away the mind, and I’ll never write an original story again. Still, at this point it didn’t feel like my
mind was important. The mind just wasn’t that big a deal.
Usually when I approach the end of a marathon, all I want to do is get it over with, and finish the
race as soon as possible. That’s all I can think of. But as I drew near the end of this ultramarathon, I
wasn’t really thinking about this. The end of the race is just a temporary marker without much
significance. It’s the same with our lives. Just because there’s an end doesn’t mean existence has
meaning. An end point is simply set up as a temporary marker, or perhaps as an indirect metaphor for
the fleeting nature of existence. It’s very philosophical—not that at this point I’m thinking how
philosophical it is. I just vaguely experience this idea, not with words, but as a physical sensation.
Even so, when I reached the finish line in Tokoro-cho, I felt very happy. I’m always happy when I
reach the finish line of a long-distance race, but this time it really struck me hard. I pumped my right fist
into the air. The time was 4:42 p.m. Eleven hours and forty-two minutes since the start of the race.For the first time in half a day I sat down and wiped off my sweat, drank some water, tugged off my
shoes, and, as the sun went down, carefully stretched my ankles. At this point a new feeling started to
well up in me—nothing as profound as a feeling of pride, but at least a certain sense of completion. A
personal feeling of happiness and relief that I had accepted something risky and still had the strength
to endure it. In this instance, relief outweighed happiness. It was like a tight knot inside me was
gradually loosening, a knot I’d never even realized, until then, was there.
Right after this race at Lake Saroma I found it hard to walk downstairs. My legs were wobbly and I
couldn’t support my body well, as if my knees were about to give out. I had to hold on to the railing to
walk down the stairs. After a few days, though, my legs recovered, and I could walk up and down the
stairs as usual. It’s clear that over many years my legs have grown used to long-distance running. The
real problem, as I mentioned before, turned out to be my hands. In order to make up for my tired leg
muscles, I’d vigorously pumped my hands back and forth. The day after the race my right wrist started
to hurt and turned red and swollen. I’d run a lot of marathons, but this was the first time it was my
arms, not my legs, that paid the greatest price.
Still, the most significant fallout from running the ultramarathon wasn’t physical but mental. What
I ended up with was a sense of lethargy, and before I knew it, I felt covered by a thin film, something
I’ve sinced dubbed runner’s blues. (Though the actual feeling of it was closer to a milky white.) After
this ultramarathon I lost the enthusiasm I’d always had for the act of running itself. Fatigue was a
factor, but that wasn’t the only reason. The desire to run wasn’t as clear as before. I don’t know why,
but it was undeniable: something had happened to me. Afterward, the amount of running I did, not to
mention the distances I ran, noticeably declined.
After this, I still followed my usual schedule of running one full marathon per year. You can’t
finish a marathon if you’re halfhearted about it, so I did a decent enough job of training, and did a
decent enough job of finishing the races. But this never went beyond the level of decent enough job.
It’s as if loosening that knot I’d never noticed before had slackened my interest along with it. It wasn’t