Anu Vaidyanathan was running one marathon after another, becoming a better triathlete. Wherever she travelled, people told her that she should write a book on her journey. She didn’t let that suggestion linger. “I thought a lot of people say that to a lot of people, and that’s that,” laughs Anu, in Hyderabad to promote her book ‘Anywhere But Home: Adventures in Endurance’ (Harper Collins; Rs. 350) which chronicles her adventures, triumphs and humbling moments as a triathlete.
The soft-spoken Anu holds a Ph.D in electrical engineering from UC Canterbury, founded PatNMarks, an intellectual property consulting firm, is the first Asian woman to have completed the Ultraman Canada and Ironman Canada. Three years ago, she thought it wouldn’t be a bad idea to write a book. “I was pregnant and had slowed down in my sport. I had a day job, but I wanted a challenge and the book seemed right,” shares Anu.
Anu had been writing journals and blogs, so a documentation of her journey existed. She had to collect them together and decide what had to go into her book. She didn’t want her book to be a “couch-to-5k training programme”. She had to find a distinct voice that didn’t make her look like a champion or a victim. “Many autobiographies are ghost written or completely about a sport. But sport is only a part of how I engage with life. I am someone’s daughter, wife and a mother,” she says.
When she began running in her hometown Bangalore, there were very few women runners. When she asked a coach permission to swim during general timings in a large pool, she was advised to do what good girls did — get married. Anu took the jibes on her chin, and continued to cycle, run and swim because sport was her way of reconnecting to a hometown that had changed drastically in the time she had been away in the US.
She also didn’t want to sound like a gender crusader. “The women in my family, be it my mother, grandmother or mother-in-law, have had minds of their own. They’ve gone ahead and done what they wanted to do and the men have championed them, standing by them at work and home. So for me, gender tussle wasn’t an issue,” says Anu.
The book gives a glimpse into her middle class family, the small town moorings of her parents and the lessons she’s learnt from them. She writes: ‘I learned early that people study hard because that is their only meal ticket. I was no exception to that rule’. Anu shined in academics, started her own company drawn by the idea that stemmed from her mother, and an early start to her day ensured she didn’t miss out on running or cycling.
The process of writing threw up challenges. “There are many ways in which you can recollect a marathon, either through the run statistics or what you go through during a run,” she says. Her initial drafts went through rewrites. “I wasn’t used to anyone correcting my sentences. All engineers are made to feel like they walk on water and Ph.Ds tend to be even more arrogant,” laughs Anu. As she wrote, she knew there would be different sets of readers. “A couple of days ago when I was talking to Hyderabad Runners, I felt I was among old friends. So the recollection was different,” she says.
Anu mentions slipping in cheeky references to Haruki Murakami and Lance Armstrong, “I like Murakami’s books; but I can’t help thinking why do we need a Japanese author to tell us about running? Similarly, we have a number of runners and cyclists in India, yet we only look up to global names like Lance Armstrong,” she signs off.
