Running: how I came to love something I used to hate

I love running. There, I said it. Love, with a capital L. But how can this be? Just a few months ago, my opinion of running was firmly on the side of “no thanks”. 

Where marathon runners need to avoid hitting the wall, I could never avoid hitting the wall of tedium just doing the old gallivant around the block. Even when bestowed with a pretty park in which to do some laps (sounds ominous already), all I would think about is, When am I going to pass those ducks on the pond for the last time today? Doing a single lap, and thereby only needing to pass the ducks once, hardly seemed to justify the psychological torment that never failed to accompany the decision to run in the first place. Laps 2 and 3, on the other hand, wouldn't go far enough in erasing the pathetic feeling I had about running because the park I’m thinking of isn’t so big that “a lap” equates to anything respectable, like 1km. And so to even begin activating the reward circuits in my brain, I’d have to complete 4 laps. But this is only a baseline as, eventually, I’d have to “make progress” because that’s what people do right? Then there's the inconvenience of having the reward for upping the laps undercut by my obsession with those god forsaken ducks…

So my relationship with running has always been, well, strained. This has not been helped by my erstwhile snobbish assessment of the merits of different physical activities. Since I started caring about staying active a few years back, I had been of the mind that any physical activity worth my while should place some intelligent demands on me. The activity should extend my body awareness and its relationship to its surroundings, and challenge my muscle memory by getting me to move in different, sometimes awkward ways, breaking my postural habits and ingrained movement patterns if need be. Therefore the activity should require skills, period. Skills like hand-eye coordination, balance, mental and physical agility. In other words, the activity should involve some form of ‘intelligent movement’. Dance, parkour, yoga, certain martial arts come to mind but not mechanical and repetitive exercises like pumping weights and running on a treadmill. This implies that a worthwhile exercise at least pour moi should be more than just its ‘get fit’ dimension. Ideally it would be a store of transcendence that can be unleashed at a certain level of mastery, as when a dancer’s flow seems out of this world, effortless and unthought of, yet virtuoso all the same. 

To top it off, the exercise should never feel like exercise. 

Bottom line: I steered clear of running because I didn’t consider it intelligent enough and because it is boring. Sure there is running with good technique and running with bad technique. But beyond technique, the point of running was lost on me. So instead I opted to explore the “fun stuff” like street dance, yoga, kung fu (Chinese martial arts) and to a very small extent, parkour (which I waxed on about here).

But my explorations in these various directions came to their own conclusions fairly quickly and, ironically, running was the last man standing. I quit doing kung fu after two years of solid commitment because it made me look butch and I had a wedding dress to fit into. After the wedding, I never regained momentum with the sport because I was drawn to the more “forgiving” practice of yoga. I also stopped going to dance lessons because my tolerance for the kind of self-satisfied Insta-generation that tends to populate the mirrored halls in hip urban gyms grew less and less as my years grew more and more.

As one activity after another fell away from my schedule, I was left with 3-4 yoga classes to do a week. This suited me just fine, until the day I found that I could no longer run for the bus without gagging for air. My fitness level had evidently fallen quite a ways since the days when I exercised 10-13 hours a week. Simply doing lots of ujjayi breathing exercises in yoga (even if it is dynamic yoga) proved a poor substitute for proper endurance training. So off my high horse I eventually got and on I went looking for some old-fashioned get-results cardio. 

There were, of course, plenty of options presented to me. Spinning, crossfit, boxfit, bootcamp… even the dreaded zumba. But all these activities involve expensive gym memberships, which, added to my not inconsiderable monthly investment in yoga, would push me closer to bankruptcy. (The ludicrously high price of staying fit is just another thing that’s wrong with this world.)

So there was only one activity I could do for (almost) nothing.

****

Two things that really helped me get over the tedium of running was, a) architecting several routes that take in some of the more pleasant parts of my neighbourhood (the scenery changes constantly); and b) to ENTER INTO A RACE. When there’s no turning back…

And so after 3 months of training, I completed my first 10km race on Sunday 21 June 2015, beating my own average time. I'm embarrassed to say it but the experience approached the spiritual and not just because I was over-the-moon about my results. I’d never before taken part in an event in which you’re surrounded by thousands of people all wearing the same t-shirt as you and doing the same thing as you. At the risk of painting an image of some dictator’s wet dream, my eyes actually moistened when I surveyed the sea of orange t-shirts ahead of me as we powered through the straight stretches. I was one with the sea, in true solidarity! Training for the race had always been a solitary affair and to experience, for those 50-odd race minutes, what everyone else must have been experiencing made all the sweat worthwhile somehow.

