Lessons from Running – Part 1

Today I completed my first 10km run ever. I ran it in a little over 57 mins. If you asked me a month ago I would have said that was impossible for me to do, and here we are. Last month one of my friend said that he was taking part in a 5 km charity run and asked me if I wanted to join. Without hesitation I said yes. Little did I know what was in store for me.

I did not check if the weather was good, if I was in a good physical condition or whether I can simply finish the race. I simply showed up to the race. I had one of the biggest surprises that day. It was snowing that day and right before the race started it started hailing, and yes I almost forgot about our dear Canadian friend, the wind of course who was blowing just shy of 45km/hr of pure awesomeness. But guess what, I ran, and so did a lot of other people. This silly weather was not going to stop us.

That’s when I realized, a lot of people talk about doing things, but the stupid word I gave to my friend was actually a boon in disguise. Sometimes doing stupid things does lead to awesome results. I was afraid to fail, but I still kept on doing it. I finished the race in 31 minutes that day.

One of my most memorable races was a race that I ran was at my time in CIRS (Chinmaya International Residential school). I was a freshman at that time and we had a tradition of annual sports meet competition between the different houses in the school. The school is divided into 4 houses based upon the color red, green, yellow and blue. We have names for each house but let’s not get into that today. At that time my house the color red was looking for people to participate in the races. I volunteered to run in the 100m and 200m events. By the way I was already pretty good at running short distances at that point in my life, But I had never run long distance. Someone suggested to put my name in 1500m, simply because there was no one else in our house who could do it. No one expected anything out of me, heck even I did not expect to finish the race. But the experience of running that race and the things that I learned that day still makes my hair trickle when I think what happened in that race.

Right before the race started some seniors gave me salt and said to put it in my mouth, they said it would help in running long distance. Of course it doesn’t, but I was naive and I was new to the school so I took it. That was the first lesson of the day I learned. Never try to please everyone. I started the race pretty good. And ran a couple of laps when I heard someone from the other house yell that that it was the last round of the race. I started accelerating and was puzzled why my competition wasn’t doing the same. To my horror I realized that I got duped by a rival house. It was actually the 2nd last lap of the race That was the second lesson of the day I learnt. Never trust a rival house. In life there are people who want you to fail more than people that want you to succeed. Find them and eradicate them from your life. But the third and the most important lesson that I learnt that day made the other 2 lessons feel like it was worth it.

That’s all folks for this post. In the second part, I will talk about how that day went down and the last and the one of the most important lesson that I had learned.