Learning to Run

“Run as fast as I can, to the middle of nowhere” sings Pink in my headphones and I get the right boost to stop trotting and run the next few meters with new-found energy and enthusiasm. While Pink sings about her estranged love, I plead the tarmac to show me some love and stop being so hard on my legs.

Getting right to the point: I want to run. I want to run because I want to lose all that excess body fat I have piled on since high school. I was a lean kid till the end of eleventh grade but not so much thereafter. What added on to my weight was a combination of undesirable factors and my own stupidity.

I loved dancing ever since I was a kid but had never taken it up for learning the classical or the non-classical forms, primarily due to the lack of classes in and around my neighborhood. When an opportunity showed up in the eleventh grade, a mile away from my house, I immediately jumped at it. My mother was initially apprehensive and cautioned me that beginning the classes meant that I would have to keep at it as the chances of becoming fat post stopping a physical activity are generally high. She also recounted the story of another friend of mine who after discontinuing dance classes had indeed put on weight.

Paying no heed to her, I walked two miles to and fro, four times a week, to dance to the tunes of ‘thai-hath-thai-hee’. That one hour I spent learning dance (Bharathantyam) was the best part of my day. Sadly though, the evenings spent joyfully dancing seemed to bear heavy on me as the academic year wore on. The workload piled higher and the beginning of twelfth grade and increased coursework for the board exams loomed large on the horizon.

The joyful evenings turned exhaustive as after a tiring day at school, walking a mile away to dance started to feel like a burden rather than a joy. This coupled with my driving-phobic parents and their denial of providing me with a two-wheeler made sure that I started to grow weary of dance classes and when things got really hectic, I stopped them altogether. A year and no ‘physical activity’ later, I had put on weight, more so, on the lower part of my body and my mother’s fears, to her disappointment, did indeed come true.

Fast forward to now and I have really felt the need to slim down my lower body by exercising and eating right. I had been to the gym during under graduation and lost quite a bit of the weight that came from the sedentary lifestyle post dance classes and knew from there that running was the best cardio workout to lose the pounds and get lean. And so, in the last month of the previous year, I got real serious about starting to run to lose the excess percentage of body fat that I was carrying around.

The idea was good and the determination, rock steady. The only thing lacking was a good stamina on my part. I have never been active as far as sports are concerned and have always suffered from a lack of good stamina. The last time I ran was during a relay competition, when I was roped in forcefully due to the lack of girls representing the house I belonged to in school, and I had made a spectacular fool of myself then, running to the finish line well after the event was declared complete.

With low stamina in tow, I turned to the World Wide Web for inspiration. A few clicks after, Google was telling me, to my surprise, that people have indeed gone from being completely inactive for most part of their lives to running half and full marathons by steady training. My searches online led me to this very popular program called Couch-to-5K (C25K) which makes it possible for people like me to become runners through a gradual and steady amount of training.

Couch-to-5K is a program that involves nine weeks of workout at the end of which one will be able to run a 5K with ease. Each week consists of three workouts; each week consisting of alternating periods of running and walking for a total of thirty minutes. As the weeks increase, the walking intervals become shorter and running ones become longer, thus making your body adapt and learn to run continually.

I have read great success stories of people who have followed the C25K and want to make one out of my efforts too. It is not an easy program for complete beginners like me and will generally take more than the stipulated nine weeks for one to really run a 5K completely. There are apps on both the Android and Windows platforms that prompt the user about the intervals and are must-haves as they let you play music in the background.

I am currently in the fourth week of the C25K and nursing some injured shins. I have come to know that injuries will abound but rest, icing and continued efforts will make them go away. I believe that in a few months time I should be writing a post about how after all the minimal stamina, I ran a 5K.

Till then, I’ll keep running, hurting, resting, icing and running on.