Pretty Huge Distance

My morning run is 1:20. My watch does not do distance so all I can give you is time. It will suffice. My goals are time goals of late. And its just important to get out and run (injury free). Its amazing how it gets rid of my niggling aches and pains (mental and physical), and irritations of the day and night before.

Which set me thinking, goals are all fine, but really what I want to aim for is to enjoy the process. As I suddenly contemplate my Ph.D., I cannot help think how it was a lot like distance running, but how it could have been more so, if I had only gotten the idea earlier.

Most of the time I was mucking around with codes and reading papers.

Usually, I am just hanging around running at any pace that gets set and any distance I feel like.

At some points, I felt exhilarated with my discoveries.

I have had, despite running only these piddly half marathon distances, enough times of genuine life clarifying moments as I run.

I very rarely followed a coherent path, a path that guaranteed success. Most of the things I did were on impulse and I did a lot of things that had no direct bearing on my thesis.

I have never trained properly, I just seem to do whatever I feel like on a given day, and am strongly influenced by goals my running mates set for themselves...

At one stage, the light was very very hard to spy in the distance. "Will I ever finish?" was the foremost thought on my mind.

That is pretty standard in even a practice run. Even today as I set my goal to run over an hour and to loop back home running, I was glancing at the traffic light at the distance (where I was going to turn right), and thinking, fuck, this is not even getting closer.

When I spied the light, it was like Splentastic (splendid+fantastic) folks, I am done! But it was only my thesis proposal....

I reached the signal finally and the mind realised I still had some distance to go, to reach home, although it was damn near.

I am not going to quit now, even if I have to crawl I will finish the distance.

(Ditto)

On the day of my defense, and the day before, everything was surreal. I remember just that I changed out of my suit into my white shirt and jeans, and that I drank a lot.

I always drink a lot (of everything) after a long run. The white shirt is gone though, I know not where.

But all in all, it has been a success (in my mind at least) - and I am coming up to its tenth year anniversary. On average, I enjoyed the process of my Ph.D. just like I enjoy even the middle part of my long runs. If I had my life to live over, I would try to savour the moments a bit more, maybe have a penned down strategy for my thesis. Like I routinely tell myself as my legs pound, look, don't think of it as so much more to run, think of it as so much more to enjoy. And of late, I am vaguely toying with the idea of being a bit more coherent in my training. But in a sense, I do have my life to live over. As in, although not my own thesis, I have all my baccha's thesis to think about in that manner. And of course, I hope I have many more running miles to clock with my rather flat feet....