Runners World

As a starting block, this is no great shakes - I run, therefore I am. I love running. No, not from the beginning - in fact, if anything, I used to shirk from running and would often find myself out of breath after jogging just a few hundred metres. No, my love for running developed some months back when tipping the scales at 90kg with a pot belly and a spondylitis threat and a life really going nowhere, I decided to don the track pants and running shoes and literally hit the dirt. Yes, I do feel better, even if I don't really look that much better! It's an addiction now and for a man who's pushing close to 40 (okay, there's still half a decade to catch up!), running gives me a craving start to my day - so much so that the day I skip it, I am just not happening.

I marked my progress - starting with brisk walking and then graduating to slow jogs, limited to half a mile, then a mile and so on. Today, I run as long as I feel like, sometimes pushing myself beyond my known boundaries. Yes, there are times when I have given up after setting new personal endurance levels but something on the track beckons you the next day - at times teasing, at times encouraging but mostly, just a silent companion.

For the first time, I probably realised the practical implication of the phrase 'to compete with oneself' - pushing myself to cover more and more ground in less and less time. It's strange though how the mind refuses to blank out - filling itself up with inane and mundane thoughts. Sometimes, troubled by happenings or events of the previous day, I have found myself sapped of all energy while just starting to run - focussing your energies on as simple a task as running at times appears more difficult than ever imagined.

Yes, running for me has also become an escape for the daily tribulations that life thrusts upon us - escaping into my world where the only thing that matters is pounding the track for as long as possible. Of late, running has taken precedence over my work - it excites me and consumes me and I find myself spending more and more time on the track. I enjoy it, and sometimes it scares me how much I am enslaved by it. Work is a chore - it wasn't always so! I love writing, words for me are toys to tinker around with which is why I became a journalist, giving shape to stories that would as informative as interesting. Don't get me wrong, I still enjoy writing, but perhaps of my own accord rather than being thrust with some idea that I don't feel a connect with. Is it a midlife crisis that set in a wee bit early in my case or am I just craving for yet another change in my life - after chucking my well established career as a hotelier to become a scribe? As with other things in my life, I feel there are no answers - and I really envy people who find answers to their life's questions or can uncomplainingly accept what life gives them. Is it really that difficult, to get on with life on an as-is-where-is-basis or does that require some special talent which seems amiss in me? More questions! More, later...