When I talk about Running

I ran into a little book by Haruki Murakami entitled: What I talk about when I talk about Running. It appeared at the house one day. My wife found it at the library and brought it home. It is sort of an autobiography (a "memoir" it says) of Mr. Murakami, who is a professional writer (a novelist), but also a serious runner. (He runs marathons.)
Here are some interesting things he says:
I never take two days off in a row.
Muscles are like work animals that are quick on the uptake. If you carefully increase the load, step by step, they learn to take it. As long as you explain your expectations to them by actually showing them examples of the amount of work they have to endure, your muscles will comply and gradually get stronger. It doesn't happen overnight of course. But as long as you take your time and do it in stages, they won't complain -- aside from the occasional long face -- and they'll very patiently and obediently grow stronger. Through repetition you input into your muscles the message that this is how much work they have to perform. Our muscles are very conscientious. As long as we observe the correct procedure, they won't complain.

If, however, the load halts for a few days, the muscles automatically assume they don't have to work that hard anymore, and they lower their limits. Muscles really are like animals, and they want to take it as easy as possible; if pressure isn't applied to them, they relax and cancel out the memory of all that work. Input this canceled memory once again, and you have to repeat the whole journey from the very beginning.

An enlargement on the above note (which I like a lot) comes from Galloway's book. He says that every week you cannot or do not run, you loose maybe 25 percent of your fitness, in particular your muscular fitness. Your cardiovascular fitness and other aspects of endurance are built up (and lost) over much longer periods of time. He says it takes years to reach your full potential, and there is no short cut. (I am taking liberties with my paraphrase).
Even if there were two of me, I still couldn't do all that has to be done. No matter what, though, I keep up my running. Running every day is a kind of lifeline for me, so I'm not going to lay off or quit just because I'm busy. If I used being busy as an excuse no to run, I'd never run again. I have only a few reasons to keep on running, and a truckload of them to quit. All I can do is keep those few reasons nicely polished.
Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's home page / tom@mmto.org