The next time someone tell you, that anyone can run, stare at him hard, so hard that he melts down, and confesses that there is an asterisk- 'Conditions Do Apply.' Running is an act of exploding into the maximum speed your heart can support and your legs can sustain, and stopping when the target is well past you. Till I was 20, even I lived under a blissful fallacy that I could run. A few sprints against J taught me that:
a. Not everyone can run
b. Not everyone knows how to run
And although I didn't start running seriously till I was 22, since that day, I respected this sport like no other. I would nod with empathy in direction of people who could conjure a 100m dash out of nowhere. Not everyone can run, because running on a regular basis requires more motivation than any other sport. Not everyone knows how to run. Look closely, mostly, they are tapping their heel on the ground rather than ball of the foot.
I often imagine myself being interviewed by a fitness magazine: "What's your favorite exercise?"
Without losing a moment, I will answer "Sprinting"
"Do you like sprinting?"
I fucking hate it.
"Why do you sprint then?"
Because when the act is over, I feel like I could uppercut even God if he came my way.
What I say may or may not be supported by every runner. But I have a feeling that it stands ground. When you make way to the track, every nerve in your body will try to dissuade you from doing it, screaming about the futility and pointlessness of the act you are going to perform. Maybe because sprinting needs every muscle in the body to work at its maximum intensity. Maybe it brings back the primordial fear of being chased by raging saber-tooth. But, I will bet my money on the fact that the moment you finish your last sprint, your vitality notches up by a level or two. Your heart might be screaming for breath, but it's also filled with exaltation that you are still alive. Maybe I am getting too menstrual over here, but the point is this, "Before you start, you hate a sprint because it brings you as close as you can consciously get to a near death experience. When you are done, you love sprinting, because, it makes you feel that you have overcome a colossal obstacle. All your headaches become too frivolous to matter (more about this in Thinking man's blues)."
For this reason, sprinting has become a pillar on which my routine stands. You can imagine how staid routines get. Just as all drops coming out of a leaky faucet look indistinguishable, your activities too tend to be forgettable. Look the other way, and you won't miss anything. That's how it is for most of my sprints, bland at best. But in this spate of blandness, following two incidents stand out, first one simply because I came to know that twisting your ankle is not the only way you can get hurt while sprinting, the second one, because in my dazed state, I mistook a stupid idea for an epiphany.
Before we go ahead, a word from Jester of Sodomia, "Want to make something profound, darling? Why, go ahead, just add blues at the end of it..."
Survival Instinct Blues
The first one was 60ft. above ground, the next one 30ft. and the latest one right on flat ground. The closer I seem to be getting to earth, dumber my close shaves with skull cracking injuries are getting. I would have kept it to myself, had it not given me a chance to flaunt about my machoness (and idiocy).
a. Not everyone can run
b. Not everyone knows how to run
And although I didn't start running seriously till I was 22, since that day, I respected this sport like no other. I would nod with empathy in direction of people who could conjure a 100m dash out of nowhere. Not everyone can run, because running on a regular basis requires more motivation than any other sport. Not everyone knows how to run. Look closely, mostly, they are tapping their heel on the ground rather than ball of the foot.
I often imagine myself being interviewed by a fitness magazine: "What's your favorite exercise?"
Without losing a moment, I will answer "Sprinting"
"Do you like sprinting?"
I fucking hate it.
"Why do you sprint then?"
Because when the act is over, I feel like I could uppercut even God if he came my way.
What I say may or may not be supported by every runner. But I have a feeling that it stands ground. When you make way to the track, every nerve in your body will try to dissuade you from doing it, screaming about the futility and pointlessness of the act you are going to perform. Maybe because sprinting needs every muscle in the body to work at its maximum intensity. Maybe it brings back the primordial fear of being chased by raging saber-tooth. But, I will bet my money on the fact that the moment you finish your last sprint, your vitality notches up by a level or two. Your heart might be screaming for breath, but it's also filled with exaltation that you are still alive. Maybe I am getting too menstrual over here, but the point is this, "Before you start, you hate a sprint because it brings you as close as you can consciously get to a near death experience. When you are done, you love sprinting, because, it makes you feel that you have overcome a colossal obstacle. All your headaches become too frivolous to matter (more about this in Thinking man's blues)."
For this reason, sprinting has become a pillar on which my routine stands. You can imagine how staid routines get. Just as all drops coming out of a leaky faucet look indistinguishable, your activities too tend to be forgettable. Look the other way, and you won't miss anything. That's how it is for most of my sprints, bland at best. But in this spate of blandness, following two incidents stand out, first one simply because I came to know that twisting your ankle is not the only way you can get hurt while sprinting, the second one, because in my dazed state, I mistook a stupid idea for an epiphany.
