only undeniably true.
It would be great if we weren’t constantly afraid. It would be absolutely amazing if, every time I am reminded of my own mortality, I can just go and do something I want to do that has real-life consequences, but because I must “avoid the trap of thinking I have something to lose”, I go do it anyway, and from the sheer romance alone of what I did, I would feel no consequences at all. But this is not how life works. I know this for a fact because I have tried; many, many times. Embarrassment and failure, they don’t just “fall away”. They never do. Because I keep on waking up, day after day, each carrying more weight than the last, the persistence of life itself ticking endlessly until it strips away any romance attached to death.
I take a break from “living” by running.
What makes running so unique and so insular from the rest of “real life” is that its most tiring cliché – “no pain, no gain” – is not only romantic in a “Rocky” or “Karate Kid” sense; it is also totally and emphatically true. Running is efficiently comforting where “real life” is almost always disappointing.
The elliptical belt of concrete surrounding the U.P. Diliman Sunken Garden, commonly known as the U.P. Diliman academic oval, seems mundanely and uneventfully flat for the casual student, faculty member, fishball vendor, and random outsider looking for a quick nature walk. But to the avid sunken garden runner, this could not be farther from the truth.
Every time I approach Roxas Avenue, that long stretch east of The Oblation, my body, acting on pure geographical memory, braces itself. As my brain maps out the path ahead, it anticipates the ache. Roxas Avenue actually tilts up ever so slightly from the Vargas Museum, right up to Palma Hall, and crests somewhere along Vinzon’s Hall. This otherwise negligible incline becomes an uphill struggle to a body at its functional optimum, midway through its four-lap academic oval run. The muscles overheat at the thighs and the calves tighten further to make up for the vertical difference. Doubt starts creeping in, taking the form of shrunken lungs and throbbing, pre-plantar-fasciitis feet.
A couple of years ago, I made a decision: on my second lap at Roxas Avenue, I would sprint for the final half of that slightly-uphill stretch. It made me hate it more. But I did not stop. I kept doing what I hated. Sometimes I still get that feeling and sort of mutter to myself, gasping for air: “here we go again”. But I never stopped doing it – for years I always ran knowing that I will sprint through that difficult stretch and that I will hate it.
Now I’m a better runner. When I say that, I think I mean that I’m more of a consistent runner. I used to “run” and then sort of lazily jog during intervals where I feel like my breath is abandoning me. Now I still feel that sensation of “running out of breath” but it’s no longer enough to stop me from “running” decently and sometimes running fast. I have no idea why. I’m not a doctor and I can only speculate on the ways a body can alter its instincts through enough repetition. I’d like to think my suicide sprint decision was the turning point; but I’m not so sure about that because I still find that unbearable at times. All I know is that – as I was busy running and hating it – I somehow got better at it.
I used to join fun runs and even joined one half-marathon some years ago; but unlike Murakami, I’ve never done a full marathon, let alone an ultramarathon. I just don’t see the point in being among a crowd of runners, seeing how I stack up against them. To me, running is an anti-sport: you’re not competing against others, you’re not even competing against yourself. You’re competing against reason. It’s hard to keep doing something that is consistently difficult and painful because that’s how we’ve been conditioned to react in real life, despite all the truisms about how giving something “our best” is enough to guarantee success, because we find out, as adults, that that’s just not true. Losing is never as romantic as it was painted to be; it’s just ugly and unbearable.
I no longer know why I keep running despite it being increasingly Sisyphean but I suspect it’s because I have found out how it feels to win against reason and I don’t want to let go of that feeling ever again. There is no sensation in the world quite like the swelling of fatigue inside your lungs and then feeling every inch of its powerlessness. In that moment you are detached from everything: from the rest of reality, from life, from yourself.
As I finish this piece, I am about to leave the office and go to U.P. for my regular run. And I can’t wait. My only escape, my only solace, my only victory awaits me.
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