Marathon as Symbol

I ran a half marathon race yesterday as part of my training for a full one. For some reason I can't quite put my finger on, I've decided it's important that I run a marathon as part of this process. I've run marathons before, but was never really big on them and haven't done one for a while. I'd much rather train to run good ten ks and half marathons. They don't rip up the body like training for and running a marathon. I mean, there's a reason the Greeks had no event that remotely resembled this tortorous 26.2 mile contest of endurance. They were much too sane for such activity. They did have long distance runners. But they were used to transmit messages, although the story you hear about the guy who ran to Athens to convey message of the victory at the Battle of Marathon is a complete fabrication.

In any case, I have run them every now and then and admit to feel a certain satisfaction afterwards which completing nothing else can really approximate. But what really set me off was Haruki Murakami's book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, which I happened across at a bookstore in the Bangkok airport this summer. Every once in a while I will stubmle across a book completely unplanned that I can immediately sense will have some significance and I had that feeling very strongly with this book. Despite being a philosopher (well, despite having been a philosopher) I place a good amount of credence in some things that go beyond reason and cannot be ultimately proven. More on this later (or maybe in another entry).

It is interesting to speculate what about this book set me off. For one, I guess, the thing I regretted about being on this two month swing through Asia--which was a great time--was that I was just starting to get back in shape when I left for this trip--after two years in China where it was incredibly difficult to train. And the book, which relates Murakami's more than twenty year and still going love affair with running, reminded me of what an important value that is in my life. I've run since high school, though at some points in my life more than others. And I think what this book was telling me was to start getting serious about it again.

So I guess it is some sort of symbol, though generally I'm not a big fan of symbolic gestures. But here it seems a way to prove to myself that I can carry something difficult through to completion, and if I can finish off a marathon, well, there may be hope in other areas where I have to work through difficulties. At least that's what it feels like now.

So after the semester ended I took this two month trip to Japan, Thailand and ultimately back to China. One of the things I regretted was I was just starting to get back into shape when I took off on this trip.



So while I am generally not much drawn by the need for openly overt gestures like running a martahon as a symbol for something, for some reason it is important for me to run a marathon before leaving on the Peace Corps assignment. This was something I envisioned when I first saw the Peace Corps posting, which in a way set me off on my resignation. Again, it had to do with an intution.



Now, I know you can't go hog wild relying on these things. And they need to be checked and rechecked to see if they make sense. But at the end of the day, I think we need to rely on these.







gave me the bug again. I've been running since high school