Half-baked Marathons…

Or, how i’m gonna try running 21km with no training

Tomorrow is a day I face with some trepidation. Other useful descriptions include expectation, anticipation, dawning alarm, alarming indifference… but trepidation pretty much averages it out and sums it up.

Reason: It’s the half-marathon tomorrow, and despite having it labeled prominently on my calendar, somehow it must have slipped between the cracks of my foggy mind. Every procrastinating reason aside, the simple fact remains that I’ll be at the starting line in about six hours. Eek!

Now, 21 km isn’t actually so bad (not that I’ve done it before). Anybody in reasonably good health can run/walk that distance. It’s just that
1. I’ve never run more than 10km before, and more importantly
2. I’ve got pride/self-esteem tied up in this and want a respectable time and 3. I don’t want to suffer too much and limp half-dead over the finish line.

So, my fault for missing the Sunday morning runs with dad’s running club (how do people twice my age wake up so early?!), and my fault for studiously avoiding the idea and not training.

Which brings me to WHY am I not training, despite knowing I have to run this tomorrow, and knowing that I want to do a full marathon in December. Why this strange inability to carry out a well-laid intention to fulfill one of my personal goals for this year?

A conversation with my sister comes to mind. She was commenting on a typical runner during a typical timed race: usually head down, heaving/gasping/panting, entirely focused on the burning goal of completing within a desired time limit, with absolutely no interest in looking at the pretty scenery around them! How Type-A, how competitive, how boring! And of course I agreed, because deep-down I’m pretty sure that I’m an Aesthetic Runner.

A what? Aesthetic Runners (I’ve just coined this term…) are people who can only run when the air is fresh, and the environs are beautiful. The type of runner who looks up and around, stops to smell the flowers, has a smile on her face. The runner who’s there mainly for the experience of running, and all the surroundings and people she encounters along the way. This sort of runner is likely to run fast and fluid while happy, and exceedingly indifferently otherwise.

This might explain why I seldom, and almost never pant or feel short of breath while running – this would disrupt the smooth, happy, easy flow. Correspondingly it means I could probably run faster or in better time if I increase the speed enough to warrant gasping for breath. Ah well. It also explains why I’m fairly indifferent and spotty about training – I’d only go for ‘training sessions’ that give me maximum aesthetic pleasure. So the usual training grounds – running tracks, routes with heavy morning traffic, residential and populated areas – are out. And quieter, more nature-y places I sometimes prefer to walk through, because there’s more enjoyment that way.

(Methinks as well: how much of this post is an attempt at pointing the finger away from the more typical culprits of procrastination and laziness? Hmm…)

Okay enough musings. Off to bed so lack of sleep doesn’t become an excuse either!

Update:
So I did it in 2 hours and 34 minutes after all! The road was ridiculously clogged with army boys forced to run the 21km, so I spent a good deal of time in the initial hour ducking around strolling and chatting walkers. Grr! That said, a pretty parts included the beach (which allowed me run off-road and ease the poor aching feet) and running across the Marina Battery and Sheares Bridge. The toughest stretch was this horrible dirt road, potholed and muddy, in the middle of nowhere (read: ugly scenery). I almost cried when I realized it lasted only two km, because I was so sure it must have been almost 5! But all in all, a good run. No injuries or icky black toes (or burst nipples – thank you, Claire, for that memorable warning…), aside from an inflamed jaw (!) and diarrhoea (!!). I’m now signed up for the December full marathon… wish me luck!

Enemies of Willpower

Or, how I attempted to write an Important Blog Post but delayed it over and over again, and decided to write about my attempt to write instead…

Willpower is a strange strange thing. One can spend all day prepping for it, cajoling it out of its hidey-hole, building it up piece by piece in preparation for some project … then it disappears just when you need it, abducted by its evil twin, Apathy, heralding the appearance of its cousin, Guilt.

Guilt and Apathy co-exist rather uneasily. Their alliance is necessarily infected by the truism of ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’, but really, they are cats of different stripes. Guilt is a nervous, high-strung and disorganised individual, swinging between extremes of anxious nagging and studious avoidance. Apathy is a chill-out laid-back comfortable depressive who yo-yos gently between mild dissatisfaction and insensate listlessness. Guilt will say lots of things but won’t do anything. Apathy doesn’t do anything, period.

Guilt is a pest, Apathy is a bum. Their fundamental modus operandi aren’t aligned with each other, much less so their personalities. So by any rational thought, Guilt and Apathy ought to be nemeses. How did they get inducted into the same dark brotherhood, set in opposition to the shining light of Willpower?

Perhaps because both are resistant to change. At its most basic, Willpower is the intent to inflict and engage in change. Change requires more effort than status quo, but Guilt is too scared and Apathy is too lazy.

While there’s no change on the horizon, all three probably fall into an equilateral triangle, like this:
(all oppose each other to some equal degree)

But once Guilt and Apathy sniff out any change that requires a significant amount of either courage or effort, the triangle quickly becomes isoceles, like this

And if these were vectors or forces in equilibrium, any beginning physics student will tell you that at any vertex in equilateral Fig. 1, the magnitudes of the vertical and horizontal components are equal, but in isoceles Fig. 2. the former is always more than the latter.

In other words, in Fig 1 (no change), Guilt, Willpower and Apathy are all fighting each other in an equal three-way battle. Once we get to Fig 2 (change), Guilt and Apathy might have mini internal bickerings, but are definitely united in an alliance against Willpower.

So the question is – how to make Guilt and Apathy fight each other instead? How to play off fundamental misalignments, incite dissent and leave Guilt and Apathy tangled up in each other so that Willpower has breathing space to act? How do we make the diagram look like this:

Anybody have any ideas?

