Followers of the blog, and/or my Twiter feed know that I’m ‘unofficially’ working my way through Haruki Murakami’s ‘What I Talk About When I Talk About Running’ right now, and it’s touching me in ways I would have never have thought possible.
Such is Murakami’s talent for turning his feelings about running into eloquent prose, that he has brought right back to me the time, 15-20 years ago, when I used to run distance races myself (I was into cycle racing at the time as well but that’s another story). He’s brought back the exact feelings I felt when I ran. He’s brought back the same passion I felt when I ran, but most of all he’s brought back a real yearning to take up the running shoes again – even though I’ve put on a good few pound since those days, and almost doubled my age 
).
I had a similar yearning a couple of years ago (although not as strong), to return to endurance training, and although my training in the 80s and 90′s was sound, I wanted to ‘swat up’ on the advances in training methods. So I picked up a few books back then, but sadly, after some initial interest, they’ve sat largely untouched and largely forgotten about on one of my bookshelves. I pulled those books down again last night though to where I can access them more easily.
Currently these books represent unfulfilled dreams, but if I continue to harvest the same level of passion that I am already from Murakami’s running memoir (to give it but one of its genre labels), then these books may well be manuals for restoring some semblance of personal former ‘glory’.
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