It Can't Be Done...

"It can't be done..."

There are a few people in the world who are so intensely positive, motivated and inspired, that the above thought never crosses their minds.

I am not one of those people.

Two years ago, I started out in the singularly illogical (on the face of it...) pursuit of long distance running. At the time "long distance" meant ten torturous, never-ending kilometers. I remember getting in touch with a small bunch of people who ran as a group and joining them for a 10k. It was August 2012. We started at a half-past-five in the morning on a route over undulating terrain, with the sun well up. The temperature must have been in the high twenties, humidity in the sixties.

By kilometer 6, I was dead on the inside, half so on the outside, and fairly certain...

"It can't be done..."

Of course, I was wrong. I pushed myself not because of any lofty spiritual ideal, but because I didn't want to embarrass myself in front of the people I was running with. Somehow, I survived that run, taking just over an hour for the distance. My lungs ached, my legs hurt and I was soaked in sweat and ready to collapse. It wasn't pretty.

I would love to be all awesome and write that I learned my lesson that day...that I showed the requisite resolve and tapped into the mysterious 'power of positive thinking' that life-coaches go on and on about.

Nah. That didn't happen. I almost gave up. Almost...

Over the next few weeks, I started running regularly (more or less). Every so often, I would run a 10k. It was never a pleasant experience in those days. I stayed away from running groups. A lot of people in the running groups in Gurgaon were experienced runners with multiple races already under their belts. Too much pressure.

I stuck with it out of sheer stubbornness, with a vague, vain idea pushing me forward that running would give me six-pack abs. That hasn't happened yet, by the way...though I still remain hopeful.

Two months of stubbornness and misplaced vanity was what it took. I was running four 10k runs a week. They were growing less and less unpleasant. I would do one in less than an hour, now and then, and feel so ridiculously great about it!

Of course, by then, I had shifted my bar of impossibility to half-marathons.

I had started reading about running on the internet, and the idea that I would one day run long distance races was slowly contaminating my mind. Physically, I was far from it. Mentally... even farther.

"It can't be done...", I told myself, predictably, at the end of every 10k.

Twenty one kilometers! More than twice what I'm running now! Are you kidding me? That's the distance buses are made for!

It took me more than a year of running to get to my first half-marathon. I approached it with what, in retrospect, I consider extraordinarily rare wisdom. I crept up on it. There's something in running called the '10% rule', which essentially states that you shouldn't increase your weekly mileage in training by more than 10% of what it was in the preceding week. I followed that religiously.

I also struggled with loss of motivation and injury. IT Band Syndrome kept me off the road for almost four months. I lost almost all the gains I had made. Winters kept me in, with me succumbing to the temptation of a warm bed more often than I care to admit.

It was the spring of 2013 before I was recovered from injury and had accumulated sufficient guilt to get back on the road to train again. I registered for the Running and Living Gurgaon Town & Country Half-Marathon, to be held on the 11th August 2013. At the time, the longest I had run was 14 kilometers.

A month before the race, with the north Indian summer well on it's way, I went out to run with a group again, people who said they would be running an easy 16k. At the start point, someone decided to run a half-marathon. I was like... what? I wasn't ready! I hadn't trained! It can't be done!

That run was agony. I was running on unfamiliar roads and had no mental picture of how much distance I had covered and how much more I needed to go. I stopped and walked several times and got left behind. When I finally staggered back to the start point, some of the others were waiting patiently.

"How much did we do?" I groaned.

"Oh, about eighteen kilometers...", someone said.

I was never more convinced, in my mind, than I was at that point, that a half-marathon? It can't be done...

For me, when I crossed the finish line of the race a month later in 2:08, the Half-Marathon distance was a watershed. Suddenly, I was addicted. My glutes and hamstrings were killing me for a week after the race, but I couldn't wait to get back to running!

I had bought a pair of ASICS (had never heard of the brand before) and some other running stuff. A fuel-belt. An mp3 player. A Garmin watch. I started writing a cutesy training journal with a fountain pen. I started putting my runs on mapmyrun.com .

I had now shifted my bar of impossibility to marathons. Forty two kilometers? Pheidippides died...died, when he ran that much to start the whole madness off in the first place. Who was I kidding? Marathons?

Can't be done.

Today, it's another year later. I've done three marathons, eight half-marathons and a 28k race. I no longer struggle to get out of bed to train.

And I've started dreaming of qualifying for the Boston Marathon.

That requires me to run the 42.2 kilometers in 3 hours and 10 minutes or less. Seriously? Do you know what pace that is? It's 4:30 per kilometer...I can barely do two kilometers of speedwork at that pace nowadays. You have to be genetically gifted to run at that speed. You know what? It has to be said...

Can't.

Be.

Done.