So I was wrong. Running, like dancing or yoga, can be transcendent. 

Afterword

I’m laughing now but the way to the finish line was pockmarked with various indignities and frustrations quite aside from trying to improve my run time. These include multiple flesh wounds, a pair of shortened hamstrings, a smashed smartphone, a busted set of headphones, two new calluses, and a lighter bank account for looking the part.

It must be love after all. 

Cos I'm still running.

Stairway to heaven: becoming an adult learner

In spite of the first shocking appearance of “you should have taken better care of your skin when you were in your twenties” fine lines around my eyes, I must say, I rather enjoy being in my thirties. As it happens entering the fourth decade hasn’t precluded me from revisiting age 16 sans the terrifying hormones and pitifully warped self-image. 16 was the last time I studied a proper science and over the last 8 months I managed to complete pre-undergraduate-level chemistry and biology at Birkbeck College (University of London) decorated with, it is hoped, some proverbial flying colours. Apart from the vindication that my brain still works and that I can write 3-hour exams without the added neuroses that might come with age, the whole experience has been truly awesome. A self-actualising  kind of awesome akin perhaps to finishing your first 10km running race (which I will be doing this coming Sunday as it happens). And what a feeling that is?!

So I’ve decided to do my utmost to keep with that feeling even as the weather outside invites me to loaf about near a BBQ. This means not letting my brain go on an extended holiday and regress absolutely until September when it’ll be a shock enough to plunge straight into full-time study (in nutrition science) at King’s College from doing nothing cognitive for 3 months. Therefore the plan is to keep my brain productively engaged on something it has never liked. That would be...

MATHS! The good old calculator-free kind of maths!

There is a rule that any training that the body finds most difficult is probably the training the body needs to endure most. Maths is that training for my brain. One of the many advantages of being in my thirties rather than in my teens is that my younger self would have balked at the idea of voluntarily taking the tempestuous bull by its horns. Even those who are “naturals” at maths probably wouldn’t gain much satisfaction from simplifying cube roots or solving “real world” word problems employing greatest common factors and least common multiples (because they would find it way too easy, but hey my point still stands, I think)! But, for the record, I have.

To be sure, I was never a total imbecile when it came to maths. At 16, I somehow managed to breach the “top 10%” in maths ability of all the school kids doing sixth form across the entire country (that’s New Zealand, a small place). But maths has never been like music or writing for me: intuitive, effortless, the closest thing to bliss for the mind. And so I have always had barely a measure of confidence with the subject.

But the years since 16 have gifted me with a modicum of masochistic madness that I like to call self-discipline bankrolled by the realisation that wasting my brain now is probably wasting it forever. Some people do crosswords or sudoku puzzles to stave of senility. I do grade 5 (and getting progressively more advanced, mind) maths.

I owe my newfound appreciation of the beauty of logic to my recent joyous foray into chemistry. Unlike biology, which, though very very interesting, requires far too much rote memorisation and room for interpretation in some respects, elementary-level chemistry is relatively neat and tidy, with right answers rather than better answers. So to succeed in chemistry is mostly about “getting it”. With this comes the added and not inconsiderable satisfaction of "getting it", which is quite difficult to recreate in other aspects of life unless that life includes solving abstract problems for a living, which mine hasn’t been. As a hedonist at bottom, I wanted to prolong that weird kick I got from using my powers of deduction and inference in chemistry. The only way I knew how was to, yes, do some maths!

This post is not really meant to be a smug boast of how wonderfully disciplined I have been though it seems to have turned out that way. It’s meant to be my two pence on the adage about how you’re never too old to learn and how it really shouldn’t be embarrassing for anyone to study “foundation subjects” like maths and English that “society” deems necessary for its minions to have mastered before they start thinking about jobs, mortgages and babies. This is because, unless one was particularly gifted in either subject at a young age, chances are that for the rest of us - the euphemistic “late bloomers” - our teenage years did not include our proudest moments of intellectual performance. Certainly not in my case anyway. I spent most of that period too busy torturing myself with thoughts about important “real world” social dynamics like “fitting in” and “how to be thin like Gisele” to appreciate the abstract worlds of differential calculus and Euclidean geometry. Academic learning just wasn’t a priority, especially when it was thrust upon me ex cathedra.

