Prologue

I start running, my movement is all over the place. If I were to describe it, the closest analogy would be ‘like a bull in a china shop’. Few seconds in, I involuntarily change from nasal breathing to mouth breathing. It sounds and feels more like gasping than breathing. Much later, a voice of reason pleads to stop before I run out of breath or legs buckle under my own weight or both. I heed the voice and come to a stop, the erratic huffing puffing slowly dies down. Legs thank me for being logical with limiting the punishment and not falling face down into the pavement making the situation any more embarrassing than it already is. I diligently check the duration of the ‘run’ thinking it might be anywhere between 2 to 3 minutes. Only it turned out to be roughly 45 seconds long, or short based on how you see it.

I should feel disappointment, perhaps frustration or even shame. Instead, I feel unbridled joy and a sense of intrigue - how do others run longer, would it be possible for me to do this someday and what would it take to achieve this feat?

First 10k and consequences

This was my experience practising for my first 10k - The 2023 Chennai Marathon. Running longer than 1 minute felt impossible, so I decided to run 40-60 seconds every kilometre. This would bring down the average time/km from 10 minutes solely walking at a brisk pace to 8.5-9 minutes/km thereby finishing the 10k at a decent 1.5 hour duration. And I did finish my first 10k at 1h 40m which felt pretty good for a first run with barely a month of walking mixed with jogs.

What I did not account for was the aftereffects … pain in my knee, mostly dull, but sometimes pulsating, over the next few days. Further intrigue piled on. How do people manage to run? And by that, I mean unlike me, really run without hurting themselves!? I would later learn from Jay Dicharry’s Anatomy for Runners that around 80% of runners are prone to sustaining injuries due to an assortment of reasons. Life happened, with personal and professional stuff taking up time – time which I took away from jogging/walking. But the idea of actually running a full 10k and being able to walk unassisted with minimal damage the next day lingered around.

Second 10k

The Preparation

By April, the high tides of work ebbed giving back the precious time to revisit the unanswered question around running. As happenstance would have it, I joined a 10k as a part of another event - Outer Ring Road Rolling Run. This time I decided to ensure I run as much as possible and not resort to an easy compromise - a mix of jogging and walking.

Avoiding tutorial hell

I decided not to look up youtube videos related to running to prevent the slippery slope of health influencers making close to impossible lifestyle recommendations. Instead, I went to /r/running subreddit to read on what the average person trying to balance work and life priorities had to stay. I felt like I stuck gold with the common questions wiki:

“The proper solution is to forget about footstrike entirely, and instead work on a better overall gait. That means: Short, quick, light steps, even (especially!) at slow paces. “Run tall”: keep your head upright (imagine a string pulling your head up, like with a puppet), eyes on the horizon. Relax, especially feet, ankles, arms, shoulders. Bend the knees. Keep your feet behind your body. Use gravity to move forward: just slightly pushing the hips forward and down will have you effortlessly accelerate while staying completely relaxed. Practice this in the form of strides. If in doubt, bend the knees more.”

Clear, concise and easy to follow instructions that even I couldn’t botch up. I took the recommendation to heart and ensured not to lose running form as much as I could in further runs.

Game plan

I looked up the famous Couch to 5k (C25K) program and decided not to follow it in its entirety. Instead, I decided to pick and choose from the program to ensure I had good periods of run interspersed with recovery walks. I decided to replace my old ‘5-8k walk lots jog rarely’ method with a ‘3-5k strictly jog lots walk as little as possible’.

Another idea I picked from the C25K program was to have properly measured timed running sessions to ensure I ran for a defined period of 1-2 minutes initially. I employed a poor method of using my phone’s timer to notify every minute or two and restarting it, later to realise the existence of a C25K app that would have a mix of walk and run notification cycles corresponding to each day of the 8 weeks in the training plan. The intermittent timer method felt distracting and I tried an alternate method of running towards landmarks approximately a minute or two away. While better than the timer method, it still felt inadequate.

The next improvisation was to count steps under my breath as I ran, 100 steps of jog followed by 100 steps walking slowly upgraded to 200 steps jog and 100 steps walk to ensure I jogged more. This felt just right. Counting steps helped set a rhythm and maintain a pace I was comfortable in, with a decent breathing pattern and an economy of movement that I usually had a hard time figuring earlier was attainable easier. No longer a bull in a china shop, or perhaps a well behaved one, I thought.

