Running in Slow Motion

I have started running again. Yes again. Believe me, if I had a fancy phone that would track my runs and publish it on Facebook, you would be getting my progress report complete with miles run, calories burnt, average speed and how far I've travelled around the world with my running; Kavisha has now travelled from Oslo to Timbuktu in 18 days, 23 hours and 57 seconds. That's just an illustration I don't run that fast. And why Timbuktu, for one it has a nice (read funny) ring to its name, don't you think so. I'm sure it's a lovely place and all, but I'm ashamed to admit that in my younger days I thought it was a make belief land. I can't be totally blamed though, if we were annoyed with someone we'd tell them to take a flight (actually a "flying + profanity rhyming with duck") to Timbuktu. "Timbuktu" was the new "Hell"; so can you now see the logic of it being mistaken for a make belief place.

So yes I was running for about four months till it got too cold to run outside; I am a master at making up excuses. At -15 degrees and slippery ice, people are still running outside here, I say their brains need to go under the scanner.
About 5 months ago when I heard the couch groaning and the phrase "I have nothing to wear" was fast becoming a prophecy about to come true, I got desperate. I was not yet ready to give up on my gastronomic indulgences, so when I stumbled on a running plan that promised to get me running for 30 minutes at the end of nine weeks, I thought, this is what I need. There were so many podcasts for this programme, I was getting dizzy with choices. Do I pick Laura with the nice and encouraging voice, or Dmitri who made a certain dictator from the world war 2 look like an angel. Yeah, I picked sweet Laura who understood my pain and urged me to keep going even though my legs were on fire and there were paramedics on standby thinking I was going to have a heart attack.

It was almost the end of summer when I started running; of course we have summers here, for a whole two months! My first run was, obviously, excruciating; I had to run for a whole minute at a stretch, followed by seven more of these minutes with recovery walks in between. And if your behind has been as much on the couch as mine has, that minute can be the worst minute of your life. But sweet Laura egged me on and told me that everything was going to be alright; I had no choice but to believe her.
Did I mention summers here are not always sun and hay, there is rain too, lots of it. And guess what, yes people here run in the rain too. I was inspired, and ran in the rain as well and was soaked right down to the last piece of clothing on my body. But I kept on, along with Laura, feeling exhilarated with the rain in my face and literally every inch of me (err... are the Laura references getting a little too gay, I'll stop)

While I was running outside I was under the illusion that I was running like the wind. And why wouldn't I, my heart was almost beating out of my chest, and my legs were just short of going up in flames (coyote and roadrunner style). But when temperatures started to drop I took to running inside a stadium, which has featured in an Olympics (yes, winter Olympics) and is about less than half a sprint away from my apartment. It was in there that I realised I wasn't actually "running". My "running" was at best "jogging", that too in slow motion. Inside the stadium which has a circular track, there were some people going past me more than three times in one lap. Either they were three spawns of the same mother or it was one person just running "fast". Not to be disheartened I told myself that I was still a newbie runner, with extra baggage, which is a huge slowing down factor.

There will be a time when I will run like the wind; if that's even possible, but isn't it oh so poetic.
So for now, I am going to pretend to be the fastest runner there ever was, for the half an hour I run for, breaking my own small records and probably a little bit of the ground I run on too.