Note: Before I wear out the personification and physics analogy (if there are glaring inconsistencies in the physics, please ignore them), here’s some background on these musings. Since going offline sometime in Feb, and on a rather questionable note , I wanted to write a post updating readers (if there are any left) about my life. Unfortunately I hit by, you guessed it, Apathy and Guilt!
And after writing about all that, I still haven’t written what I was going to write. Productive procrastination, indeed!

Hello World, redux

“Hello world!”

… after months of neglect, i’ll be writing in here again. there is a season to everything, and for a while it was time to lie fallow, to fall asleep, to hide. And as anybody who has had trouble waking up in the morning knows, getting up is tougher than falling into bed. It’s much easier to hit the snooze button and go right back asleep. But nobody can sleep forever… (apologies to readers who have been asking about what’s up with me – a case of ‘blog hypersomnia’!)

So, a little bit of action beats no action at all, and this post is a reminder/declaration that:

I want to say hello to the world! I’ll write something here again! I want to write about figuring out what to do with my life! Hopefully it’ll be meaningful, literary, wise, interesting! (but i’ll also settle for simple narrative and refrain from detailing my daily lunches and/or toothbrushing) Feel free to comment and chatter!

Hello world!

Inertia, Apathy, and the Risk-free life

Yesterday I wallowed in the half-asleep lethargy brought on by cold medicine, the kind that says ‘May cause drowsiness. Do not drive or operate machinery.’ It was my excuse for bumming around the house, desultorily surfing the net, refusing a short stint to relief-teach at a nearby school, rejecting all social invites, being generally brain-dead, dull, negative, dead.

Of course, I was under the weather and needed to rest, but what came as a quiet shock was that my day of sick rest was no different from my usual day! I repeated the same pattern of time-wasting, committing to nothing, creating nothing, just hanging around and maintaining my current immediate needs like food, Facebook chatter, emails, picking up around the house, job-searching and sleep.

Clearly, one hits a minima at some point, and I think I’ve hit mine.

There is no risk in my current life. Inertia and apathy comes about when there is no risk, and no fear, making me slide comfortably down to sleepy la-la-land. Which makes me realize that everything I’ve done before worth anything has been motivated by fear/insecurity/deadlines… in other words, no simple certainty of success, or risk.

Somewhere along the line I’ve forgotten what risk tastes like, and was content to chug along. End result: end up lazier, narrow, smaller, flying under the radar. And it’s an exponential decline from there.

So how to drag myself outta that muck? Actually, I exaggerate. Things aren’t that bad, with jobs and social life etc getting somewhere. The problem of inertia and apathy is actually located closer to the heart – the lethargy I feel when questioned about what I love and what I want to do, and the quiet little very sian feeling that it doesn’t really matter. Contrast this to my previous post where I swore that I must must must find a passion. I think I’m facing a slide into the Quester’s Apathy, or at least a questioning of the belief that I will find what I love.

Note to self: beliefs are often almost religious in nature. By this I mean, no matter how much rational and reason prop it up, there will always be a gap and you got to take the last leap of faith and say, regardless of anything, I believe!

On second thought, isn’t believing, beyond rhyme or reason, but the pure act of will, actually the greatest risk of all? The thought that I will find what I love, and I will jump into the abyss after it (if necessary), and f**k all notions of money, prestige, expectations, opinions?

I am still uncertain about my appetite for risk in life, especially in such large ideological doses. So let’s start small again. More in another post, on how to structure my day-to day life to bring about practical and manageable risk, and eliminate inertia!

Passion, and Responsibility

In the time-honored field of career counseling, they always tell you to ‘work from your passion’, because if you do what you love, any job becomes enjoyable, you’re willing to put in a lot more work, and hence that brings about a bigger chance of success, not to mention all the good stuff like personal fulfillment and growth.

Well, after quite a bit of soul-searching and equivalent avoidance, I realised that I don’t know what my passion is. Everything so far in my life has come very easily – the sequential progression through educational institutions, the various achievements. I never had to think about what to do, and naturally focused on the short-term objective of ‘doing what I’m doing now well’ instead of asking ‘why am I doing this, what do I want to do, and how do I do it?’ That’s not to say I didn’t love what I was doing, but that it wasn’t a conscious choice, it just happened.

So, in this day and age, where people are solidly divided into two camps, the practical ones and the idealists, what’s preventing me from following the former and chasing indicators of success like respectability, status, achievement, and wealth? Answer: I am, at heart, an idealist.

An idealist without a passion exists in a spiritual vacuum, like a chicken without a head (or heart). Not happy, and fundamentally frustrated. Toss in my perfectionism and you get inertia.

(Of course, there is a distinct possibility too, that subconsciously I do know what I would love to do, but am not willing to consciously admit it lest it withers under the glare of cold reality. But that’s the subject of another post)

So, goal time. I will instill in myself the belief that:

I will find what I love. I will keep searching and never settle until I find it.

I have to take the personal responsibility of laying the groundwork, looking for, and actually defining a passion to align my life with. Nobody’s going to present it nicely on a platter. In fact, passion is probably not found, but chosen. After all, where I am is the combined result of all my past choices. Where I will be depends on what I choose now.

With that, somehow I think I can rest easier. The stakes are lower now. I’m not looking for an eternal spiritual marriage with my career anymore (which hung me up over the past few months). I’m just looking for a job, while I dedicate myself to fulfilling all these idiosyncratic idealistic tendencies.

And if it comes to be that if I can’t define it soon, I ought to take heart in this quote by Joseph Campbell:

“I don’t believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive. “

So, Live!