After that, I didn’t have to think anymore. Or, more precisely, there wasn’t the need to try to
consciously think about not thinking. All I had to do was go with the flow and I’d get there
automatically. If I gave myself up to it, some sort of power would naturally push me forward.
Run this long, and of course it’s going to be exhausting. But at this point being tired wasn’t a big
issue. By this time exhaustion was the status quo. My muscles were no longer a seething
Revolutionary Tribunal and seemed to have given up on complaining. Nobody pounded the table
anymore, nobody threw their cups. My muscles silently accepted this exhaustion now as a historical
inevitability, an ineluctable outcome of the revolution. I had been transformed into a being on
autopilot, whose sole purpose was to rhythmically swing his arms back and forth, move his legs
forward one step at a time. I didn’t think about anything. I didn’t feel anything. I realized all of a
sudden that even physical pain had all but vanished. Or maybe it was shoved into some unseen corner,
like some ugly furniture you can’t get rid of.
In this state, after I’d passed through this unseen barrier, I started passing a lot of other runners.
Just after I crossed the checkpoint near forty-seven miles, which you had to reach in under eight hours
and forty-five minutes or be disqualified, many other runners, unlike me, began to slow down, some
even giving up running and starting to walk. From that point to the finish line I must have passed
about two hundred. At least I counted up to two hundred. Only once or twice did somebody else pass
me from behind. I could count the number of runners I’d passed, because I didn’t have anything else
to do. I was in the midst of deep exhaustion that I’d totally accepted, and the reality was that I was
still able to continue running, and for me there was nothing more I could ask of the world.
Since I was on autopilot, if someone had told me to keep on running I might well have run beyond sixty-
two miles. It’s weird, but at the end I hardly knew who I was or what I was doing. This should have
been a very alarming feeling, but it didn’t feel that way. By then running had entered the realm of the
metaphysical. First there came the action of running, and accompanying it there was this entity known as
me. I run; therefore I am.
And this feeling grew particularly strong as I entered the last part of the course, the Natural Flower
Garden on the long, long peninsula. It’s a kind of meditative, contemplative stretch. The scenery along
the coast is beautiful, and the scent of the Sea of Okhotsk wafted over me. Evening had come on (we’d
started early in the morning), and the air had a special clarity to it. I could also smell the deep grass of
the beginning of summer. I saw a few foxes, too, gathered in a field. They looked at us runners
curiously. Thick, meaningful clouds, like something out of a nineteenth-century British landscape
painting, covered the sky. There was no wind at all. Many of the other runners around me were just
silently trudging toward the finish line. Being among them gave me a quiet sense of happiness.
Breathe in, breathe out. My breath didn’t seem ragged at all. The air calmly went inside me and then
went out. My silent heart expanded and contracted, over and over, at a fixed rate. Like the bellows of a
worker, my lungs faithfully brought fresh oxygen into my body. I could sense all these organs
working, and distinguish each and every sound they made. Everything was working just fine. People
lining the road cheered us on, saying, “Hang in there! You’re almost there!” Like the crystalline air,
their shouts went right through me. Their voices passed clean through me to the other side.
I’m me, and at the same time not me. That’s what it felt like. A very still, quiet feeling. The mind
wasn’t so important. Of course, as a novelist I know that my mind is critical to doing my job. Take