There's a saying in Kannada - "ಕುದುರೆ ನೋಡಿದರೆ ಕಾಲು ನೋವು". If you see the horse, you get leg pain. A throwback to the days when the horse was a means of transportation.
Just over 2 years ago, as my 6th semester at college was winding down, there was a tentative plan for a trek in the Himalayas with my friends (in the end, they went, I couldn't go. :( TWICE! ). I was worried about my fitness naturally, as walking continuously over mountainous terrain in sub-zero temperatures wasn't exactly a part of my usual routine. Thus, I consulted some website, looked up the recommended fitness regimen for such a trek and started on it in preparation for the trek.
Part of the regimen was jogging/running (terms to be used interchangeably now on) thrice a week. The aim was to do 5 km in 35 minutes, and the website recommended a gradual increase towards this level by jogging for a fixed time, then "taking a break" by doing brisk walking, repeated 5 times. The other three days involved climbing some stairs continuously or some such fools errand which wasn't challenging at all.
My view on running up till then had been simple - who the hell runs when you're not chasing some kind of a ball? A football, a basketball, any round bouncy object. I could just play football. What about practice for football? Increasing your stamina for the game? Well, play a lot more football and you'll get the practice.
Surprisingly, when I forced myself to run without the lure of a ball ahead of me, I actually began to enjoy it really quickly. Since that first time about 28 months back, I've been a regular jogger on and off (mostly off, but in the past 1 year, quite on). And it feels phenomenal. I couldn't recommend it enough to anyone and everyone.
I recently read one of the best books I've come across, called "Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen", a book that talks about running with proper form, about a tribe whose people are known to simply run hundreds of miles out of boredom or fear and most fascinatingly, how we're all alive today because our ancestors could run. Homo Sapiens, the book points out, were smaller, weaker and even less intelligent than Neaderthals, who were our competitors and our cousins in the evolutionary tree, not our direct ancestors as most of us believe. But because humans acquired the ability to run long distances without tiring, we out-survived our better endowed cousins. The author gives fascinating tales of people who lived with tribals and perfected the art of running and hunting animals that are rapid, and the tales of modern, industrial age people who by accident discovered their ability to run by jogging to and from work and few years later winning "ultramarathons". (Google that term, trust me!)
I'll just throw one last fact from the book at you, oh patient reader - Human beings peak at around the age of 26 in terms of running. But the decline is really slow, so the running ability of a 19 year old is the same as that of a 64 year old! Even elder men and women among our hunter-gatherer ancestors ran and hunted!
Over the past few months, I've run mainly in three places. In and around the Pashan-road and Baner-road area of Pune, on the path around Sankey Tank in Bengaluru and in the campus of Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru. That proverb at the beginning of this post, that's absolutely true!
In Pune, I would begin at my hostel located near Pashan Road, jog along a fixed path and return to the hostel. I carried nothing with me and I jogged almost daily for a period of a month this April-May. What a happy month that was!
The thing about this path was that once I started, I had no choice but to run all the way. I could stop running and walk, of course, but it would be a long, tiresome walk with sweaty clothes, far worse than being absolutely knackered but still jogging to reach hostel again quickly and drinking some water. There were primarily two paths, a shorter path and a longer path, with several shortcuts giving rise to runs of distances intermediate to these two. By the end of the month, I was exclusively taking the longer route every day and on a day of great determination, as a sort of culmination (since I would be leaving Pune soon), I did a circuit of the long route once followed by the short route, all in one go. Pure swarga! An unparalleled feeling, a tiredness that was ecstasy itself. I have no idea how I did it, but now I know I can do it again!
This reminded me of a quote from the book - "Beyond the very extreme of fatigue and distress, we may find huge amounts of ease and power which never dreamed ourselves to own; sources of strength never taxed at all because we never push through the obstruction." I know I've never gone close to breaking this "obstruction"; that's reserved for the people who run hundreds of miles. But if just going somewhat towards that can feel this good, I can only imagine what that feels like. The book is full of stories of runners who collapsed to the ground, completely dehydrated, fatigued, cramped, and then suddenly found a reserve of energy to wake up and resume running for 20 more miles as if nothing happened.
However, I found that the modest resolve of mine completely deserted me during my rounds of Sankey Tank. It was infuriating and frustrating - how could a person, perfectly capable of running at ease and with so much joy in Pune, not be able to reproduce that effort at Sankey Tank, Bengaluru? The setting was perfect. The path around the lake is serene, the greenery is beautiful and the weather couldn't be any better anywhere in the world. But I was too tired to run another step when I'd run just half the distance I could run in Pune.
It wasn't the pollution, I didn't feel any congestion in my chest or my throat. Running on main roads in Pune couldn't be far better than running near a lake surrounded by lush greenery in Bengaluru. Is it the city? Could my beloved city of birth be betraying me and making me weaker? Maybe it was the food? In Pune, an hour before running, I would have a carefully chosen health snack to give me some energy for the run. This snack of one vada paav and one chai wasn't available in Bangalore. Was that the cause?
I meditated on this and realised something - it wasn't physical. It was mental. The same level of tiredness in Pune would make me think, "Ha, it's starting to kick in now. Let us see how far I can go." In Bengaluru, it would make me walk back home.
