I’ve recently been raving about Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run; this extended love letter to the art of running can inspire even the most lackadaisical runner to strap on a pair of shoes and get on the trail because of how strongly the author expresses the conviction that, well, we’re born to run [1]. More generally, and apart from mere inspirational purposes, the writing-about-running genre has intrigued me of late because of the poetry implicit in any description of such an awesome (in its literal sense) endeavor as long-distance running, where pushing bodily limits, testing human will, and forcing unyielding dedication upon oneself are routine and necessary [2].

So it’s no surprise that I spared little hesitation in reading John L. Parker’s Once a Runner as soon as I heard about it. The fiction, apparently a cult classic and required reading among competitive runners, is hailed by Runner’s World as “the best novel about running ever written”, and does not disappoint [3]. This page-long excerpt shares the competitive runner’s perspective, that of someone who doesn’t run because of any deeper meaning to be found in the act, but rather because it’s the only meaning there is. Spiritual, material, worldly aspirations dissolved and manifested in pursuit of physical perfection— beautiful. 

“Cassidy sought no euphoric interludes. They came, when they did, quite naturally and he was content to enjoy them privately. He ran not for crypto-religious reasons, but to win races, to cover ground fast. Not only to be better than his fellows, but better than himself. To be faster by a tenth of a second, by an inch, by two feet or two yards, than he had been the week or year before. He sought to conquer the physical limitations placed upon him by a three-dimensional world (and if Time is the fourth dimension, that too was his province). If he could conquer the weakness, the cowardice in himself, he would not worry about the rest; it would come. Training was a rite of purification; from it came speed, strength. Racing was a rite of death; from it came knowledge. Such rites demand, if they are to be meaningful at all, a certain amount of time spent precisely on the Red Line, where you can lean over the manicured putting green at the edge of the precipice and see exactly nothing.

Anything else that comes out of that process was by-product. Certain compliments and observations made him uneasy; he explained that he was just a runner; an athlete, really, with an absurdly difficult task. He was not a health nut, was not out to mold himself a stylishly slim body. He did not live on nuts and berries; if the furnace was hot enough, anything would burn, even Big Macs. He listened carefully to his body and heeded strange requests. Like a pregnant woman, he sometimes sought artichoke hearts, pickled beets, smoked oysters. His daily toil was arduous; satisfying on the whole, but not the bounding, joyous nature romp described in the magazines. Other runners, real runners, understood it quite well.

Quenton Cassidy knew what the mystic-runners, the joggers, the runner-poets, the Zen runners, and others of their ilk were talking about. But he also knew that their euphoric selves were generally nowhere to be seen on dark, rainy mornings. They primarily wanted to talk it, not do it. Cassidy very early on understood that a true runner ran even when he didn’t feel like it, and raced when he was supposed to, without excuses and with nothing held back. He ran to win, would die in the process if necessary, and was unimpressed by those who disavowed such a base motivation. You are not allowed to renounce that which you never possessed, he thought.

The true competitive runner, simmering in his own existential juices, endured his melancholia the only way he know how: gently, together with those few others who also endured it, yet very much alone. He ran because it grounded him in basics. There was both life and death in it; it was unadulterated by media hype, trivial cares, political meddling. He suspected it kept him from that most real variety of schizophrenia that the republic was then sprouting like mushrooms on a stump.

Running to him was real; the way he did it the realest thing he knew. It was all joy and woe, hard as diamond; it made him weary beyond comprehension. But it also made him free.”

1. The title says so!

2. It’s why I express profuse admiration for all high-caliber athletes in general; endurance athletes, though, have it the roughest and are the ones that truly get to confront the big questions of Human Body and Spirit.

3. With a blurb like that, how could it? Trust the blurb.

And Bolaño’s magnificent so far:

“The second conversation, radically longer than the first, was a conversation between friends doing their best to clear up any murky points they might have overlooked, a conversation that refused to become technical or logistical and instead touched on subjects connected only tenuously to Norton, subjects that had nothing to do with surges of emotion, subjects easy to broach and then drop when they wished to return to the main subject, Liz Norton, whom, by the time the second call was nearing its close, both had recognized not as the Fury who destroyed their friendship, black clad with bloodstained wings, nor as Hecate, who began as an au pair, caring for her children, and ended up learning witchcraft and turning herself into an animal, but as the angel who had fortified their friendship, forcibly shown them what they’d known all along, what they’d assumed all along, which was that they were civilized beings, beings capable of noble sentiments, not two dumb beasts debased by routine and regular sedentary work, no, that night Pelletier and Espinoza discovered that they were generous, so generous that if they’d been together they’d have felt the need to go out and celebrate, dazzled by the shine of their own virtue, a shine that might not last (since virtue, once recognized in a flash, has no shine and makes its home in a dark cave amid cave dwellers, some dangerous indeed), and for lack of celebration or revelry they hailed this virtue with an unspoken promise of eternal friendship, and sealed the vow, after they hung up their respective phones in their respective apartments crammed with books, by sipping whiskey with supreme slowness and watching the night outside their windows, maybe seeking unconsciously what the Swabian had sought outside the widow’s window in vain.”

41 pages in, and I’m in for a wild ride.

