and motivation, when we lace up our running shoes early in the morning we feel exactly the same way.
Seko’s reply at the time came as a great relief. In the final analysis we’re all the same , I thought.
Whenever I feel like I don’t want to run, I always ask myself the same thing: You’re able to make a
living as a novelist, working at home, setting your own hours, so you don’t have to commute on a
packed train or sit through boring meetings. Don’t you realize how fortunate you are? (Believe me, I
do.) Compared to that, running an hour around the neighborhood is nothing, right? Whenever I
picture packed trains and endless meetings, this gets me motivated all over again and I lace up my
running shoes and set off without any qualms. If I can’t manage this much, I think, it’ll serve me right.
I say this knowing full well that there are lots of people who’d pick riding a crowded train and
attending meetings any day over running every day for an hour.
At any rate, that’s how I started running. Thirty-three—that’s how old I was then. Still young enough,
though no longer a young man. The age that Jesus Christ died. The age that Scott Fitzgerald started to
go downhill. That age may be a kind of crossroads in life. That was the age when I began my life as a
runner, and it was my belated, but real, starting point as a novelist.