Before we go ahead, a word from Jester of Sodomia, "Want to make something profound, darling? Why, go ahead, just add blues at the end of it..."
Survival Instinct Blues
The first one was 60ft. above ground, the next one 30ft. and the latest one right on flat ground. The closer I seem to be getting to earth, dumber my close shaves with skull cracking injuries are getting. I would have kept it to myself, had it not given me a chance to flaunt about my machoness (and idiocy).
IIM Indore has much to boast about. We are regularly covered in media for drug scandals, sexual harrassment cases , a murder, and financial misappropriation. Sadly a running track is not one of its bragging rights. With search for one not yielding much, i settled for an uneven grassland in campus, with trees grown at random spots. Cutting across the trees, was a strip of ground about 60-70m in length, good enough for my sprints.
I have been sprinting on this strip for past 6 months or so, and it has never let me down.The pattern is predictable. Reach the spot, check the take-off strip for stones and holes, take care of them, run like drunkard, walk back sober. Repeat.
That night (I am a night runner, straining my limbs early in the morning is anathema to me), when I surveyed the track, I found that some asshole dug up a hole 20m short of my finishing line. Most likely the gardener. Keeping up with the fuck it- fix it policy of the college, he has a knack of planting trees on most random spots, so that 10 years down the line, the college has to hire cranes to uproot those very trees.
Filling up the hole would have wasted some time, as the soil surrounding it was already leveled off. So to steer clear of this hole, changing the angle of run seemed to be the only option. Before I drumbeat my misadventure, there's something you should know about my running style. I wasn't joking when I said I run like a drunkard. The acceleration phase of your run requires your head bent down, barely looking a few steps ahead. Only in the maintenance phase do I look above. All the while, my arms are flailing like dead worm in sparrow's beak. Not particularly easy on the eyes, but it keeps your body loose, and helps you get into the rhythm. The "hunched head" pose, where I look just about 3 ft. ahead of my shoes, lasts for about 50m. How do I know that 50m have passed? A tree at this distance, falls just within my peripheral vision and as soon as I register it, it's my cue to raise up the head.
Back to the 'change the angle' part. Tonight my track had changed, but I forgot to change my running style. Looking straight into my shoes, which were no longer pointing towards their usual direction, I shot off. My mind failed to account that there won't be any tree to guide me tonight. That was because I was running towards the tree tonight!! Although I had planned to scrape by the tree, somewhere along the sprint, the angle altered subtly, and suddenly my lighthouse comes right in front of me. On top of it, I register the tree barely 3 feet from it. At my speed, changing track was not an option. But miraculously, my hands, as if they were detached from my mind, came in front of me, shoved the bark to push my body aside. Staggering, I run for 5 paces before tripping knees first into the ground. I rise up immediately, taking stock of damage. Except from some bad lacerations on my knees, not much. My palms, my only body part that made full contact with the tree weren't even scratched.
Immediately I turn around, there were 9 more sprints left. Not completing them wasn't even an option. Rationality dictated that I should call it quits, but my big ego spurred my wobbly knees into action. Admittedly, my sprints that night were far from satisfactory. The speed was restrained because in my mind the collision scene was played and replayed. Every time I walked back to the starting point, I weighed the possibility of a crushed skull. What would my situation have been. Lying on the ground, bleeding, would I have heard my mother's voice, reprimanding me softly, "Tera kya karoon main khote? (What should I do of you, Jackass?), or would I have imagined J pointing at me laughing his ass off? Well as Roland once said, "We'll burn that bridge, when we reach that bridge." These questions were to be answered once their time came. Me, I was still on the track, heading for another run.
After-burn: Three months have passed, and I still boast a scarred knee. I wish this scar lasts my lifetime (most probably it won't). From that day on, I took special interest in that tree. Although unremarkable due to its abundance in M.P., it is a beautiful keshu tree. It sprouts bright red flowers between December and March. It is one of the trees you come across everyday, but barely take a moment to notice. But once you notice, you realize how well it complements the scenery. In this case the tree looked like an angry fireball erupting from the ground, a welcome distraction from the banal green that had almost hijacked the scenery. What a thrill it would be to pick up an axe and cut this killer from its bark. Or see it getting uprooted by a crane 10 years from now.
