26 Miles of Pain, A Lifetime of Bragging ...

That's how marathons have been marketed, and how true it is! These westerners are born with marketing heads!

For my own reasons, I am still not able to relate myself with a marathon run. On multiple thoughts, I think it is because marathon is so much about a challenge one throws to oneself, about doing something relatively superhuman (relative to oneself, I mean). In the physical endurance domain, it's highly aspirational.

My problem is that all through my three decades of existence, I have thrown harsh physical challenges at myself uncountable times, and achieved many of them with immense satisfaction, (infact, with Edwin Sir as the coach, even the warm-ups would be challenging sometimes)! So much so that the 'aspirational' attribute of running a marathon is too lilliputian to tempt me into running ... or as Nike put's it, " ... pounding the pavement ... or .. raking up those miles ...!"

I have found this theorem to be consistently true: not one person I know who was even remotely associated to playing a sport in IIT or at RKC has thought about attempting a marathon (the one's that keep showing up in all these metros). 

When I say, "... sport ...", I mean competetive sport, not recreational.

May be because metro-marathon running is more magnetic for those who have never attempted anything this physicall-crazy in life ... though they had all the chances (be a part of a sport, go through the draining training routines everyday, sustain injuries etc. etc.) to do so. Those who have been regular at sports in college or school seem to be more inclined to enjoy the 5km or 7km runs at these marathon events with colleagues and friends, assure themselves that they are still in good shape, and get back to homes.

There are other reasons why people run marathons: social-proof (everyone's doing it, I should try it as well); because it's the easiest way to get started in a sport (you just can't think, "I'm going to play football" ... and start doing it the next day); for a social cause; for personal physical goal-setting; for self-indulgence; or simply for the love of running. May be one day I will do it for these reasons (except the first two). Till then I have many other things to do: having a blast playing my daily football (and within 2 weeks, I should be able to master the Zidane 360 turn to baffle defenders running on either side of me); rediscovering the joys of playing hockey; cycling gleefully through Rajasthan!

Running, I feel, is like an arranged marriage. You get into it first mostly without a definitive purpose, and then you start falling in love. Running is utterly pleasing when you mean it to be ... and that's why I fail to perceive it as a sport. Sport, as I have always seen it, is much more than mere pleasure. It's like a war where all that matters is winning, and there's no concept of "runners-up". Sport is about fiery competing, having an opponent who brings his own set of mysterious constraints that one has to deal with, and tearing that opponent apart. There's nothing 'friendly' about sport! The day I find a reason to compete with the best runners in a marathon, I will devote my knees to 3 hours of tar-torture ... but I hope that day doesn't come. Until that day, marathon-runners will continue to simply amuse me with what they are doing to their joints.

Probably, the one thing that can really get me back to serious running would be the guarantee that I'll get to run on the crossy route within the IITB campus all through the monsoons :) Hopefully Sari could join me on those runs sometimes, or Issac could help me time the run on a borrowed cycle!