I was also feeling more thirsty while running in Bengaluru. Also felt like going to pee very frequently. What was the difference between Pune and Bengaluru that, I wanted to drink more water while jogging in Bengaluru, I wanted to pee incessantly while jogging in Bengaluru and I wanted to quit much earlier in Bengaluru. Then the answer struck me!
The path around the Sankey Tank has several amenities for the walkers and joggers. It has 2 toilets. It has 2 taps for drinking water. And it has 2 exits. These were distractions. When there was a fixed path with nothing available in Pune, I had no choice but to run and come back to hostel for any rest, recuperation, excretion and rehydration. At Sankey Tank, I had an outlet at every point. I could quit any time and walk back home from one of two entrances in to the park. ಕುದುರೆ ನೋಡಿದರೆ ಕಾಲು ನೋವು. If you see horse, leg pain. A life lesson!
So I decided to jog at the beautiful campus of the Indian Institute of Science instead. There are toilets here, but I have no clue where they are. And it is infinitely more awkward to walk into a department building where no one knows you and ask for where the toilet is than it is to walk into a public toilet. And I'm so glad to say the running form of Pune is back. It had nothing to do with the city or pollution or anything.
On every run, I go through 3 stages. The first I call discomfort. Your body has just gotten up off the chair/bed after a comfortable day. The last thing you really want to do is physical activity. You really want to watch TV, stretch on the bed and read a book or just while away the time. So as you slowly trot up the path, your mind starts to echo your body's protest. Go sleep dude, he says. Your stomach makes funny rumblings. Your lungs refuse to bring in that oxygen. Maybe a bit of pain in your knees or hips. Your mind gets a little more tactful. He says that just today you aren't in the best of shape, run tomorrow. Skipping one day for health reasons is perfectly legitimate. For some reason, out of habit or sheer force of will, you get through this.
Your body begins to loosen up and you enter the 2nd stage. I call this The Zone. The Zone is the best place to be. Your body has warmed up, each stride is effortless and you're not thinking about running or the path - you're thinking about random things. Almost meditating. This feels brilliant, I could do this forever, you think. This is where all the stress evaporates. You feel like closing your eyes but thankfully you're aware enough to know that is a really stupid thing to do on the footpath of Baner Road during peak hour traffic.
One of the frustrations of Sankey Tank was about not being able to enter The Zone. It is impossible to enter The Zone when you're constantly monitoring your tiredness and thinking when you'll take the next pee break or water break or when you'll exit. The truth is, when you run you will feel tired and thirsty - that does not mean you rush to drink water. Discomfort is a part of the process. You get used to the discomfort and enjoy the tiredness. "Joyfully participate in the suffering of the world" as Buddha preached.
Once you've enjoyed and meditated through The Zone though, harsh reality catches up with you. You're flesh and blood. There is a finite distance you can run continuously for without food and water before you drop dead. And ideally you don't want to be too close to that limit. You enter the 3rd Stage, for which I don't have a name yet. The Ayyo Stage, maybe. Ayyo, how much further away is hostel? Ayyo my legs can't carry me anymore. Again, this stage, where you're absolutely knackered is joyous and meditative in its own way. It's like a tired extension of The Zone. It is like when you're working on a long project, you really get into it but then you start to burn out, so you somehow see it to completion because you've started it and you have to finish it.
What I've found though is that tiredness, up to a point, is relative and subjective. Look, if you're on the edge of complete dehydration and you have no food left to burn in your body, there's nothing subjective about that tiredness. Eat and drink soon, or something serious could happen. But the truth is that our bodies are so much more capable than we imagine - an hour long jog barely scratches that surface of objective tiredness. Subjective tiredness is where you can convince yourself that you're too tired to go another step or you can convince yourself that you can do another half an hour. Whenever you stop, you're going to be equally out of breath and thirsty and hungry. But the most important thing is to not stop. If you stop after say 35 minutes, your body just begins to relax, it's almost impossible to restart again. But if you power past that urge to stop, you can jog another half an hour and when you stop then, the tiredness is almost the same. To give an analogy, if you can eat 20 idlis, whether you eat 3 or 6 makes hardly any difference to how full you feel but eating 18 would feel very different from eating 15. We just do not know or accept that our body's limit for jogging is most probably so high, that 30 minutes or 60 minutes of running makes very little difference. At the end it feels the same. After all, we're Born To Run. So taking a break to drink water from the very conveniently placed tap at Sankey Tank fools you into thinking you're exhausted and you've to head back. That horse always brings leg pain.
Another lesson I've learnt is about company. While I've been running reasonably regularly in Bengaluru, it is not with the same enthusiasm and regularity of Pune. In Pune, I had a dear friend who would run with me. The meaning of "run with me" here is not literal. We would put on our shoes, go downstairs together and start together. He possesses a far larger stride than me, thus he would zoom off and I would run alone except for the first 200 yards. But even that bit of company, the knowledge that someone else is doing it with you, a good friend, adds exponentially to your enthusiasm. Again, this was echoed in the book. There is something deeply human about running, I don't know how to say it or put it, but I can understand that it is indeed so. You have one of the top ultramarathon coaches of the world who dedicated his life to the study of running talking about becoming a more empathetic person as a legitimate way of running better.
Is it the unscientific ramblings of a senile old fool, or a line grasping at some deeper truth? The same question could be asked about this blog post!
Disclaimer: All this is based on my own experience of jogging and reading the book. Don't run some crazy amount without drinking water, faint of dehydration and then sue me.
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