What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami Page B

gesture, promising I’d run the original marathon course and write an article about it, and I’d flown all the way to Greece to accomplish it. No way could I back out now. I racked my brain to come up with ideas on how to keep from getting exhausted by the heat, and finally got the idea of leaving Athens in the early morning, while it was still dark, and reaching Marathon before the sun was high. The later it got, the hotter it would be. It was turning out to be exactly like the story “Run, Melos!,” about a competition to outrun the sun.
    The photographer from the magazine, Masao Kageyama, would ride along in the van that accompanied me. He’d take pictures as they drove along. It wasn’t a real race, and there weren’t any water stations, so I’d occasionally stop to get water from the van. The Greek summer is truly brutal, and I knew I’d have to be careful not to get dehydrated.
    “Mr. Murakami,” Mr. Kageyama said, surprised as he saw me getting ready to run, “you’re not really thinking of running the whole route, are you?”
    “Of course I am. That’s why I came here.”
    “Really? But when we do these kinds of projects most people don’t go all the way. We just take some photos, and most of them don’t finish the whole route. So you really are going to run the entire thing?”
    Sometimes the world baffles me. I can’t believe that people would really do things like that.
    At any rate, I started off my run at five thirty a.m. at the stadium later used in the 2004 Athens Olympics, and set off down the road to Marathon. There’s just the one main highway. Once you run roads in Greece you’ll understand, but they’re paved differently. Instead of gravel, they mix in powdered marble, which makes the road shiny in the sunlight and quite slippery. When it rains you have to be very careful. Even when it isn’t raining the soles of your shoes make a squeaky sound, and your legs can feel how smooth the road surface is.
    The following is a shortened form of the article I wrote for the magazine covering my Athens–Marathon run.

    The sun’s climbing higher and higher. The road within the Athens city limits is very hard to run on. It’s about three miles from the stadium to the highway entrance, and there are way too many stoplights along the way, which messes up my pace. There are also a lot of places where construction and double-parked cars block the road, and I have to step out into the middle of the street. What with the cars zooming around early in the morning, running here can be dangerous.
    The sun starts to come up just as I enter Marathon Avenue, and the streetlights all go out at once. The time when the summer sun rules over the earth is swiftly approaching. People have started to appear at bus stops. Greeks take a siesta at noon, so they tend to commute to work pretty early. They all look at me curiously. Can’t imagine many of them have ever seen an Oriental man running down the pre-dawn streets of Athens before. Athens isn’t the kind of town with many joggers to begin with.
    Four miles into the run I strip off my running shirt and am naked from the waist up. I always run without a shirt, so it feels great to take it off (though later I’ll wind up with a terrible sunburn). Until the eighth mile I’m running up a gradual slope. Hardly a breath of air. When I get to the top of the slope it feels like I’ve finally left the city. I’m relieved, but at the same time this is where the sidewalk disappears, replaced only by a white line painted along the road, marking off a narrow lane. Rush hour has begun, and the number of cars has increased. Large buses and trucks whiz right by me, at about fifty miles per hour. You do get a vague sense of history with a road named Marathon Avenue, but it’s basically just an ordinary commuter highway.
    It’s at this point that I encounter my first dead dog. A large, brown dog. I don’t see any external injuries. It’s just laid out in the middle of