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!