P.G. Wodehouse, Alan Furst, Zane Grey, Arturo Pérez-Reverte, to pluck a few random-ish names from the hat: that's the stuff. Undemanding, yet utterly satisfying, man-centric fiction. Laughs and/or action, snug in the shelter of a surely conceived narrative arc. Exquisitely executed literary comfort food. I know what I like when it comes to holiday reading.

So it follows that I know what I don't much like, too. Such as my one previous brush with Haruki Murakami. It was on a Mexican holiday with some nice-then, not-now, ex. I'd churned through all my paperbacks so, drawn by the Beatles reference, turned to her book Norwegian Wood and read. And read. And kept reading - in case something happened. But no. (Spoiler alert: this hugely glum student hangs about in glum locales pining after a glum girl who kills herself. He declares his love for the hot student he'd been too glum to pay attention to before - and that's it.)

It was about nostalgia, emptiness and that hilarious-only-in-retrospect time in your life, late adolescence, when you perceive your deprivations, especially self-inflicted ones, so acutely that you're blind to the fact that you're brooding away your best years, the years before your problems become real. Coming-of-age fiction for the unfulfilled. But I felt fine and I wanted entertainment: blood and guts, not Bildungsroman. I shifted weakly, contemplated the Caribbean and the tickle of sweat trickling over sun cream. Limply threw Norwegian Wood and its author on to the sand, out of my hammock, out of my life. Sayonara, Murakami, you tortuous downer.

But now, five years on and completely unexpectedly, Murakami has inspired me. I stumbled upon the excerpt while riffling through the latest New Yorker, home of the world's best cartoons. (Favourite in this issue: the drawing shows a bride and groom in a limo. He turns to her and says: “It didn't have to end like this.”) In the piece, headlined “The Running Novelist”, Murakami recounts how he began his career as a successful writer - which is quite interesting. But he also relates how, at the age of 33, he was going to seed a little. It was his lifestyle: he ran a jazz club (fantastic!) and smoked 60 cigarettes a day (horribly impressive). When he started to write more and lug fewer crates of Suntory into his club, the prone-to-plumpness Murakami really piled on the pounds. So he resolved to start running. “The more I ran,” he wrote, “the more my potential was revealed.”

At first it was hellish, but with time he managed longer and longer distances. His weight dropped, his muscles bulged. He stopped smoking, almost as an afterthought. He ate healthily, living off fish and vegetables, spurning rice and alcohol. In three ways the running helped to catalyse a sea-change in his life: it put him in prime physical shape; it ensured his transition from the short-term, battered-sausage and chips with lager on the side (with fag for afters) lifestyle of your twenties into a regimen befitting a more mature man; and it helped him to think more purely about the world around him. “Thirty three - that's how old I was then. Still young enough, though no longer a young man. The age that Jesus Christ died. The age that F.Scott Fitzgerald started to go downhill. It's an age that may be a kind of crossroads in life.”

Phew! I happen to be 33, too. And - leaving Christ and F. Scott Fitzgerald out of it, for now - I've been fretting that my mental outlook is that of a much younger, more irresponsible man. And that my physical condition is that of a much older, soon-to-be-decrepit one. I suck down a trifling 20 cigarettes a day to Murakami's 60. It's probably so few because at work I have to smoke outside, shuffling about like a striker waiting for scabs. At home I puff in the garden (although recently my fiancée complained that the smoke drifts into the house, so I walk up the road a while instead. To the pub.)

Anyway, this piece felt as if it was written for me to read, to take inspiration from. It was, I felt with a fuzzy rush of purpose, a sign. I resolved to go on my first run. Soonish. On the way home I picked up a copy of Men's Health. Perhaps it would gee me up still further, give me practical tips, that type of thing.

Are you one of the 240,000 people who buy this magazine? We deserve it, really. It's the same insidious beauty-myth bile from which women have had to annex their sanity for decades now. But instead of making its readers fret enviously after £1,000 handbags, “youthful” skin or “having it all”, the unit-shifting holy grail with which it mesmerises its readers is the six-pack.

By the time I lumbered down the stairs at Kilburn Tube station I'd become acutely conscious of my man-bag chafing against my spare tyre. Jesus Christ (let's bring him back into it): what chance had I of getting my “abs beach-ready for summer”? I'd be doomed to Men's Health hell, looking “like the fat kid who wears a T-shirt in the pool”. Sure, I could eat zebra (seriously) 24/7 and embark on a gruelling regimen of Bulgarian squats, but let's face it: I'll never have ripped pecs like David Gandy, the model who wears afterthought-underpants in the Dolce & Gabbana ad (the only thing guaranteed to make my female colleagues fall silent - if only momentarily). Who'd ever want to objectify me? I veered left into Alex Plaice for a battered sausage supper. Why the F. Scott Fitzgerald not?

That was on Friday. I recycled Men's Health, read The New Yorker again and yesterday evening slipped on my adidas and headed for my nearest good running spot. Wheezing like a wet accordion, I made it around Paddington cemetery twice and, yes (boom, boom!), it nearly killed me. But it felt good, too. So cheers, Haruki Murakami.

Times Recommends

• Treat Africans as part of the human jigsaw
• Too bitter a pill for me to swallow
• This Bill is a panic measure in a tarnished age