Now that I’m free of said social anxieties, and have lived long enough to see the relevance of the stuff teachers tried to teach me at school, I am deliberately answering the call to improve myself while I still can. Because I ain’t getting any younger (sweet though my wiser outlook on life is). After all, numerous studies on the plasticity of the maturing brain gives us all cause to not only keep on using the one we have but to stretch it whenever possible. Intelligence, like much else about human nature, is more fluid than the old school geneticists would have allowed.

And there really is no excuse not to do a bit of brain gymnastics. Adult learning today couldn’t be easier and cheaper. The internet, as we know, is rich with tools to help us get wise even if it requires a double dollop of discernment. When properly harnessed, the internet is a true leveller, democracy at its purest, and, just as it is a shame to throw a vote away, it would be a pity if we didn’t all plug into this brave new world of learning.

In addition to my wonderful tutors at Birkbeck, a world-class university predominantly geared for adult learners, I owe a great deal of my recent learning to the Khan Academy. This wonderful online education tool was set up by a super brainy but endearingly modest ex-hedge fund guy named Salman Khan who has done a lot in North America as well as in developing countries like India to make education fun and accessible to all.

Had it not been for the hours I spent watching Khan Academy’s clearly presented and engaging videos in biology (among a library of videos on practically every academic subject one can think of, all presented by formidably qualified people), I probably would not have scored 97% on my mid-term biology exam at Birkbeck.

Unlike old school textbooks that are dry and 2D, well-constructed video tutorials not only bring to life subjects like biology, which require a lot of visualisation, they allow the student to watch and re-watch them at any time. The Academy has gone one step further in engaging its users by “gamifying” the whole learning experience with plenty of incentives and rewards. Not surprisingly, this gamification is found in its most developed form in the Maths section, which, as you may have guessed by now, I have chosen to “play”. The subject is divided into pre-secondary school- all the way to undergraduate-level topics that span pretty much everything that’s important for a wannabe mathematician that’s not rocket science. Each level/topic is further subdivided into baby steps that the student gets a handle on and eventually masters, earning points and cute/cheesy accolades (badges and honours!) along the way. Such incentives and rewards, even for a thirty-odd year old, never seem to get old. Nor do the pie charts which show your own personal progression! What’s most important, though, is that the structure of the course is very personalised and it covers all bases. To advance in a subject like maths requires a solid foundation and so Mr Khan won’t let a student move up a rung to doing long division with icky decimals if they haven’t mastered the vanilla version first. Not surprisingly, given my lack of attention during maths lessons at primary school, the Khan Academy helped me uncover many holes in my maths foundation!

By the way, may I add that tuition at the Khan Academy is absolutely free. There is always room, of course, to make donations — which I have done as a gesture of my gratitude to Mr Khan and his team, in the hopes that they keep up the good work.

This post hopefully captures some of the joys I’ve experienced from getting back into formal education as an adult. In saying that, I urge all you adults out there who feel that you’ve stagnated in your careers or just feel ‘old’ and irrelevant in this accelerating world to go back to school because it’s so easy and cheap, not to mention so totally worth it.

What dropping my phone has taught me.

It’s peak time and I’m stood inside an overground train watching all the heads around me barely bob to the rhythm of wheels on a track. Meanwhile I skate over the thought of how interesting it would be to put together a mosaic of all the faces that belong to those heads from the point of view of the screens that are viewing them. This thought I’m having is a product of the phenomenon that I have no book, no tablet, no i-this or that to help me utilise this no-man’s-land segment of time. I can only direct my senses to these heads as well as to the sensations I’m feeling as I’m trying to stay in balance while ‘surfing’ the train without holding onto any handlebars. My tiny Nokia, which I call my phone for now, has real buttons that you need to lay some elbow grease on to get going and so it is lodged unemployed in one of my pockets. My thoughts then drift onto the somewhat happy fact that I’m not a security risk. I don’t have anything worth stealing on my body, apart from my hair I suppose. And that’s liberating.

In recent years, my birthday has been an occasion for the universe to go forth and really upset me. Last year, I was plunged into the depths of existential despair only to find a life raft in the nick of time. An event that occurred near my birthday just past interrupted my flow and contentment with the seeds of transformation that maybe less newsworthy but no less dramatic. What happened was that I finally managed to do what so many others have done before me and write-off my brand new smartphone by gloriously smashing its screen on concrete after a post-birthday gluttony redemption jog around the block. Without insurance. So Happy Birthday to me! Because M and I don’t own a car, this incident was my version of crashing my car moments after driving it out of the showroom. 

We all know how much our lives depend on these crazy gadgets. But, as I found out, the addiction doesn’t become apparent until the day you find yourself without one.

