*Taking cue from the Oatmeal's comic about why he runs, I thought it is best for me to post on why I run as well. It's a long story, so please bear with me on this one.
I believe that for many of us, if not for most of us, we need something, like an idea, or a thought, or a belief, or an activity, that we can hold on to, that we can put all of our energy and attention into, just so that we can make sense of why we are here. It's an existentialist crisis that I have been grappling with, and therefore I truly believe in such concept. I even have a metaphor for it: the waiting room. (We're all sitting in a waiting room, at a clinic, or a hospital - doesn't matter - and while waiting for our turn to go and meet the doctor, we do things to amuse ourselves, like flipping through the magazine (and a side note: it seems like all waiting rooms have terrible reading materials as if the people who made the waiting room hate the very people that they are holding up), or watching the TV (if there is one), or just sit and stare at all the other sickly people in desperate need of a health boost.)
And so, applying that metaphor to the real world, I see people go to war, shop for trendy clothes, have sex with gonorrhea-infested prostitute, gamble, jump off a flying airplane with parachute on their back, eat live octopus, pay ridiculous amount of money for a 'supposedly' exclusive house in an exclusive neighbourhood, ingest copious amount of designer drugs, and for some people like me: they run - just as a way to amuse themselves as they shuffle through this mortal coil called 'living' before death come calling. That is all the purpose to our sorry existence.
This entry is about why I run.
Three years ago, I met this girl. Admittedly, she was not the prettiest girl but she has a character that I really like, and after a while we became best friend. She was fun to be around - we had a lot of things to talk about, something that I imagine was an impossibility because I'm not very much the conversationalist type of person. It was, to put it simply, magical.
But at the same time as well, I was quite plump. A fat bastard if you may. So in early 2010, I decided to go for a jog every night at a sport complex near where I live. This decision, mind you, was made independent of me meeting this girl. It was a decision made because I got tired of being fat. (Get it? Tired of being fat. Ha!) So I started to jog, every night, with the outright intention of losing some weight and to stay in shape. I dream of the leaner body that I used to have when I weigh somewhere in mid-70 kilo. I never intended on taking running seriously. I wasn't even aware of the fact that there are people who take running seriously.
Well hello there...
Fast forward a few months later, with me still trudging slowly around the track doing 4 rounds maximum, every night, things start to become serious between this girl and I. We were taking the relationship to the next level. Or the second base. Or whatever else you call - I have no idea. We texted feverishly almost every day and every waking hour.
We were madly in love.
And since it's two grown-ups who are in a steady relationship that we are talking about here, normally the topic of settling down becomes a regular feature in our discourse. I was madly in love with this girl, so I was ready to dive in. (Ready to dive in? Easy there, tiger.) She too seemingly was taking the whole issue quite seriously. I thought: this is it.
You know that when you're in a relationship, you will occasionally have this little bug called tiff? So the same goes between me and this girl - the small ones. I take it as a sign that we both had a good relationship because little fights like this actually brings people even closer. But little did I know that this tiff would actually snowball to something very big...
If there is one thing about being in a relationship that I never get to fully master, or completely clueless about, is how to make the relationship last. I'll freely admit it - I'm a failure. I still am. If this is like doing your degree at a university, I am now into my extended ninth semester and graduation is almost definitely a no-hoper.
So one thing lead to another, and this girl started to distance herself from me. I can feel it - there was no more that intimacy, or even friendliness in the tone of her text, or in phone calls, and when we meet occasionally, I can see that she has built an invisible wall between us. It was painful.
And much, much more painful because I did not know exactly how and where it went wrong.
One day, I receive a text asking me to come over to her house because she wanted to return something to me. (She had borrowed something from me earlier) So I drove over to her house (she was staying with her parents), we had a little chat but she was very distant and very cold, it was very awkward. Incidentally, all of this difficult phase that I was going through did not stop me from going for my nightly jog. I still jog because it's the only time and place and thing that makes me feel like a sane person. Even for a while.
Then the text stopped coming in. For good. I knew by then that the relationship was over. It was very cruel of her to just switch me off like that, but I probably deserve it. I have done the same thing myself to other people. How stupid of me. That was when I got to one of the lowest point in my life. I started to have existential crisis again. But then...
This is what we call a foreshadowing
A few months later, I learned through my officemate that this girl has got engaged with another guy and they are going to get married in three month's time. That was when I blew my head off.
I was properly, savagely, furiously, pissed off. I was pissed off at her, at myself, at every single living and breathing human being. I got angry with the whole world. Every morning on my drive to work, whenever I see a fellow driver in another car, I will mutter: "fuck you". When I queue up at the cafe to get my lunch, I will curse at every single person in front of me for being slow and indecisive. Even watching shows that I love (Top Gear UK being one) has lost its fun. The jokes are no longer funny. I have become, in every sense of the word: the grumpy cat.
Fuck you too, little-known blogger that nobody gives a fuck about
In all that anger, my existential crisis too comes about hard and fast. I could no longer muster a single reason as to why I should continue living.
All of this while, while I was nursing my hurt feeling, the jogging still continues. But somehow through all this anger and pain, I had only started to increase the intensity of my jog - and I went from jogging to actually running. The tiredness and being out of breath at the end of the run makes me feel alive. That's how it was like for two months - first begin with a slow jog, then when the pain kicks in, I increase the intensity of my jog. Every time a painful thought pops up, I pick up my speed. And long before I knew it - I am actually running. I was no longer jogging. That was when I realized that anger is an extraordinary boost of energy. Not even a Powerbar gel comes close to it because the energy boost is immediate and lasts much longer.
It feels addictive - but in a good way because this fix makes me feel good (or relieved - like after taking a huge dump), and it makes me healthier. So I started to run instead of jogging, and to cut a long story short (not that it's not a very short story to begin with), I started to take run seriously. I joined races, I pay attention to my training regime, my daily food intake, my choice of running shoes, and the amount of time that I clock every time I go for a run.
Suddenly my life has a meaning again. Running has given my life a meaning. Now, more than ever, I enjoy and revel in my running, and hence out of that it gave birth to this blog - and this blog too has now become a part of the meaning to my life. This is the only thing that keeps me going strong nowadays. There are times when I reflected upon the question: "Is there any more reason as to why I should keep on living?"
And I always come up with: "At least I can still run."
