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In his review 'Inside the mind of a marathon runner' (Nature 454, 583–584; 2008), Andy Miah says he approaches the book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running from the perspective of the ethics of biotechnical enhancements. But the striking title of Haruki Murakami's work deserves further comment.

The title echoes that of one of the most important short-story collections in contemporary American literature, taken from one of the stories it contains: Raymond Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (Knopf, 1981). That story's themes include death, isolation, drinking and different types of love. Murakami's substitution of “running” for “love” speaks for itself, as does the insularity evoked by moving from “we” to “I”.

This shift towards isolation is also picked up in Alan Sillitoe's poignant The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (W. H. Allen, 1959): a phrase that has become better known than the powerful short story that evoked it.

Carver himself even fits into Miah's theme of biotechnical enhancements. Some say he did his best work while drinking and smoking, which may have helped ease him into his writing in much the same way as Murakami's coating of Vaseline helped him slip into his triathlon wetsuit.

The term 'enhancement' could also be applied to the work of the aggressive editor Gordon Lish, who in many ways shaped Carver's unique voice. It was Lish who coined the reflective 'What We Talk About When We Talk About Love', an improvement over the story's original and less evocative title 'Beginners'.

Whether we are talking about writing, sport or science, some enhancements pay off.