Running

Like most others in their 20s I've also jumped on the running bandwagon over the past 8 months. Today when I reflect on it, it's become a part of who I am, without me realising it or not. I now wake up early for runs, a good part of my social life involves runs and other physically enduring activities, I've made good friends through running. In fact, running has substantially changed my attitude towards many small and big things in my life - I now don't drink alcohol anymore since I have to wake up early and I also don't want it to affect my run performance, which eliminates a certain kind of lifestyle completely. I also eat thinking in protein terms now, the Instagram algorithm has picked up on it and shows me mostly only run related content now, my weekends are now planned around long runs and rest days. Even the ways I think about my personal finance have shifted without me realising, I've started thinking of the money I spend on running as an investment into myself. If you'd asked me why I was spending all this on running, a while back, I would have said that I would never be this delulu.

Since most people pick up long-distance running, during a mid/quarter-life crisis, I've been the butt of a lot of these jokes, which led me to think, what led me to this running journey? Was this the result of me avoiding some sort of long lost childhood trauma, was this me searching for answers about my existence (basically some crisis I was experiencing)? But in all honesty, after a bit of thought I don't think it's any of the above, considering I'm in one of the most happiest phases in my life at the moment, and life has been pretty good for the most part.

What I realised running gives me though, that I was lacking earlier is - an avenue to keep setting up goals and challenges for myself. During the race of school and college which had milestones and goals setup for me like check-posts, I always knew what was next. However, post college, in this exploratory phase of my early career and life where I'm figuring out what I want my life to look like, in terms of location, lifestyle, career, etc – running makes me feel like I'm moving ahead in some life. Not that this phase of my life, is not taking me ahead, but it's kind of hard to convince my brain that, very often. But running, it feels like the harder I keep working, I can get the results I want. Where as life, needs to a bit more exploratory time to (hopefully) better understand myself and what I want the future to look like. Until then running 🫶