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.

A Movie and a Meteor

     

It was the fourteenth of February yesterday and as usual a day when love is celebrated in all its cliched and non-cliched forms all over the world. While abroad it’s a day when love is professed over cards, gifts, wishes and all things nice, here in India if you are out celebrating, the chances of being harassed by a big group of people wearing saffron are quite high.

I began my day by jogging with my friends in the morning as these days I am trying to overcome my utter lack of stamina and learn to run by following this hugely popular program called Couch-to-5K (C25K). After a draining session I returned to my room and called up my parents to wish them Happy Valentine’s Day as theirs was a troubled-yet-successful love story and also to tell them how much I indeed love them.

Then on it was just another weekend to catch up on hitherto untouched study work and assignments except that I eagerly looked forward for the night as the movie ‘Boyhood’ was playing in the Open Air Theater here at IIT Madras. When ‘Boyhood’ was first released I was smitten by the concept of filming in real, over a course of 12 years to chronicle the story of a boy growing up and had a great desire to watch it. The months of November and December went past in exams and spending soft sunny days and cold nights at home in Bangalore, amidst lots of good food and Boyhood was forgotten.

I started on my final semester here in January and again got reminded of the movie during random bouts of web surfing and was waiting for it to be screened here in the campus. So it was only natural that I became very excited when the mail about its screening finally arrived. And so sharp at eight after a hurried dinner me and my friend made our way to see the much awaited movie.

Less than halfway into the movie and I realized that my excitement was for nothing. The movie dragged on slowly showing how a small boy grew through his parents troubled and divorced marriage, through a mom whose second marriage turned abusive, through a super-smart and hardly affectionate sister, through teenage explorations of dating, alcohol, and sex, through his passion and talent for photography and through the minutes and hours and on it went.

While the boy grew up, I grew restless and my eyes involuntarily turned to the clear skies overhead; over the shining stars of Canis Major, Orion and Auriga constellations. While I narrowed my eyes to identify the faint constellation above the big screen a bright meteor about the magnitude of the star Sirius fell across in a small arc and my joy knew no bounds. If it hadn’t been for the people surrounding me I would have jumped up and did a small celebratory dance!

It’s been a long time since I saw a meteor as I am always either under clouded skies or there has been no opportunity to go on a stargazing trip as I used to in my undergraduate and high school days in Bangalore. The bright meteor reminded me of the bright, huge fireball me and my school friends had witnessed at the Kavalur Observatory back in 2010 when we had just graduated from high school.

And then after a while the meteor had fallen, my eyes went back to the movie where the boy now was graduating from his high school and was going away to college. The movie and the meteor put together took me back to the days in 2010 when me and my friends had just graduated high school and were well on our way to get into the real world through the first stepping stone that was college.

I sat through the rest of the movie disappointed as my expectations were very high than what the movie was offering to satiate them. I was overjoyed with having seen a meteor and went around making my disappointment known to people after the movie, as all I saw was a boy grow up from a child to a teenager and finally become a young adult with all his experiences along the way that are commonplace to me and you.

I awoke today morning and while I pondered the previous night’s movie and the happy sighting of a meteor, I realized that my disappointment at the movie was baseless. I did laugh when the boy did silly things, I sympathized with him when he had troubles with his family, with friends and a broken relationship, I identified with him all the frustration and confusion that teenage brings about and I saw a reflection of myself in the growing up kid and I was reminded of me and my friends graduating as young adults from high school and moving thereafter to college.

We all go to a movie to take a break from the monotony of our lives and to feel the excitement and rush of an unknown eventful something happening to someone but feel let down when the movie is itself a reflection of our rather uneventful lives. Thinking back to yesterday’s night I realized that the movie was not to be casually enjoyed but it had to be experienced and identified with.

Our lives go on with all the commonplace growing up we have to do, commonplace struggle we have to face and sometimes the rather uneventful course of our lives, is marked with happy or sad or shattering or amazing things that streak past us, like a meteor does occasionally across the sky !