Jiu Jitsu & Running

A consideration of Haruki Murakami's sports writing classic in relation to jiu jitsu

Despite being principally known for his novels like Norwegian Wood and Men Without Women Haruki Murakami also has the honour of writing a mainstay of “Best books about sport” lists - What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. It’s difficult to think of two sports that are dissimilar in so many ways as jiu jitsu and long distance running. Certainly, they seem to differ on most significant defining features: the basic equipment required, the kinds of location they can be practiced, the intensity needed in competition (unless talking about shorter distance events), whether physical contact with an opponent is allowed or whether there is even an opponent necessary in the first place.

And yet Murakami’s book has several interesting themes that might inspire a jiu jitsu practitioner to think about their sport in new ways.

Physical pain soothing emotional pain

I’ve said to people many times: ‘I find it really hard to do non-competitive workouts because I can’t make myself work through the pain. I can only push myself to my limit if someone is trying to strangle me’. What kind of strange logic is this? And yet a straw poll of people at my lunch time class yesterday seems to show that many people agree. Someone trying to kill them or break their limbs adds motivation to keep them working when they’re tired. But is that not just using one kind of pain to distract from another? I’m sure runners feel totally the opposite - they’d much rather choose the controllable pain of pushing themselves along the road, than have to deal with someone smothering them from mount and dripping sweat in their mouth.

But what if these variations of physical pain serve the same purpose? Murakami makes the beautiful point that physical pain can be soothing of emotional pain. And emotional pain is a condition for living. If we think about the countless little confrontations and disagreements we have in our day to day life, not to mention the big blow-out ones we have every now and again. Every time someone cuts us off in traffic, dislikes our work, says no to one of our propositions. These are all the price of being an individual with our own concerns and desires, in a world of other individuals with competing concerns. Each one causes a little scratch on our soul, not devastating, but a little prick of discomfort. And that can build up over time to something oppressive and heavy. Psychologist Albert Ellis argued when developing his therapeutic technique Rational Emotional Behaviour Therapy that a large source of our mental anguish comes from the mistaken and largely unconscious beliefs that success should be common and the world should oblige us in our pursuits. Even if we try to guard against this idea (and many of us struggle to do so), it can still sting when we find that the opposite is true – success is very hard to come by and the world does not oblige.

But when Murakami steps out for a run the emotional pain recedes and physical pain comes to replace it. Perhaps it’s easier to accept physical discomfort because it’s easier to see how it makes you stronger over time. Certainly by physically exhausting ourselves we also manage to draw the sting of what might be attacking our soul. British philosopher Andrew Edgar has stated that a key feature of sport, is the pain that it involves. And that rather than being a bug it is in fact one of the main things that makes it attractive to people, as pain has a clearer meaning for us in the context of the sport than other kinds of pain might have for us in other aspects of our lives. Seen alongside the ideas of Murakami and Beck we might posit that sport reminds us that life isn’t easy, struggle is necessary, fighting and losing is just as common, if not more common, than fighting and winning. And in this realisation, made through physical activity, is a comfort that carries over into the rest of our life.

This is a sentiment I think most of us would clearly recognise in jiu jitsu – where all of the world’s unyieldingness is embodied in an opponent who is doing everything he or she can to control you and make you submit. Winning in this context is joyful. But even losing, while frustrating sometimes, can be liberating and reassuring.

Rules

One of Murakami’s unique approaches to running is the setting of rules for himself while on a run – the most important of which is to not allow himself to walk ever. On the occasional ultra marathon he allows himself to stop completely and stretch. But if he’s running, he’s running, not walking. Walking would be a kind of betrayal of the spirit of going running. I find this extremely difficult to abide by personally. Again, I really struggle to push myself physically without some kind of extra competition, preferably in the form of an aggressive opponent.

Jiu jitsu is totally different from running in this respect. When you have to tap there is no decision or rule to follow, other than you have to tap. To stop dying or having a limb ripped up. But perhaps we could learn something from this runner’s approach. I’ve been tempted to give up on occasion, I’ve felt the hopelessness of continuing to fight when I’m well down on points and I can taste the cold beer that’s waiting for me if I just tap. At the World Master’s in Las Vegas last year, my opponent attempted a smother choke on me while up 8 points and with one minute left on the clock. I knew I was beaten, I could hardly breathe through his sweaty gi and I wanted to go home. But the choke wasn’t quite on. So how could I live with myself if I tapped? The issue in jiu jitsu is that giving up or pushing through the pain is not as visible as it is in running. How do we hold ourselves to account and force ourselves to distinguish between yielding to a stronger opponent and giving up because of our own weakness? This will perhaps be a personal battle but we should try and live my Murakami’s rule – if you’re going for a run, don’t walk.

Aging

The final theme in the book is that of continuing to practice sport with an aging body. In the foreword Murakami says that he finds it a bit uncouth or coarse for someone to talk all the time about what they do to keep fit. I think I understand what he means - people talking about their exercise routine all the time is quite boring. But if you do something physical on a regular basis over a long period of time, you can start to learn something quite profound about yourself, and that’s much more interesting to talk about. Any action, if you repeat it over and over again for long enough, becomes meditative. And that is equally true of jiu jitsu as it is of running.

Murakami talks of the early years of running when he felt his body becoming stronger and fitter. Then how there was a time when he was consistently running marathons in around three and a half hours, even if he hadn’t trained so hard. Then at a certain age he found that his times were slipping and he couldn’t do anything to get them back to where they were.

We all come to jiu jitsu at different times in our lives. Some people will be young and agile and get to see themselves physically blossom as their jiu jitsu knowledge is also becoming strong, while some be already well passed their athletic prime when they first step on the mat. Some people will have to overcome serious injury or having a baby along the way. But everyone will experience some change to their body and their mind as they practice this sport. This change will be both in our athleticism, our strength and speed, which might improve for a while and then gradually decline. But it will also be our mind muscle connection to our body, our coordination – our physicality, by which I mean our sense of fully inhabiting our bodies, where our bodies respond exactly to the movements that we intend for them. And with this comes our ability to execute techniques with precision. These latter attributes may not decline as much or at all, and may even continue to improve for as long as we can practice. And certainly our knowledge of jiu jitsu technique and strategy can continue to improve as we age. This sets us into an interesting relationship with jiu jitsu and time – where some attributes may be improving while others declining and we have to manage that process through our attitudes and our training practices.

For this reason, though everyone will have their own journey, what unites them all is that if someone trains for more than a few years, they will see their relationship to the sport and their bodies change gradually. And that can occasion deeper insights into life and aging. Eventually seeing my body start to age and weaken on the mats against younger, faster opponents, injuries lingering, even as my technical knowledge improved, was the thing in my life over all others that made me confront the realities of growing older. But, though painful in some ways, it also had unexpected delights. Being able to tell a story of your life that wasn’t just the usual set of family and work milestones, but also included a more physical and personal manifestation of the passing of time, feels very important. This is a more joyful story that the one that a lot of people have – that they took their body for granted until at a certain age things started to go wrong. Yes, it’s a story that includes pain, but it faces that pain head on, accepts it and uses it to enhance other areas of life.