Imagine that you are an uber driver. Your first ride at 5 am in the morning was booked by a brown guy to go to an establishment whose name ends in ‘Alehouse and Brewery.’ You are completely justified in assuming that this brown guy is an alcoholic. In fact, this happened to me three weeks ago when I booked an uber to go to white rock alehouse & brewery. My uber driver was confused and asked me “is it really open this early in the morning? Or you just go this early because you work there?” Maybe there’s a parallel universe where I learned how to brew a beer and landed a lucrative job in a brewery, but I had to break it to him that we are not in that universe, and that I am going there to run with my marathon training group. I did the same thing this morning again. If someone ever starts using my name as a verb, I hope it is to represent the act of “booking an uber ride to a brewery to run with a marathon training group”
Whenever I am running with other people, I have this disease
which turns me into a Chatty Cathy. So, I have been trying something new called
‘keeping my mouth shut’ lately, and I think it’s going well. I had to try this
primarily because the pace this group runs at takes some time for me to get
comfortable with. So, by keeping my mouth shut, I am not letting people in on
the fact that my calves hurt, my heart rate is a billion beats per minute and I
am secretly wishing that a truck hits me on the way so I can be relieved from
this. But I also have this flaw of being a naturally curious person. If a
conversation is going on around me which falls into my ears and gets processed
by my brain, it generates a billion questions and thoughts I get the urge to
put out, and when I put them out loud, I usually get weird looks and uncomfortable
laughs, and there you go, I have now dragged myself successfully into another
awkward social interaction my brain will randomly play on a lonely night ten
years from now. So, I came up with a brilliant solution for this problem, I just
run with music playing in earphones and I can’t hear the conversations around
me clearly. Checkmate.
The initial miles we ran today were very hilly, and I am not
very good at running hills. I was suffering at mile 2, I thought maybe I won’t make
it till the end today (The training group had to do a long run of 12 miles overall).
But after 5 miles, I got comfortable and was just floating along, matching the
stride of other runners mindlessly. We reached the brewery around the 12-mile
point, and a few runners were getting extra miles, so I tagged along with them to
run another 3 miles. Then I continued the run for another 2 solo miles to test
if my tired legs can maintain my target marathon pace. As it turns out, they are
capable of holding that pace, but they will be very annoyed and tired for rest
of the day. So, overall, I ran 17 miles this morning.
I have this habit of sharing my runs on Instagram with a nice
picture of whichever scene I find interesting during my run. I don’t do it to let
people know that I am better than them. I mainly do it for myself. I am proud
of the fact that I am running with strangers in a foreign country, which is a
big deal for someone who grew up unathletic and awkward in a small Indian town.
I have no clue how I reached this point; my theory is that I got sucked into a
black hole and it transported me here. But if someone asks me, I will have to
say things like “I worked hard, overcame a bunch of personal struggles, took
some gambles and here I am”, which is not a bad way of explaining it, but
definitely not the complete picture. There must be a reason why I am here, or
if there’s no reason, it means that people should stop asking such questions,
or else I will keep making up weird answers for them.
I actually didn’t share this run on Instagram; I have not
checked Instagram for a week now. It is because I am trying to move on from
someone I like very much, but who doesn’t have the capacity to reciprocate my
affection. For past few months, every run I post and every song I share on Instagram
has been partly to get her attention, just like how Gatsby threw lavish parties
to get the attention of Daisy. If both Gatsby and I ever meet in the brewery to
talk about this common behavior of us, we both will agree that life feels less
lonely when we have the attention of people we love. Then I will try to explain
to Gatsby that – it’s like she is Schrodinger and I am the cat, and I am both alive
and dead until the moment she notices me, at which point I definitely come to
life or die, depending on whether her attention had any hints of affection. I
guess this will get me the same confused look from Gatsby, that I get when I am
trying to make conversations while running with a group.
Anyhow, unlike Gatsby, I need to make the right choice of
moving on. Like I said, there must be a reason why I have embarked on this journey
of running marathons, and I wouldn’t figure it out if I can never get over
someone, who may happily erase my memories from her brain if she gets a chance.
So, my decision of taking a break from Instagram for 30 days is definitely the
right decision, and wow, I am already at day 5! I guess time flies when you are
writing random shit each day and calling it a journal.
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