Thinking man's blues
Some men like hunting,
some men like fishing
some men like to hear,
to hear the cannon balls roaring,
me I like sleeping,
especially in my Molly's chambers - Whiskey in the Jar (Metallica)
Time and again, we come across a cliche, that seems so smooth, that you almost want to believe it blindly. But scratch it a bit, and you find fluff beneath its surface. It was an November evening, when we were being shown Steve Jobs' legendary Stanford speech, a small 15 minute piece that held our class's attention as raptly as it did for the Stanford's outgoing batch. The guy's words carried immense weight, perhaps the conviction he lent to those words had something to do with it. In the last 5 minutes of his speech, he quoted "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It was one of the quotes that had outlived its authors, not even Steve Jobs could recall where he heard it from. But it was something everyone (including me) desperately wanted to believe in. The girl sitting next to me wondered out a loud if she was the only one getting goosebumps in the room, I assured her she wasn't. When the speech was over, the participants emptied the hall silently, still deep in their thoughts about what they had heard.
Later in the evening, when I was heading for my sprints, that particular statement was still sticking out in my mind, irking me like a fishing hook. I am person with a narrow bandwidth of exercises, any movement that requires a complicated sequence of motion confuses me. So I stick to work-outs that you have to be a retard to do wrong (Hint: Even a retard can run like a fart-fire if a swarm of hornets is chasing him); and although I can write a bible or two exalting the physical benefits of sprinting, it is the mental aspect of this exercise that amazes me.
No matter how lousy day I have had, sprinting is a mental flush that washes all the worries away. It's like a sieve. Thoughts pour in at one end, leave bullshit behind and only a black and white picture stays in front of you. But you don't think anything while you are running. The moment you push your body forward for running, a frame freezes inside your mind, and shatters only when you reach the finish line. Only then do thoughts come back; a trickle when you are walking back to the starting line, gushing when you take a stance for another run, pausing back again when you shoot yourself towards the finish line. But with every walk towards starting point, these thoughts get blunted, you think something over and declare it to be pointless. More and more things to care less about. Lousy day - Couldn't care more, Life after college - Will care when its time comes, Forever broke tune that rankles your insides - belongs to some other lifetime.
It's in this state that intricate knots in your mind start opening themselves, you realize that all the 'living everyday like your last' concept is a castle on sand, good to look at but with shaky foundations. If this was actually your last day on earth, you would be living it so recklessly that you may not even be able to make it through half a day. You will be killing people you hold grudges against, banging (or more appropriately raping) girls way out of your league, biting their tits off and swallowing them with booze as old as your long dead great grandmother. No you can't afford to live everyday as if it's your last.
It was in this state that I thought that I could teach Steve Jobs, a thing or two about evaluating life (Sprint breeds cockiness). I call this 'The only man alive' epiphany. If you were the last person alive, will you still be doing the things you are currently doing? The logic was that, many daily things are simply matter of keeping up appearances, or showing off everyone that you exist. When no one is alive to observe your actions, you will be living a different life altogether. After all, how many times do you look into the mirror on weekends, that will be spent lying on couch. Will you still dress up in your best clothes, eating exotic food in far-flung places, while flashing million dollar smiles for pics to be uploaded on facebook?
I hardly think so. In fact, apart from usual foraging for food in a predictable territory, your adventurous emotions will burst out only when you are bored by a scenery. Perhaps, I won't working out (and sprinting) because there won't be anyone telling me I look younger for my age. "Passive entertainment and Survival" may become your life motto (at least I imagine myself in this mode), wherein you entertain yourself with the things that need minimum effort. Imagine yourself, rummaging through books in a deserted library, stealing the ones you like, reading them lying in a vast grassland. Or watching the movies and listening to music as and when you find them. Or setting fire to monuments, museums and paintings that carry no meaning because there are no spectators. Hoarding the things that are needed for survival, discarding or destroying the rest. A heavenly mirage. But mirage nonetheless.
