What I Talk ABout When I Talk ABout Running

As someone who has been planning to start jogging since the better part of this year, I had been avoiding to read this book, lest it might bring about some guilt-trips. However, I finally sat with it last weekend, and finished it off in a day: it’s a small book, about 130-pages.

What I Talk ABout When I Talk ABout Running

Author: Haruki Murakami

Translated by:

Murakami is a “running writer”; he has been running at least 5-6 kms a day for more than last two decades. He is typically a long-distance runner and participates in at least one marathon a year.

The book is indeed based on running but goes beyond being limited to a journal where the author meticulously tracks his development from amateur to a pro. As Murakami puts it, it is a memoir centered on running.

He begins from his struggle to make the ends meet, setting up a coffee shop, his first forays into writing, the decision to shut the coffee shop and devote full time to writing. Then he delves into his modus operandi towards running, the preparations required for undertaking long-distance competitions, the fleeting thoughts that pass through a runner’s mind and the transformations that a runner’s body goes through over the period.

He draws some interesting parallels between running and writing. To succeed in writing, just as in running, the author (or the runner) should have clear priorities, focus to drive away distractions, and endurance to keep working at the process. Frankly, as Richard Feynman aptly remarked in Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman: “One can draw such parallels between any two subjects (for example, poetry and theoretical physics) and hence such analogies are not of much use”.

What really make the book worth a read, at least in my opinion, are Murakami’s observations about the nature and the people he comes across as he runs and his narratives of some of his more daring running adventures. It is a pleasure to read his description of his running the course of the actual Marathon (from Athens to Marathon) and it is equally scary to read his torturous journey in the Japan ultramarathon.

Throughout the book, Murakami comes across as an underdog, a tender yet a resolute person, someone with a never-say-die attitude.

The language of the book is ‘pretty simple’ and ‘sort of laid back’. Actually, these are the phrases that repeat themselves a bit too many times, but ‘as I mentioned before’, it is small book and one can put up with such trifles. 

This being the only book of Murakami I have read as yet, it is difficult to know whether he deliberately chose this style or whether it is trademark Murakami.

You should read this book, even though you may not be a runner…. In fact, especially if you are not a runner, because it might just nudge you to shake yourself a bit and move around!

The Checklist Manifesto: Atul Gawande

I first read about Dr Atul Gawande as one of this prominent Thinkers of this decade, as selected by the TIME Magazine. So on coming across a book by him at Crossword, Nagpur, it was hard to resist picking it up.

Leafing through a few pages, the matter seemed interesting, so took it home.

Later that evening, as wife prepared dinner, I began to read; and got so much hooked to it, that only put it down after finishing it around 2 AM... and the next day was a Monday.

Nevertheless, it was worth the time.

In this book, Atul Gawande, a surgeon with specialization in endocrine oncology, talks about checklists. He doesn't tell you how to create one, but why one is needed in the first place. The subject matter may seem mundane, but what makes the book exciting is the way in which the author describes how he arrived at the concept of using checklists in a critical field like surgery.

He begins by sharing with us some hair-raising stories of surgeries, in which the patients had a touch and go with death. He describes how The rising complexity and sophistication has made even the best minds sometimes miss out on critical factors. Surgery has become, in his own words, 'too much of an airplane for a single person to fly'.

In a quest to find a solution for a better success rate in surgeries, he meets people from diverse fields to know the secret of their efficiency: a builder, a master chef, a team of Wal-Mart staff that provided on-time relief to victims of Katrina hurricane, a key technical guy at Boeing.... and he discovers that each one of these uses something as basic as a checklist to ensure that things fall in place when they matter the most.

He learns of Keystone Initiative, a programmer started by Peter Provonost to get doctors and all those involved in health care serious about reducing avoidable errors.

Gawande then sets out to try and test his theory, using support of the World Health Organization (WHO). He and his research team involve hospitals from all over the world, New York, London, Delhi, Nairobi... in which the operating teams are required to adhere to a simple checklist during each surgery.

The results, he says, exceeded his own expectations.

It's a thrilling narrative, one that at once fills your mind with awe about complexity of the human body, and admiration for the people who have mastered at least a significant part of it. Gawande spares no one, including himself when he talks about the mistakes and errors that people make, mostly out of carelessness borne out of routine.

If you think checklists are a bore, then this book should make you re-think your position.

And if you are already a checklist enthusiast (like me!), then this book would give you a sense of having got it right in the first place!

[This article has two companion blog posts. Mind Matters  talks about my personal take on checklists, whereas ByteSpace takes a look at checklists from a technical writer's perspective.]