Hence why I now have as a standby this ‘dumb’ Nokia, which, up until the ‘incident’, was used primarily as an intercom system to allow delivery people into my building. 

The nice thing is that with a phone that does the bare minimum of what a phone should be able to do, I’ve freed up my time to do what I need to do properly. I can now look both ways before crossing the street rather than scanning my screen from left to right while crossing the street. I can complete my university assignments without being distracted by the latest Instagram updates from Cara or endless chats on Messenger. I don’t find myself checking my phone 2 minutes after I wake up in the morning and 2 minutes before I fall asleep, making either experience that much more calming. And so my stress levels have noticeably given way by the relative new quiet. It also feels really good not to be a security risk when I’m in public. It even feels good to flash my Nokia in a pretentious place like Shoreditch. The hip young day residents there are probably thinking I’m being ironic. 

Unfortunately I do have to end this nice little story with a plot twist, which is that I have opted to buy a replacement smartphone after all. My reasoning is based on real honesty. As much as I love the liberation of going ‘lo-fi’, my heart of hearts tells me that I don’t want to be left behind in a world that will continually be shaped for people who own smart whatevers (phones, watches, glasses). I miss the apps that make life easier - Google Maps, Map My Run and err… Best London Coffee, Spotify…. and I miss having a high res camera on my phone to capture moments (I’m not even on Instagram). 

Having said that, I do want to make something of what happened as I believe it probably happened for a reason that goes beyond my congenital clumsiness. The lesson I take away from it is that I need to live more simply. The word of the day is DECLUTTER. Less.is.more. (And it's spring, how perfect!) As hackneyed as the phrase is, it really does seem to hold the key to true happiness. I like not being bogged down by excess. I like my home to be sparsely furnished with only the things my husband and I actually care about (books, mostly). I’ve managed to trim my wardrobe to such a minimum that my husband and I can share it and it’s not a walk-in. That’s because I practically wear the same clothes day in day out, which puts me in good company. (I do however allow myself a new pair of trainers once yearly and new underwear, as old undies are gross). M and I have also stopped buying more food than the two of us can eat, and so we are wasting less food. Our household water consumption, as confirmed by a recent bill, is below average. As this implies, living more simply has a positive ecological impact (mini-fist pump!). There even appears to be a ‘movement’ of sorts of people like myself who are voluntarily willing to live more simply.  

While making headway towards minimalism in the physical realm, I have neglected to translate this in the digital one. So now’s the time for action! To this end, I have sworn that when my replacement phone arrives in my clumsy little hands, I will (1) buy a proper shock-absorbing cover, and (2) minimise the use of my new phone by not installing Twitter, Facebook or Gmail. I’ll make an exception for WhatsApp as it’s been a fantastic tool for helping me stay in touch with my Mum and friends overseas. Other than that, I’ll probably continue spending my commutes gawking at heads around me and find my quality of life spike as a consequence.

From January blues to eternal hopes

I've never been a cynical person. But today, I came within a stone's throw of the precipice, inhaling the fumes of profound hollowness that comes with being a cynic. It was not a good place to be, to be sure, cowering under all the bad news cropping up around the world like mushrooms after a heavy rain. Usually I can handle the torrent, but today was not one of those days. Today was about being stared in the face by Hopelessness and Despair. By Questions like how one can sleep at night? What is the point of it all? Why try to make the world a better place when one's actions seem to barely cause a ripple in the ocean that's been caught in a rip of Bad News? Why not just end everything now, with the eager help of the oil and shale gas industries, of course? Am I not becoming a cynic??

Fortunately, I eventually managed to retard these destructive thoughts. As cliché as it sounds, my saving grace was meeting up with a 13-year-old child who I regularly mentor at a neighbourhood secondary school. Coaching him on geometry today made me realise not only that I've retained something from the mind-numbing maths lessons of my school days, but that - more importantly - if I give up on humanity, I will necessarily be giving up on people like him (he wants to be a graphic designer, bless). And so, while my mentee was grappling with the difference between a scalene and isosceles triangle, I concluded that it is because of the current existential crisis faced by all Earthlings that I must never give up the hope that life can and will continue to thrive on Earth. It would not only be unethical and a great shame for us not to at least try to make the planet a beautiful and habitable place once more for future generations; it would be mighty disrespectful to all those courageous souls in history who died fighting for a more just world (as well as those highly intelligent souls who invented the likes of geometry). 

