Apparently, November is National Blog Posting Month. In order to counter my extreme inertia w/r/t the Internets, I thought I would informally participate. Not sure why. But it means I will try posting at least once a day through the month of November.
The title of this post doesn't mean anything, by the way. It's a riff on What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami, which I just finished reading. That title is itself a riff on What We Talk about When We Talk About Love, by Raymond Chandler, which I haven't read, and probably won't, since they are short stories and I don't read short stories. But anyway, the Murakami book was pretty good. I don't really like him as a novelist but he's very approachable and likable as a memoirist, and I am trying to turn myself into a runner so I liked the sustenance it provided in that regard.
And so why am I doing that?, you are probably wondering. Or actually, you are probably thinking, Why are YOU doing that? And I don't think I have any particularly novel reasons. I wanted an efficient exercise option, and I got myself strong enough to do it, so in August, I just started. And I like it, and it feels good, and I want to keep doing it. And in order to take it from just an exercise to something that I keep doing, I feel the need to give myself the new identity of runner. Because if you call yourself that, you have to do it. If you call yourself a runner and don't run, then you are really just an a-hole, and lying.
It also feels good to get to age 35 and find that you have new things inside of you that you can be. I want to keep finding new things inside of me. It makes me feel young, which strangely I have been feeling a lot of lately. I thought that I went through "so much" as a kid, and thought I was "so mature", but now that I have rounded the bend of this decade and see 40 on the distant horizon, I feel like I've had a pretty great life and not experienced much at all. At least not many bad things. And in order to keep having new experiences, you have to keep yourself open to being a new person, or at least having new parts of yourself. All of this dawned on me this weekend because I finished Murakami's book, and its sort of about that, and also because a friend tricked me into running 4.5 miles on Saturday, and it wasn't that hard, and it felt great, and it almost felt like I had run through a wall (3 miles) that I didn't know I had put up for myself. Which means there are other walls that I can run through, if I just let myself.
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