Memoir of a Long Distance Runner

In his former life, Haruki Murakami used to be a  jazz club owner in Tokyo who smoked 60 cigarettes a day. In his current avatar, he is a passionate long distance runner who quit smoking when he started running. By his own confession, he runs 10k everyday, and a half marathon and a marathon every year. From New York City to Boston Marathon, he has done it all. Many times. And he once ran a soul-sapping 100k ultramarathon.

In 1982, he ran his first unofficial marathon, in the original marathon course in Greece in sweltering summer heat, from Athens to the eponymous village of Marathon. It was near this small village that a small army of Athenians defeated the invading Persian force of Darius in 490 BC (British author Tom Holland's 2005 book Persian Fire re-tells the story of this battle in a colorful style although his barely disguised contempt for orientals might put off some readers). On the busy straight highway that links Athens to Marathon, Murakami kept the count of roadkill: three dogs and eleven cats flattened against the bitumen.

Murakami also happens to be a world famous writer. Everyday, before hitting the road for his daily 10k run, he sits at his desk for four hours,  applying the same intensity, focus and perseverance to writing that he cultivates during long solitary runs. In fact, Murakami claims that he learned everything about writing from long distance running. These two key preoccupations of his life, writing and running, furnish the subject matter of his slim memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running published by Vintage in 2008.

I bought Murakami's memoir to seek inspiration and concrete advice on training, strategy, race-day tactics, etc, in order to rekindle my own flagging running motivation. On these counts, the book was a bit disappointing. Sure, Murakami takes readers through his elaborate preparations for 2005 New York City Marathon and triathlons held in Japan and Hawaii, and how he fared in them. However, they come between extended meditations on aging and its corrosive effects on creativity and physical abilities. After a certain age, just as the wellspring of creativity starts to dry up, so does distance running increasingly become an exercise in diminishing returns.

This is not to say that the book was not a pleasure to read. It is just that it dwells less on the mundane details of distance running and more on its metaphysics. If you are after a distance running training manual, you have to look somewhere else.

Watson Bay to Bondi Beach

On the day that 16-year-old Jessica Watson sailed back into the Sydney Harbour after her solo world round trip in her pink yacht, we walked from the Gap in Watson Bay to the famous Bondi Beach along the track that hugs the cliffs in Sydney's beautiful eastern suburbs. On the left, we could observe a flotilla of boats sailing out on the turquoise blue waters of the Tasman Sea to escort back Australia's latest teen hero. On the right, the Sydney Harbour was teeming with more watercraft.

Along the track from the Gap to the Lighthouse Reserve and further down in Dover Heights, walkers and tourists, some of them with binoculars, were peering out to the sea at a distant cluster of  boats,  which had circled a seemingly stationary pink speck that we surmised was Jessica's yacht. During the whole time that the cluster was in our field of vision, it did not seem to move an inch.

The Watson Bay to Bondi Beach walk, along with Manly to the Spit and Bondi to Clovelly walks, must rank among Sydney's three most beautiful walks. The trail itself is easy with no sharp elevations, and is less than nine kilometers long. At the Bondi Beach, instead of hopping onto a Sydney bus, we decided to keep pushing on foot along Bondi Road to the nearest train station at Bondi Junction, notching up another couple of kilometers.

To get to Watson Bay, buy a return train ticket from your nearest train station to Bondi Beach, get off at Edge Cliff station and catch 324 or 325 bus from Stand C to Watson Bay. The bus ride takes around half an hour.  You can use the train ticket to catch a bus from Bondi Beach to Bondi Junction.

I took a few pictures with my old, automatic Sony DSC-W70 along the way, which you can see below.

[gallery link="file" columns="6" orderby="ID"]

Three Cheers To the Old Champion

With the successful defense of his second world title against the formidable Bulgarian GM Veselin Topalov earlier this month, Indian GM Vishwanathan Anand has again proved himself to be one of the greatest chess players of his era. The match went down to the wire, with both GMs tied at 5.5 with one game to play. In the final game, Anand, disadvantaged with Black pieces, still prevailed over his illustrious opponent.

[caption id="attachment_351" align="alignright" width="297" caption="Anand contemplates the position on the board."][/caption]

Anand was a childhood hero of mine. After he became the FIDE world junior champion in 1987, I think it was the Indian sports magazine, Sports Stars, that shipped with a centerfold of a youthful, bespectacled Anand staring intensely at a chess board. That image adorned the wall of my bedroom and fueled my own youthful, quixotic dreams of becoming a GM.

In a sense, Anand carried the hopes of all the youth from the developing world but specifically from South Asia. The fact that India is today poised not only as a rising economic but also a chess powerhouse owes a lot to Anand's spectacular exploits at the highest levels of chess. He has inspired an entire generation of chess players in India and South Asia. The only other Indian chess player to make his mark at international level before was Mir Sultan Khan (1905 - 1966), who won the prestigious British Championship three times between 1929 and 1933 before his promising career was cut short to attend to his duties in the service of an Indian prince.