And so: terrible events may happen all the time, but it is up to those who are able – like myself – to continue battling with a steeliness that's couched with the one emotion that unites us all – love. And whenever a crisis of confidence presents itself, as it is bound to over and over on this journey to salvation, it is imperative that we reflect on the sacrifices others made in order for us to be. Now that I'm studying biology, I am appreciating for the first time just how miraculous life is. There are possibly millions of ways that life can go wrong. A lack of an enzyme or protein here retarding normal development or a missing gene there causing cancer. And yet, statistically speaking, it's rare that nature, when left it to its own devices, gets it wrong. In other words, things often go wrong because we make it go wrong. So, on the flipside, we have the power to make things right again. At least, that's the hope.

2014 - a roundup

Wow, what a year 2014 was! It was a year marked by some of the biggest events of my life – ie. getting married and planting roots for shizzle in London – as well as one rollicked by some serious achey breaky soul searching.

And so it is with some sadness that I now turn my back on it.

You may have wondered why my last post on this blog was back in July. I take it as a good sign. Wedding planning notwithstanding, I. Got. Busy... getting my life into gear once more after many many months spent crawling about in the doldrums of uncertainty.

So here is my last 6 months in summary:

After my honeymoon in South Africa in August (amazeballs!), I began treading back into the suffocating embrace of the rat race. Didn't think I would did you? It certainly makes me cringe just typing this up as my visceral dislike of the rat race still stands unwavering. But eventually I felt I had no choice if I wanted to get unstuck. Fortunately, I have not gone the whole hog of selling myself into money-minded slavery (I am unqualified to do so anyway). I have instead chosen to enter into an arguably more competitive sphere: University. Yes, again. Twice again in fact.

This latest chapter began around May 2014 when amid the last minute panic and flurry of wedding activity, a soft (hopefully sober) murmuring in my head encouraged me to chart a new course in science. After all, as all my leisurely reading on nutrition, neurons and epigenetics seemed to indicate, I was already heading in that direction quite on my own. The important thing was it made sense. 

But which science?

I initially considered and then dismissed the notion of becoming a neuroscientist. I had had some acquaintance with neuroscience during my undergraduate degree. Unfortunately, as cool as being able to call myself a neuroscientist (all those pleasant eyebrow raises at dinner parties!), something deep in me recoiled at the idea. It just seemed too hard core (or should I say, hard-headed?) for me, a crypto lady of leisure. I'd also considered studying biomedicine since some programmes promised an introduction to everything that I found fascinating about the human body. The biology of aging? Check. Immunology? Check. Stress? Check. But then I looked at the career prospects of a fresh biomedical science graduate in the UK and nothing sounded more promising than a lowly lab technician in some chemical works. So instead, I decided to consider what I rightly or wrongly think of as the softer more glamorous option of nutrition science. Apart from my hapless experimentations with diet, during those heady dog days, what was getting me excited was all the new research on gut microbes and what diet and lifestyle do to them. I mean, did you know that your body is composed of 30 trillion human cells and yet is host to some 100 trillion bacterial and yeast cells? You have to wonder, then, what makes you human?

So to get me to the point where I can apply to study nutrition at degree level with my head held high, I enrolled at Birkbeck, University of London to do a foundation course in biology and chemistry – subjects I'd buried along with my dismal secondary school career 14 years ago. But now I was absolutely chuffed to be marching from age 30 to 16 without the aid of chemical peels and injections of young blood, a process that began when I took up playing the guitar. My analytical brain needed desperately to be reawakened. I'd spent so much of my life since 2012 working on my confidence by developing my intuition and physique that I had become 'shy' of doing dryer stuff like maths, even though I was never really bad at it. Perhaps like the feeling someone gets when they learn to write properly, I was surprised to find a new mode of expression in being able to solve problems in chemistry using simple algebra! It was another form of self-actualisation.

So I hope to finish the foundation course in June with flying colours and be accepted by one of the top universities in the UK to study nutrition science. 

Beyond that, I have no idea and may very well hit yet another existential block. Do I become a nutritionist working for the NHS (National Health Service)? Or a researcher in the cutthroat world of academia where I'm likely to be chasing grants more than doing actual science? Or will I have to forge a totally new path? Who knows. The possibilities. More first world problems!

Maybe my decision ultimately won't matter. I am now reading Naomi Klein's anticapitalistic manifesto This Changes Everything. Klein's unique ability to chip away at my conscience may turn me into a climate warrior who knows how to eat right. Whichever way I look at it, all of our futures are intertwined with that of our planet's.

Thrilling stuff. So there you are, 2015.