Gasping for breath, while I walked back to my room that day, I thought I found out the secret of happiness. That was until sober thoughts began to fill up the vacuum created by sprints. Is the thought of living like last person alive, any more realistic than living like it's your last day? Not unless, you live in Siberia, or a Nordic country, where population is thinly spread. Not in a place, where the moment you turn your head, you'll bump into another person. How you live is a function of your internal thought process and the circumstances people around you create. These forces battle it out, and give decide your territory. Shove people away and your territory expands, let them prevail, you lose out your privileges. Like a world of bubbles pressing against each other, each bubble expands only as much as the air inside it and the bubbles surrounding it want. So, it may come to mind that, if several bubbles are removed, the rest may expand to what the air inside them allows. But what if they don't. what if the only reason they had grown their size was to counter the pressure surrounding them. And now with that pressure lost, they will simply stay in their place, waiting for the nature to prick them. What if, given the choice of doing anything you can in a world without people, you are at complete loss for what you are going to do. What if the only thing that kept you going was the gallery surrounding you, giving you cues when you were clueless, applauding when you dance to its tune, chiding when you deride it. Gallery exists, more for some people and less for others, but it exists. Some may choose to dance, some may shrug it off. But at some point, everyone has to bow and give it a little respect. Wishing it away, may seem out to be a fun idea, but unless, you have a bucket list to last a lifetime, you may end up being the lone swimmer in the ocean, who, wavering for a week about which way to go, decides to swim towards the depth....
Filling up the hole would have wasted some time, as the soil surrounding it was already leveled off. So to steer clear of this hole, changing the angle of run seemed to be the only option. Before I drumbeat my misadventure, there's something you should know about my running style. I wasn't joking when I said I run like a drunkard. The acceleration phase of your run requires your head bent down, barely looking a few steps ahead. Only in the maintenance phase do I look above. All the while, my arms are flailing like dead worm in sparrow's beak. Not particularly easy on the eyes, but it keeps your body loose, and helps you get into the rhythm. The "hunched head" pose, where I look just about 3 ft. ahead of my shoes, lasts for about 50m. How do I know that 50m have passed? A tree at this distance, falls just within my peripheral vision and as soon as I register it, it's my cue to raise up the head.
Back to the 'change the angle' part. Tonight my track had changed, but I forgot to change my running style. Looking straight into my shoes, which were no longer pointing towards their usual direction, I shot off. My mind failed to account that there won't be any tree to guide me tonight. That was because I was running towards the tree tonight!! Although I had planned to scrape by the tree, somewhere along the sprint, the angle altered subtly, and suddenly my lighthouse comes right in front of me. On top of it, I register the tree barely 3 feet from it. At my speed, changing track was not an option. But miraculously, my hands, as if they were detached from my mind, came in front of me, shoved the bark to push my body aside. Staggering, I run for 5 paces before tripping knees first into the ground. I rise up immediately, taking stock of damage. Except from some bad lacerations on my knees, not much. My palms, my only body part that made full contact with the tree weren't even scratched.
Immediately I turn around, there were 9 more sprints left. Not completing them wasn't even an option. Rationality dictated that I should call it quits, but my big ego spurred my wobbly knees into action. Admittedly, my sprints that night were far from satisfactory. The speed was restrained because in my mind the collision scene was played and replayed. Every time I walked back to the starting point, I weighed the possibility of a crushed skull. What would my situation have been. Lying on the ground, bleeding, would I have heard my mother's voice, reprimanding me softly, "Tera kya karoon main khote? (What should I do of you, Jackass?), or would I have imagined J pointing at me laughing his ass off? Well as Roland once said, "We'll burn that bridge, when we reach that bridge." These questions were to be answered once their time came. Me, I was still on the track, heading for another run.
After-burn: Three months have passed, and I still boast a scarred knee. I wish this scar lasts my lifetime (most probably it won't). From that day on, I took special interest in that tree. Although unremarkable due to its abundance in M.P., it is a beautiful keshu tree. It sprouts bright red flowers between December and March. It is one of the trees you come across everyday, but barely take a moment to notice. But once you notice, you realize how well it complements the scenery. In this case the tree looked like an angry fireball erupting from the ground, a welcome distraction from the banal green that had almost hijacked the scenery. What a thrill it would be to pick up an axe and cut this killer from its bark. Or see it getting uprooted by a crane 10 years from now.
Thinking man's blues
Some men like hunting,
some men like fishing
some men like to hear,
to hear the cannon balls roaring,
me I like sleeping,
especially in my Molly's chambers - Whiskey in the Jar (Metallica)
Time and again, we come across a cliche, that seems so smooth, that you almost want to believe it blindly. But scratch it a bit, and you find fluff beneath its surface. It was an November evening, when we were being shown Steve Jobs' legendary Stanford speech, a small 15 minute piece that held our class's attention as raptly as it did for the Stanford's outgoing batch. The guy's words carried immense weight, perhaps the conviction he lent to those words had something to do with it. In the last 5 minutes of his speech, he quoted "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It was one of the quotes that had outlived its authors, not even Steve Jobs could recall where he heard it from. But it was something everyone (including me) desperately wanted to believe in. The girl sitting next to me wondered out a loud if she was the only one getting goosebumps in the room, I assured her she wasn't. When the speech was over, the participants emptied the hall silently, still deep in their thoughts about what they had heard.