I was able to run for a full two or one minute duration, now my personal best, but felt deflated not being able to run longer or cover a full kilometre without breaks. As the marathon day came close I tried to go all out and run as much as I could at the start of training one day to have a fair assessment of my limits. I managed to cover ~700m in my longest single run of 5 minutes before I felt like I had ran out of gas. Then played it safe, limiting the workout duration by half where I would only walk. Despite the precaution my body decided to complain the next day, shin splints hurt more than what I was used to over the past few days. I decided not to perform any more ambitious experiments as race day approached. An injury at this point is the last thing one would want.

Race day

The ORR 10k flag-off was scheduled at 5.30 am on July 30, 2023. It was a pleasant day by Chennai standards with a cool breeze. I decided to stick to what I had practised and stay in tow with a friend who was comfortable running the long mile. Tailing alongside him, I ran my first uninterrupted kilometre. Then my Second. And my third, fourth and finally fifth. It was a day of personal bests. For the first time ever, I ran my longest uninterrupted distance of 5km at the longest duration of ~45 minutes.

At my request, we skipped the rehydration point at 2km mark as I felt uncertain if I would be able to resume after a brief stop and instead decided to stop at the one in 5km mark. As I came to a grinding halt at the rehydration point, shock exploded from the legs to the entirety of my body. A couple of minutes later we were back to running and slowly my body started complaining of the ordeal. At around the 7km mark, I felt the sides of my abs burning and had to stop to catch my breath and walked a couple of minutes. This happened again in the next kilometre. I muscled through the last kilometre to ‘finish strong’ as folks on the running subreddit would recommend. I finished my 10k at 01:21:34. I would also end up with blisters on both feet learning an invaluable lesson of wearing thick socks for long runs.

The dull strain from running vanished after a good night’s sleep. My self-assembled training plan felt vindicated with the result of the race and the lack of any pains or injuries unlike the earlier 10k. While it initially felt surreal, I was doubtful if it was a one-time thing or would I be able to run a full kilometre again? I set out to test myself the next evening. Running solo, I managed to run an uninterrupted 5k albeit slower than my 10k pace, but it felt good enough. I would repeat the same drill the next day finishing a 5k at ~8.5min/km. I was now certain that I could do it at will.

Aftermath

I decided to run more, to ensure I don’t lose my newfound running superpower to the ‘use it or lose it’ rule. As I stuck to a regular 3-5k running regime my body decided enough with the ad-hoc exemptions and started protesting. Shin splints would become a regular occurrence sometimes with strains in the ankle or sometimes the achilles or calf.

The need to have a proper workout plan before and/or running became an inevitability. This pursuit led me down another unchartered territory of dynamic stretches and cross training. Exercises to strengthen the core, improve stability and mobility of hips, knees and ankles proved really beneficial and slowly became a part of my daily routine.

This meant less time doom scrolling Twitter or lurking around reddit. Watching mediocre shows or movies late into the night as a part of my retaliatory wakefulness was out of the question. A stiff neck or a sore back the next day would mean setting back all the progress I had made by 10 steps. Self control at the age of 35 seems much easier to master than at late twenties.

But why? And What is the end-game?

Shuffling around, reorganising and even eliminating activities from daily life for physical well-being should be a no brainer. Undoing some damage from years of sedentary lifestyle is worthwhile. But to this individual running offers something more. I’ll borrow words from writer and marathon runner Haruki Murakami to try best explain with this Quote from What I talk about when I talk about running:

“I just run. I run in a void. Or maybe I should put it the other way: I run in order to acquire a void.”

Running to me is a meditative experience, simple yet profound. The act of traversing from one moment to the next with simple repeated movements on autopilot. Barely affected by external stimuli, embracing the inner void and letting the mind float from one random thought to another, be it insignificant or groundbreaking.

Ageing gracefully is a pretty attractive idea at this juncture of my life. Enjoying the delayed gratification of having self control and the discipline to run regularly is another. But the boundless joy and unadulterated exhilaration from running is almost incomparable to anything else and remains my primary motivation.

I made up a realistic goal to run at least 10 minutes a day as regularly as life would let me. A popular quote misattributed to Aristotle states “You are what you do repeatedly”. And at this point I’d like to be a consistent enthusiast jogger and enjoy this journey as much as I can.

Epilogue

I start running, my movement feels voluntary and controlled. Few seconds in, I switch from nasal breathing to mouth breathing, I like to believe it is not as bad as it used to be. A voice says my legs feel heavy as lead and it doesn’t feel any easier than it was the previous day. I retort that it won’t be half as fun if it were any easier and that it’s a good challenge to lose. Legs feel less heavy as time progresses, the economy of movement improves as I maintain my running form. Time and distance matter no longer as I embrace the void.

Thanks for reading. Even if you did scroll directly to the end, I still appreciate the effort.

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