Six
JUNE 23, 1996 • LAKE SAROMA, HOKKAIDO
Nobody Pounded the Table Anymore, Nobody Threw Their
Cups
Have you ever run sixty-two miles in a single day? The vast majority of people in the world (those
who are sane, I should say) have never had that experience. No normal person would ever do
something so foolhardy. But I did, once. I completed a race that went from morning till evening, and
covered sixty-two miles. It was draining physically, as you can imagine, and for a while afterward I
swore I’d never run again. I doubt I’ll try it again, but who knows what the future may hold. Maybe
someday, having forgotten my lesson, I’ll take up the challenge of an ultramarathon again. You have
to wait until tomorrow to find out what tomorrow will bring.
Either way, when I look back on that race now I can see that it had a lot of meaning for me as a
runner. I don’t know what sort of general significance running sixty-two miles by yourself has, but as
an action that deviates from the ordinary yet doesn’t violate basic values, you’d expect it to afford you
a special sort of self-awareness. It should add a few new elements to your inventory in understanding
who you are. And as a result, your view of your life, its colors and shape, should be transformed. More
or less, for better or for worse, this happened to me, and I was transformed.
What follows is based on a sketch I wrote a few days after the race, before I forgot the details. As I
read these notes ten years later, all the thoughts and feelings I had that day come back in quite sharp
focus. I think when you read this you’ll get a general idea of what this harsh race left me with, both
the happy and not-so-happy things. But maybe you’ll tell me you just don’t get it.
This sixty-two-mile ultramarathon takes place every year at Lake Saroma, in June, in Hokkaido. The
rest of Japan is in the rainy season then, but Hokkaido is too far north. Early summer in Hokkaido is a
very pleasant time of year, though in its northernmost part, where Lake Saroma is, summer warmth is
still a ways off. In the early morning, when the race starts, it’s still freezing, and you have to wear
heavy clothes. As the sun gets higher in the sky, you gradually warm up, and the runners, like bugs
going through metamorphosis, shed one layer of clothes after another. By the end of the race, though I
kept my gloves on, I’d stripped down to a tank top, which left me feeling chilly. If it rained, I’d really
have frozen, but fortunately, despite the lingering cloud cover, we didn’t get a drop of rain.
The runners run around the shores of Lake Saroma, which faces the Sea of Okhotsk. Only once you