What I think about while I'm cycling . . .

Just reading "Murakami's" "What I talk about when I talk about running" and enjoying it immensely.

I try and mix up my reading with a bit of fiction, biography, educational, swapping alternatively to keep the interest levels up.

Every so often a book gets read at just the right time, I've just finished Wilfred Thesiger's "Marsh Arabs", which although interesting I was looking forward to moving on and it was no reflection of the book itself. I just wasn't what I was needing to read at the time.

"What I talk about when I talk about running" is timed to perfection. Over the last 8 months I've been workingto regain my fitness I had in my younger years and I have just reached a point when I am happy to call myself fit.

Murakami covers his path to writing, through jazz bars etc and then I finds the running he takes up helps him adapt to his new career choice. Falling almost in line with my recent career change and my progress back to fitness.

I've always been a big adovocate of fit body, fit mind and feel I am getting back to where I was a few years back, with a new lease of life in my career I felt invigorated and passionate about work again, something I've not felt for years. Now with my fitness returning I am actually starting to feel years come off my age.

But the real interest I find with Murakami's account of his life is the solitude he seeks when running and how this has helped him. This is something I seek in both my running, cycling and when out in mountains in general. It's a defrag of my mental hard drive, a resorting of unnecessary information and filing into the depths of my mind, whilst at the same time running over items of interest that I have active in my mind that might develop into projects for the future.

My hat off to you for your "as it is" account Haruki, perhaps if your passing the Peak District you can drop in for a run, but don't expect me to say much.