What makes a runner — who hits the pavement day after day, mile after mile — keep going? There is a myth that Tibetan monks run 300 miles in 30 hours by fixating on a distant object and repeating a mantra with each footfall. Last year’s New York City Marathon winner, Paula Radcliffe, says that she makes it through a tough race by counting her steps. For the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, who describes his decades-long dependency on long-distance running in his new memoir, “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running” (Knopf, 180 pages, $21), the secret is consistency: running every day no matter how he feels, pacing himself, and pop music — the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Gorillaz, Beck, Creedence Clearwater Revival — which he loads, with great care, onto a Walkman.