I am jolted awake by my alarm that goes off at 4.30 a.m. I jump out of bed and head straight to my chest of drawers to turn it off before the family (read toddler) wakes up! I stealthily walk across to my cupboard and flash my mobile torch to pull out my sports clothing to get set and hit the road. I have rearranged my workout clothes at the bottom of my cupboard, simply so the family cannot spot even a faint apparition at the crack of dawn.
I sense a movement… Oh! He is just turning to the other side; I make it to the wash room and just when I open the door, feeling squeaky clean and fresh, ready to make my way to the kitchen and drink my only cup of coffee in solitude (read bliss), he’s up!
“ Amma venum ” (I want Amma in Tamil). I try desperately to lull him back to sleep — all the rhymes I remember… But in vain! My mobile is beeping non-stop. “Are you going to make it? I am ready to leave home in five,” writes my running buddy for eight years now. No, not this morning, I think to myself, and simply surrender to the dynamic nature of my life and its current context…
When I wake up (it takes me a full hour to put the baby back to bed and I decide to snooze too), I enviously trawl through a series of messages and photos of everyone who actually made it to the run in the morning.
I sulk through the day and my husband pitches in generously. The alarm rings again; I go through the same motions; my toddler wakes up, but this time my husband lulls him back to sleep while I sit in a semi-lit living room sipping my cup of coffee before I run.
Running gives me a high. It is not about the distance you clock or the timing you manage. There are good days and bad. On some, I run with the hope of getting better; on others, I run with a sense of gratitude for being blessed to be able to stay on my feet for an hour or more, strike up a conversation, head back to my destination, drive to my favourite spot for my second cuppa before heading back home to take on my regular chores.
I have been a regular on the road for nearly a decade now. Am I pro? Not at all. To be honest, it does not matter any more. Over the years of running with a buddy by my side, I am still completely in tune with my own thoughts and emotions. I have come to realise that running is a very personal experience. Running has taught and continues to teach me a quality that I believe we all need the most to get past life’s sometimes pleasant, sometimes unfair alleyways — endurance! It has enabled me to grind through the loneliness of being a first-time entrepreneur in a space that is as exciting as it is excruciating; it has taught me the art of solitude, the ability to run fearlessly on the road, without being worried about the infuriatingly perverted eve-teaser whose eyes are always where they are not meant to be. It has instilled in me the imperatives of discipline and the beauty of rigour. That a small portion of skill mixed with generous doses of process and a spoonful of deliberate practice over a sustained period of time, can yield results.
Just the ability to wake up, fight your own demons, and do what you like to do before you set off doing things for your near and dear ones, is so satisfying.
It is past 10 p.m. Tomorrow, we intend to run in the hills! Yes. You’ve got to sign up to be a runner to figure that out.
