I run. Do you?
How I started running.
What helped me build and maintain an active lifestyle.
Why you must too.
From “I’ll do it tomorrow”, to “can we stop now” and to finally running across that finish line with a clenched fist and arms raised high, it’s the same cycle every time I go out for a run. I’m confident it is a lot similar to many of you too, irrespective of whether you are a professional athlete, is someone who pulls out their running shoes once in a blue moon or is somewhere in between. If you don’t run at all though, then I do hope my story can help you a little to finally lace up.
I was someone who ran only during sports trials in school every year (yes trials, never made it to the House team for the Sports day). By no means am I the fittest lad around even now, but I know I’ve come a long way from what I was half a decade back. Not just physically but also mentally because of running. In the process I do get to stay in shape, but running definitely does so much more than help lose weight. Certainly, there’s also a pinch of pride today that running is a constant part of who I am.
Having been brought up in a small town in Kerala, I wasn’t raised with a culture of exercise around me. Exercise when I was a school boy either meant P.T. classes once a week where half the time was spent in queueing up in straight lines and staying silent till we reached the school playground to do not all that exciting exercise drills that involved moving your arms and legs around like soldiers in a march past or the occasional games of Kho Kho or basketball. It was in college though, where I met students who had come from different parts of the country from whom I learned that there was a lot of excitement and purpose in adding exercise and sport to one’s lifestyle.
I started running regularly with a friend, Rohith in the last year of college. A partner in the initial stages of building any new routine made habit installation so much easier than if I were to do it alone. The fact that we both knew that we could do more with our fitness and a mutual sense of accountability to our promise to wake each other up and get the run in to start our day, ensured that we weren’t going to skip our runs. Thus began that routine of starting the day sweating.
Once I left college and joined the corporate world having had a taste of the runner lifestyle, I knew that ‘to exercise’ was always the better decision than ‘to Netflix’. To be fair, most of us want to go out there and exercise as well. But many will tell the world that they have no time for anything other than their own routine. I too used to think the same for the longest time until I realised that I just could not do the same routine staring at computer screens every day and call it life.
So I decided to run. Again.
I told myself that I’d run often. I also challenged myself to run fast. But like most plans, to actually go out and get it done is much harder than what we imagine in the comfort of our cosy living rooms.
I found that 5 kilometre and 10 kilometre races were held often in different parts of my new city, Mumbai. So I thought that signing up for these would give me a milestone to train for. It helped that I had family in Mumbai who used to run these races. They stayed very close to a lake with a 3 kilometre trail around it where they often used to go jogging. I started running with them and that helped me get back to my routine and build a lot more stamina than I ever had and also get a little faster with every run around that lake, with trees roofing my way almost the entire stretch of that trail.
I ran my first 10K in January 2018. The number of people who showed up early morning when most others in the country was still asleep startled me. Almost none of the thousands who showed up at the start line waiting for the race to start were drowsy, even though their digital watches had not even ticked over 5 AM yet. From 7 year old girls to 80 year old grand dads, the excitement was omnipresent without any discrimination of gender, caste, wealth or religion.
I too had been waiting for race day since the time I signed up for the race couple of months back. I watched YouTube videos of pros guiding and giving tips on how to pace the run, read articles on what to eat and drink and how to train leading up to the race. Once the race began, I started out with a steady pace sneaking past other runners while still soaking in the ecstasy of the environment. I maintained my pace till the halfway mark leaving a majority of the crowd behind. By now the muscles had started to get weary and the voices in my head questioned why I was doing this to my body and kept telling me to stop. But I kept reminding myself that I can get through it like so many others already have and the thought of the smile on my face as I cross over that finish line helped me maintain my pace and earn the first of my many race medals.
Though Rohith moved to another continent, he still sends me screenshots of every 5K or 10K he runs there. Even today, we keep that accountability to each other alive talking fitness over WhatsApp and helping each other to clock faster times on our next run by taking turns in pushing the benchmark that we set for ourselves on either part of the world.
I’m going to head out for my run now. Before I leave, I’d reiterate that I’m not a Jay Shetty, Hima Das, Dwayne Johnson or Will Smith who all have led extra ordinary lives, fought and learned through life experiences and now wants to inspire the world to be better versions of themselves. You might dismiss them all saying that they’re gifted with extraordinary genetics or that they do it because it’s part of their job or that they are exceptions.
But me, I’m just someone like you, a boy who even had asthma growing up, for whom the better part of the first 20 years of his life revolved around speaking competitions, books, ICSE boards and entrance exams.
So, if I can run, often and fast. Then why can’t you?