When Anand first won the FIDE world chess championship in 2000, he became only the second person to wear the crown who was not of Russian or former Soviet background since 1937. The other person was the mercurial American GM Bobby Fischer, who, in a highly charged Cold War superpower theatrics of 1972, defeated the then world champion Boris Spassky of the USSR in Reykjavik, Iceland.

What was astonishing about Anand's meteoric rise was the suddenness with which he appeared out of seemingly nowhere to take the chess world by storm. Although the birthplace of chess, India did not have the state-backed chess patronage system of the USSR, which marketed the post-WW II global dominance of its chess players as the validation of its ideology, or a vibrant community of grandmasters, theorists, writers, supporters and clubs to match those in the US and Britain. When he attained the rank of grandmaster in 1988 at the age of 18, it was the first for his country.

One of the crowd-pleasing features of Anand's style is the speed with which he makes his moves. This has served him well in shorter formats of the game as well as in the classical format, where he almost never runs into time troubles. Imagine Sachin Tendulkar and Cameron White, unrivaled masters of Test and Twenty20 cricket, respectively, rolled into one. This capacity for lightning fast thinking earned Anand the nickname of 'speed demon' early in his career.

A new brat pack of chess superstars led by the 19-year-old Norwegian GM Magnus Carlsen, who became a GM at the age of 13, is snapping at the heels of Anand and his generation of grandmasters. In the next world championship cycle in 2012, Anand will face players who grew up on a diet of computer chess. It will be interesting to see if this new breed of players will be able to topple the last of the pre-Internet generation of grandmasters who still rule chess.

Reading Best Australian Essays: An Annual Rite

Reading Black Inc. anthology of best Australian essays of the year has become something of an annual rite for my readerly self. Edited by a well-known published writer, the anthology showcases essays that meet three criteria.

Firstly, the essays have to satisfy the standards set by the editor, which could include parameters such as currency and relevance to contemporary debates and issues, literary and aesthetic merits, and whatever else the particular  idiosyncrasies of the editor dictates. Secondly, the writers have to be Australians and/or the essays have to engage Australian topics. Lastly, the essays have to have been published in the previous calendar year.

Having found last year's offering, The Best Australian Essays 2008, which was edited by David Marr, a bit disappointing, I bought this year's collection with a degree of reservations. I need not have worried. So far, the essays, which range far and wide just as Black Inc. promises, have succeeded to 'entertain, inspire and provoke'.

I have been reading the essays in random order (surely, an oxymoron), and two essays that have so far stood out are Richard Castles' Death Duties and Robert Dessaix's The Grand Illusion. In the former, Castles recounts the year when he worked in the grandiosely named Transfer Response Unit but which the author liked to think of as a 'taxi service for the already departed'. In unadorned terms, the job involved collecting dead bodies or body parts from homes, hospitals, nursing homes and crash sites whenever the coroner wanted to examine the bodies.

Castles observes that 'death could be beautiful', especially when old folks died in nursing homes. However, "Like all things in life, death can be done in a variety of bizarre and often messy ways". And, yes, people die during sex, he informs helpfully from his macabre experience.

The writer describes his first body pick-up memorably. A gung-ho homicide detective greets him and has a dig at him for his inexperience. He writes: "I simply told him that he was right, that this was my first time. As I walked through the door, I caught first glimpse of the body in situ. I never got used to the jolt of those moments. A dead body is always out of place: an interruption in the picture; a spectre; a mistake."

In a culture where death is sanitized, where most people have never seen a dead body, Castles' essay confronts readers with the pervasiveness of death, its finality and  implacability, the stark reality that it is always lurking nearby in the shadows, just below our consciousness.

[caption id="attachment_344" align="alignright" width="105" caption="Robyn Davidson, editor of The Best Australian Essays 2009. Picture Courtesy of Black Inc."][/caption]

Dessaix's essay The Grand Illusion sifts through the travel industry hype and hyperbole to re-define the notion of a perfect getaway, in itself a quaint Victorian notion that became a 20th century mass consumer craze just like MacDonald's thanks to the swelling of the middle class rank in the developed countries.

For Dessaix, who, among others, authored Twilight of Love: Travels with Turgenev (2004), the perfect holiday destination is not tourist-infested Bali but the "grubby little Tozeur on the edge of the Sahara in Tunisia's south, however, where there's nothing to see and nothing ever happens" but where "I feel dense with wakefulness".

"In Tozeur, in the labyrinth of the old town, lost amongst the endless palms, or just loitering with intent outside a carpet shop at night, when the town springs to life, I find myself very interesting indeed."

The central contention of this essay is that modern travel is a form of escape from our own bored, satiated selves to places where we find ourselves interesting again. This may not necessarily happen in luxury hotels and resorts where we end up drinking the same cocktails and watching the same silly sitcoms as at home.

"The antidote to boredom lies not in excitement, amazement, unparalleled vistas or repose in paradise, but in being woken up to our own inner complexity, our density, and befriending it," Dessaix writes. He cheekily suggests that such inner awakenings could take place even in, wait for it, Dubai, the new Mecca of conspicuous consumerism, for "Good travelling depends not on the travel, but on the traveller."