Running (1)

I've never thought there would come a day when not being able to run would be upsetting news to me.

Last September, I got myself a checkup, the usual sugar-cholesterol-kidney-I-forgot-another-one, which results I kind of expected because, well, you are (usually) what your lifestyle is. Everything is thankfully fine except, of course, for the bad cholesterol. All the delicious cookies and fried food have finally paid off!

I don't need the results to know that I should exercise regularly and eat good food, but I like that I now have the numbers from a doctor -- who spent years in med school learning important and hard stuff -- as a reminder. So now, as in latest by the following October, I really have to do better, right? (Ok, for the record, I do exercise and make effort to eat good food, just not consistently, because consistency requires discipline and willpower.)

So, October, November, December and January -- I spent a lot of my free time staring at my medical results and imagining myself on an exercise plan. And I did the occasional usual 10-20 minutes of yoga and TA and spent another 20 minutes cooling down while playing with my iPad because cooling down is important.

February -- I knew I wasn't fooling even myself. I probably burned a total of 57.3 calories from those exercises, and I'm not changing anything if this is the most that I do. So I started gathering my running shoes and socks -- which took another month, obviously -- and started running in March. The first three days were about 1km/day of running and walking, and it made me hate the world (even more).

But the internet came to my rescue. I read a lot of running stories, and one that managed to keep me going was by this person who says he doesn't schedule running the usual "three days a week". Instead, he aims "to run every day", only skipping them on days he needs rest or has an unavoidable event on his schedule. "Three days a week" makes it easier for us to put off exercise to "tomorrow" and eventually fall off the wagon.

So I half-forced myself to keep going on a three-day running + one-day yoga and TA + one-day rest cycle for the whole of March. And something magical happened in early April ---- I noticed my face got a little slimmer!

Oh. My. God. Guys, who cares about cholesterol levels or whatever's happening inside our bodies. Seriously, a slimmer face is a much bigger reward and motivation. People should have told me this in 2009, and I could have run a million kilometres by now!

But for the past two weeks, I've had to slow it down for a reason. And if I told my 2012 self that this would make me restless and unhappy, my 2012 self would have burned 300 calories from laughing about it alone.

To be continued.