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.

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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.