I'm Lovin' It!

“Let your home be your mast and not your anchor.”

- Khalil Gibran

 
I don’t have a firm running routine, except one - I must run some every day. It is particularly hard on the body to maintain this target. I do admit to faltering once or twice a week on the target for various reasons. Family and friend support is not one of them.

I am lucky to have a family that has overlooked my craze to punish my body on daily basis. My mum, forever with her CFO hat on, was not very happy initially. She once told me that it was nothing short of craziness to spend money flying across cities, and some even across the globe, to just run on the road. “What’s wrong with the road outside our house?” she once asked me. She has come to grip now and accepted that running fanatics have little value for such logic.

Straddling the routines of two young boys, one of them barely 7 months, is as good a test of endurance as they come. If it was not for my wife, who herself is a working professional, I would be changing diapers through the night and catching up on sleep in the morning. Since she manages the younger one through the night and leaves the easier task, though sometime hairsplitting, of getting elder one ready for school to me, I’ve been able to run regularly. Lately, and this worries me, she has gone a step ahead. She now regularly keeps a check on my food intake and has taken it upon herself to give me a diet worthy of professional long distance runner. I reckon I will need to increase my mileage in order to survive this extra love and care. I am loving it, though.

A word for my friends – my running mates - who have encouraged me. It takes a lot of character to keep pace with slower runners and I salute those who sacrificed their pace to push me along. I hope I pay some of it forward. Special thanks to my good friend Nafay Kumail for being my unflinching proxy at Airtel Pre-race Expo year on year to collect my running bib and goodie bag. All this for a very reasonable charge of a couple of hours of my time and a double shot of Americano.

P.S: Last weekend was yet another reminder that my Punjabi genes are losing their intensity. I dined at Punjabi by Nature with some office colleagues. Based on prior experience of the calorific food preparation at this restaurant I kept my servings extra extra small. However, to no avail. My stomach caved in, leaving me with 2 days of running down time.