Running on roads
I had an epiphany during a run this week. It was Thursday morning; I woke up with an extremely bad dream. The dream felt so real that I woke up terrified. It was already noon, but I had planned to go for a run early that day. Things didn’t feel aligned, but I pushed myself to go for the run. I was frustrated, and I wanted to push myself hard that day. So I decided to go for an 8km run.
I put on my shoes and get outside, to see that the sun was shining bright. I changed my goal from running an 8km to running a 5km in under 30 mins. I haven’t been that fast in the past few weeks, so I wanted to take up that challenge. I slowly walked down the road to reach my starting point and I started crying internally! I had never seen so much traffic on these roads before. The road was jam-packed and bikes were fighting to go in the front by taking the footpath.
A bad mood, hot weather, & heavy traffic. I thought of an instance of going back to my home & just sleeping again. Somehow, I pushed myself to start the run & wanted to finish it faster than ever. I started running faster than usual, went through the standing cars & bikes multiple times, and jumped across a few potholes to finish the first lap. But I was exhausted for the second lap. I barely managed to run and somehow finished both laps successfully. I couldn’t finish 5km in under 30 minutes but still, I was super satisfied with the run. Why? Because I had a beautiful realisation during the run.
In this whole chaos, while running through the traffic I realised that running on roads is similar to flowing like water. Just like water, you just have to sense the smallest of the gaps and go through them to reach your destination. It doesn’t matter if it's a wide-open lane or a small pinhole, you just have to flow through both of them to reach the other side. The heavy traffic, sun, or the guy blocking your path cannot stop you from running. You either flow through them or crash and break through the obstacle in front of you. You just FLOW.
This is the reason I don’t prefer running on a treadmill. A treadmill is a controlled environment where things are laid out for you and you just keep running. Life is not the same, things keep coming at you & it's our job to flow through them and find out our way out of this chaos. Running on the road reminds me to flow like a water. And that's how I would always like to move (flow) in life.