The Quiet Stride of Building
Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running isn’t about speed or self-optimization—it’s about rhythm, stamina, and presence. Like indie building, it’s a long game: you show up daily, move forward steadily, and let the practice itself become the reward.
It begins with the cadence of footsteps.
The morning air—steady, rhythmic, relentless.
No music, no metrics—just quiet rhythm and breath syncing with the ground. That’s how it begins. Not with ambition, but presence. Not to win, but to show up. In What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Haruki Murakami doesn’t pitch running as self-improvement or fitness. He frames it as something truer: a daily practice of becoming.
Running, for him, isn’t about pace or progress charts. It’s ritual. From quiet streets in Tokyo to races in distant cities, he runs the same way he writes—alone, consistently, without shortcuts. Sweat as punctuation. Solitude as syntax. Each run is a loop back to self, a clearing-out before he returns to the page. There’s no secret, just repetition. Just rhythm. Just doing the thing.
And that part feels familiar.
Marc Lou recently tweeted about running 4 kilometers after hitting $4,000 MRR. Not for health. Not for followers. Just because the motion matched the moment. A quiet nod to the work. Because when you’re building as an indie hacker, shipping tiny wins day by day, sometimes the most honest way to mark a milestone isn’t a thread or a revenue screenshot—it’s movement. A run that doesn’t ask for applause. Just breath and motion and momentum.
For makers, these rituals matter. Not because they’re efficient. Because they’re grounding.
Murakami’s path from sporadic jogs to marathons mirrors what it feels like to build a product from scratch. Early days? You sprint. Launch fast. Hack together v1 and duct tape bugs as they pop up. You’re fueled by anxiety, caffeine, and tweets. But like Murakami pushing past his early races, there comes a shift. From speed to stamina. From urgent to steady. You learn to hold back. Not because you’re slowing down—but because you finally know how long the road really is.
And that shift? That’s where you find durability.
You see it in Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s flow: deep work sprints bookended by quiet runs. Not performance. Reset. She isn’t chasing PRs—she’s guarding focus. Or Pieter Levels, who talks about running like he talks about building: showing up, sweating it out, keeping clarity high and friction low. For both, motion clears the mental clutter that no productivity app can.
This is the same muscle Murakami trains. And not just physically. His reflections on aging—on running slower, breathing softer, listening more—land hard if you’ve been shipping for years. He doesn’t frame time as loss. He calls it transformation. He doesn’t mourn the sprint—he honors the long game. And that hits different when you’ve built a dozen projects, seen half of them stall, and are finally learning to pace your ambition like you pace your steps.
There’s no grand finale here. No punchline or secret growth strategy.
Just the simple idea that running—like building—starts the same way every day. You lace up. You show up. You move forward. Not because you have to. Because it’s the only honest way to keep going.
That’s what Murakami reminds us. That creativity isn’t a spark. It’s a stride. That the work gets easier—not because you get better—but because you stop needing it to be anything other than what it is: a quiet act of becoming. Again. And again. And again.