Murakami the Runner

A notable difference between Murakami and the other athlete-writers or writer-athletes, though, is that, for the Japanese novelist, pounding the pavement is more than something he does to fill the hours when he’s not busy pounding the keyboard. He considers it essential to his writing career, partly because it has given him the health and endurance to complete novel after novel, but in more subtle and far-reaching ways as well. Murakami fans (who number in their millions) will already be well aware of this connection between writing and running. He has written plenty of articles about it over the last two decades, and has been profiled in glossy magazines for runners, who seem to be tickled by the idea that such a celebrated author should share their world of cramps and aching knees. ... Running, Murakami explains, was a vocation that came to him not very long after his relatively late start as a writer.

Kevin Jackson in The Times looks at :

...a cult writer’s obsession with pounding the pavement when he’s not pounding the keyboard.

Murakami's new book is What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.