First of all, sorry for the extensive footnotes in this post (and likely throughout my writing). I’m a huge David Foster Wallace fan and I think I understand his use of the footnote/endnote tool as a way to relate tangential points without interrupting the flow of the primary exposition. Anyways, to the meat of this post.

Anyone who knows me knows that I’m a passionate, die-hard fan of NBA basketball, to the extent that I know or care little about other sports. I’m a fan of the technique, the athleticism, and the artwork that are all inherent in such a high-skill environment (1).

So, when it came time for me to pick a team to root for during the Cup (which I’m going to with 5 of my best buddies from high school, something I’m infinitely excited about), I was initially wary. A die-hard fan like myself understands the issues related to team fandom, mostly concerning the concept of a “bandwagon” supporter who roots for whichever team is most likely to be successful, not a team that they truly care about and would support through thick and thin (2).

In thinking about who to support, I thought about my own love for basketball— why I love the sport, who I choose to root for, and how I relate to the game. I think sport is beautiful, and at its finest transcends a game into an art form (read some more of my thoughts about that here, when I quote Werner Herzog). I’m always partial to players that enhance this view— people like Kobe Bryant, Chris Paul, Pau Gasol, Steve Nash, Jason Kidd— who with their mastery of technique turn sports into something beautiful (3). I realized that I’ve subsconsciously rooted for Brazil the last couple of World Cups because of this— their flair for the game, their bravado, their willingness to experiment and have fun and just play beautifully. This is obviously a widely recognized fact— Nike’s last World Cup ad campaign revolved around promoting this style of play— Joga bonito— play beautiful. Watch one of these clips and see if you don’t feel like dancing or clapping your hands (seriously, watch them. They are awesome.). It means so much more than sports. It’s art.

And that is why I’m rooting for Brazil in the World Cup.

1. I firmly believe that basketball players are the most skilled athletes in terms of combination of athletic ability and talent. Perhaps I’m a little biased in this view considering I’ve played basketball since I was 8, but bear with me.

2. Picking a sports team is really like choosing a wife. It’s someone you love, whose flaws you acknowledge and choose to overlook or cope with, and decide to support no matter what the present circumstances are. Philandering and cheating are not acceptable.

3. It’s the same reason I root for Roger Federer whenever I watch tennis. It’s also why I will never quite love players like Lebron James or Rafael Nadal, who rely on their brute force and physical dominance to excel at the sport. Awesome in its own right, but never quite beautiful.

I just got done with the “demo day” of my yearlong senior design project for Systems Engineering at Penn, and figured I’d blog about it. 

Senior design is a yearlong project that everyone in the engineering school has to complete- students are split into teams and pick a topic to work on at the start of the year, and work on completing an engineering design in their relevant field of study that helps tackle the problem. The project essentially culminates in demo day, where each group presents their results with posterboards in front of panels of judges.

My systems project dealt with the realm of medical IT— more specifically the issue of electronic medical record systems (EMRs). EMRs are basically enterprise software systems that help digitize all medical records and billing information within a practice (patient history, past prescriptions, insurance information, etc.). There’s been a big push for hospitals and medical practices to digitize their records, because of the potential lowered costs due to higher efficiency, better workflows, and less prescription/billing errors. In light of this potential, the Obama administration has even offered a federal stimulus to all practices that adopt EMRs by 2016 as an incentive. So, there are numerous factors in place to bring about a big shift to universal adoption of electronic records within the medical industry. However, hospitals have been slow to adopt because of how fragmented and complicated the medical IT marketplace is, with over 200 vendors, little standardization of product features, and incredibly complex installation procedures. My team used this understanding to build a tool that helps medical doctors and practices pick which EMR product to install in their practice. 

We realized that for the shift to EMRs happen, there needed to be an open, information-heavy marketplace that was consumer-friendly. The market right now is basically controlled by the vendors- price information is hard to find unless you sit through sales demos, it’s tough to get reviews unless you hire consultants, and it’s hard to find which EMRs even fit your practice in the first place. We built a tool called EMRfindr that brings all of this information together in one place, and lets medical practices find which EMR is best for them based on their own practice’s characteristics (how many doctors, medical specialty, preference for cloud/local computing, etc.). A lot of the value here is simply in the data we collected, bringing together comprehensive information from disparate sources and making it publicly available and searchable. This wealth of information in one source is especially valuable because the key stakeholders in this scenario are medical professionals making the IT investment decision. They just don’t have the time or resources, while running a medical practice, to deal with a complex IT search process.

Check the tool out!* 

You can click around the site to learn more about the topic, and to see some of the methodology we used for data collection and analysis. 

We’re happy with the prototype we built in under a week, since it pretty easily demonstrates the clear value of such a tool. It would be cool if someone in the medical IT industry took note and attempted a similar project on a large scale with actual advanced data collection about different EMR vendors! For the EMR shift to happen, transparency needs to be the market norm.

*A good amount of time by a couple coding novices went into building that the last few days. My teammate Abhi coded the search engine, form, and results in SQL and PHP, while I did the design and wrote some HTML and basic CSS.

Not much to look at, but we’re pretty proud of our efforts making it in less than a week after extensive data collection! A new goal of mine is to get really good at web design.