Later in the evening, when I was heading for my sprints, that particular statement was still sticking out in my mind, irking me like a fishing hook. I am person with a narrow bandwidth of exercises, any movement that requires a complicated sequence of motion confuses me. So I stick to work-outs that you have to be a retard to do wrong (Hint: Even a retard can run like a fart-fire if a swarm of hornets is chasing him); and although I can write a bible or two exalting the physical benefits of sprinting, it is the mental aspect of this exercise that amazes me.
No matter how lousy day I have had, sprinting is a mental flush that washes all the worries away. It's like a sieve. Thoughts pour in at one end, leave bullshit behind and only a black and white picture stays in front of you. But you don't think anything while you are running. The moment you push your body forward for running, a frame freezes inside your mind, and shatters only when you reach the finish line. Only then do thoughts come back; a trickle when you are walking back to the starting line, gushing when you take a stance for another run, pausing back again when you shoot yourself towards the finish line. But with every walk towards starting point, these thoughts get blunted, you think something over and declare it to be pointless. More and more things to care less about. Lousy day - Couldn't care more, Life after college - Will care when its time comes, Forever broke tune that rankles your insides - belongs to some other lifetime.
It's in this state that intricate knots in your mind start opening themselves, you realize that all the 'living everyday like your last' concept is a castle on sand, good to look at but with shaky foundations. If this was actually your last day on earth, you would be living it so recklessly that you may not even be able to make it through half a day. You will be killing people you hold grudges against, banging (or more appropriately raping) girls way out of your league, biting their tits off and swallowing them with booze as old as your long dead great grandmother. No you can't afford to live everyday as if it's your last.
It was in this state that I thought that I could teach Steve Jobs, a thing or two about evaluating life (Sprint breeds cockiness). I call this 'The only man alive' epiphany. If you were the last person alive, will you still be doing the things you are currently doing? The logic was that, many daily things are simply matter of keeping up appearances, or showing off everyone that you exist. When no one is alive to observe your actions, you will be living a different life altogether. After all, how many times do you look into the mirror on weekends, that will be spent lying on couch. Will you still dress up in your best clothes, eating exotic food in far-flung places, while flashing million dollar smiles for pics to be uploaded on facebook?
I hardly think so. In fact, apart from usual foraging for food in a predictable territory, your adventurous emotions will burst out only when you are bored by a scenery. Perhaps, I won't working out (and sprinting) because there won't be anyone telling me I look younger for my age. "Passive entertainment and Survival" may become your life motto (at least I imagine myself in this mode), wherein you entertain yourself with the things that need minimum effort. Imagine yourself, rummaging through books in a deserted library, stealing the ones you like, reading them lying in a vast grassland. Or watching the movies and listening to music as and when you find them. Or setting fire to monuments, museums and paintings that carry no meaning because there are no spectators. Hoarding the things that are needed for survival, discarding or destroying the rest. A heavenly mirage. But mirage nonetheless.
Gasping for breath, while I walked back to my room that day, I thought I found out the secret of happiness. That was until sober thoughts began to fill up the vacuum created by sprints. Is the thought of living like last person alive, any more realistic than living like it's your last day? Not unless, you live in Siberia, or a Nordic country, where population is thinly spread. Not in a place, where the moment you turn your head, you'll bump into another person. How you live is a function of your internal thought process and the circumstances people around you create. These forces battle it out, and give decide your territory. Shove people away and your territory expands, let them prevail, you lose out your privileges. Like a world of bubbles pressing against each other, each bubble expands only as much as the air inside it and the bubbles surrounding it want. So, it may come to mind that, if several bubbles are removed, the rest may expand to what the air inside them allows. But what if they don't. what if the only reason they had grown their size was to counter the pressure surrounding them. And now with that pressure lost, they will simply stay in their place, waiting for the nature to prick them. What if, given the choice of doing anything you can in a world without people, you are at complete loss for what you are going to do. What if the only thing that kept you going was the gallery surrounding you, giving you cues when you were clueless, applauding when you dance to its tune, chiding when you deride it. Gallery exists, more for some people and less for others, but it exists. Some may choose to dance, some may shrug it off. But at some point, everyone has to bow and give it a little respect. Wishing it away, may seem out to be a fun idea, but unless, you have a bucket list to last a lifetime, you may end up being the lone swimmer in the ocean, who, wavering for a week about which way to go, decides to swim towards the depth....
