Nothing has been said here for some time. I’m back here to make amends (with whom? the crickets ask me chirpily). Whenever I try to get back to writing after a long while, the gate-keeping thought is : “Of what use will your words be? Will they be useful to someone?”.
On some level, I know that it shouldn’t matter. I mean, it is literally mah domain, mah rulezz. But I acquiesce to this utilitarian demon just this once, because a sloth demon needs to be slain.
Back to square one. Maybe not quite. Being here reminds me of the feeling I get when a snake brings me down from 96 to 3 in a snakes & ladders board game. My writing muscles have regressed and atrophied yet again and the only way to get back up is to thrash my fingertips over my keyboard.
Up until early 2020, I could not, for the life of me, find any value in running. People who’d come to the football pitch and just run circles always perplexed me. At best, they’d end up where they started, square one and panting. Stamina wasn’t prized among my peers when I was growing up because most (including me) had just enough to play leisurely games of cricket and football/futbol/soccer. On running, my thought process was (pseudo) utilitarian. What was the point of running?
It wasn’t until I fell into an abyss hitherto undescended, that I searched for ways to get out which were cost-effective and read in an article that running was the closest in physiological affect to Ritalin. And then I conjured up a pair of shoes, a headband and sunglasses and ran into the morning sun like old Seabiscuit.
Nope, instead I shirked away from running and meandered through grey days until a friend (now a great friend) called me up and asked me if I wanted to go running with him on the beach. I was hesitant at first but I accepted to try it out because I was tired of my routine, everything I was doing then seemed to keep me down. I was apprehensive of buying shoes to run, thinking that they might be underused. But one could run on the beach barefoot. I could just wear some old soccer jerseys so I didn’t need to buy new clothes either. All I had to follow my friend. And follow I did.
I’ve been running ever since. Along the way, another friend suggested that I record my runs on a tracking app. Again, I was concerned about losing out on the purity of my running experience, but then again, I liked to listen to blaring music from my earphones while running, so how ‘pure’ was I really? Once I started recording, it did feel assuring to look back on these recorded runs because I would have forgotten and discounted them otherwise, being in the state of mind that I was.
As I’ve been mentioned before, exercising in public is an exercise in building self-confidence. When I began road-running, I had intrusive loud thoughts worrying about what people thought of me when they made eye contact with me, why’s he running, is he in danger, why is his gait so strange, why is he running if he’s so out-of-breath, why does it look like he’s struggling and so on. If you start to move your body in ways you haven’t in public, that is a practice of not-giving-a-fuck. We were made to move, and we were made to feel good while doing it (give it a few minutes though).
Getting into running had a butterfly effect of going back to resistance training too eventually (something I used to beat myself up about when I was in the dark and not moving at all), although I struggle on a higher plane of consistency still. It also reminded me that I took breathing outside air for granted, or even breathing in general, how it could be controlled for intended calming or energizing effects.
I run in loops nearly every week and I come back to square spiral one all the time now. You just have to think of it like an upward spiral. With every step (walk, jog or run), the pain will come but so will the strength to bear it.
Public Journal of a Private Man 