you think about it—and I did think about it—Danton and Robespierre wound up with their heads cut
off.
Ultimately, using every trick in the book, I managed to grit my teeth and make it through thirteen
miles of sheer torment.
I’m not a human. I’m a piece of machinery. I don’t need to feel a thing. Just forge on ahead.That’s what I told myself. That’s about all I thought about, and that’s what got me through. If I were
a living person of blood and flesh I would have collapsed from the pain. There definitely was a being
called me right there. And accompanying that is a consciousness that is the self. But at that point, I had
to force myself to think that those were convenient forms and nothing more. It’s a strange way of
thinking and definitely a very strange feeling—consciousness trying to deny consciousness. You have to
force yourself into an inorganic place. Instinctively I realized that this was the only way to survive.
I’m not a human. I’m a piece of machinery. I don’t need to feel a thing. Just forge on ahead.I repeat this like a mantra. A literal, mechanical repetition. And I try hard to reduce the perceptible
world to the narrowest parameters. All I can see is the ground three yards ahead, nothing beyond. My
whole world consists of the ground three yards ahead. No need to think beyond that. The sky and wind,
the grass, the cows munching the grass, the spectators, cheers, lake, novels, reality, the past, memory
—these mean nothing to me. Just getting me past the next three yards—this was my tiny reason for
living as a human. No, I’m sorry—as a machine.
Every three miles I stop and drink water at a water station. Every time I stop I briskly do some
stretching. My muscles are as hard as week-old cafeteria bread. I can’t believe these are really my
muscles. At one rest stop they have pickled plums, and I eat one. I never knew a pickled plum could
taste so good. The salt and sour taste spreads through my mouth and steadily permeates my entire
body.
Instead of forcing myself to run, perhaps it would have been smarter if I’d walked. A lot of other
runners were doing just that. Giving their legs a rest as they walked. But I didn’t walk a single step. I
stopped a lot to stretch, but I never walked. I didn’t come here to walk. I came to run. That’s the
reason—the only reason—I flew all the way to the northern tip of Japan. No matter how slow I might
run, I wasn’t about to walk. That was the rule. Break one of my rules once, and I’m bound to break
many more. And if I’d done that, it would have been next to impossible to finish this race.
While I was enduring all this, around the forty-seventh mile I felt like I’d passed through something.
That’s what it felt like. Passed through is the only way I can express it. Like my body had passed
clean through a stone wall. At what exact point I felt like I’d made it through, I can’t recall, but
suddenly I noticed I was already on the other side. I was convinced I’d made it through. I don’t know
about the logic or the process or the method involved—I was simply convinced of the reality that I’d
passed through.