Rollercoaster.

Mostly, this blog post isn't about running. It's about writing.

Ever since I started writing this blog a month and a half ago, I have had to get used to a kind of a weekly emotional rollercoaster.

Sometime on Friday or Saturday, I click the little orange 'Publish' button on my blog console...

The first thing I feel is an overwhelming sense of Relief at having managed to write anything at all.

I'm not a natural at writing stuff down.

There's no flow. There are drafts and redrafts and redrafted drafts of draft redrafts, ad infinitum. 

There's no honesty. Good writers are honest. They write with their heart. I don't even know what that means. I write with my fingers. I agonize over words and phrases, their meanings and implications, over metaphors and similes, over grammar and punctuation. It's all very mechanical.

There's no skill. I have the vocabulary of a small dog. If there was no thesaurus.com , I'd probably never be able to fill a paragraph.

In spite of all that, I've written something and put it on the internet for everyone to see...

Which brings me to the next thing I feel. Panic.

Suddenly, everything I've written seems wrong. It seems smug. Preachy. Disjointed. Verbose. Illogical. Inconsequential. Just plain stupid.

And now I've shared it with a whole lot of people. I'm dead sure that soon, someone will write a nice little remark calling me out.

"You suck, Shiv. Regards."

I'll take it. It's better than nothing.

Thankfully, runners are good peeps. The few people who do end up reading the tripe that I wrote and care to give feedback are unusually kind and full of praise.

Elation. It feels good to get reader feedback. Frankly, it feels good to know that someone other than my mother is reading my blog.

Especially since my mother doesn't read my blog.

I check in with the stats on the Blogger console and watch the numbers climb. They don't climb very high. But seventy or eighty views makes me ecstatic.

There's a little section in stats which gives countrywise blog views. Besides people I know and share my blog with in India, I'm delighted that complete strangers from as far away as Canada or France or Spain or Brazil or Ireland or Australia have read my stuff. There was at least one view from Kenya once.

This is why I write.

A writer is nothing without readers.

Moving on...elation lasts over the weekend till Monday, maybe Tuesday. By this time the views have trickled down to three or four a day. And the euphoria is ebbing.

Then comes Fear.

Every Tuesday, It dawns on me that I have no clue what I'll write next. It's my old, fast friend - Writers' Block. Have you met this guy? No? Lucky you.

Mr Block is a right scary-ass bloke. He sits in your head and doesn't let you think. He mocks you in the form of a blinking text cursor on a blank screen.

Tuesday passes. Wednesday passes. Nothing.

I just sit in front of my lappy every day, sweat and curse and chew my nails to the quick. Running is bad for toenails, and writing is bad for fingernails. Between the two of them, I'll soon be completely nail-less.

I'm not sure why I go through that, week after week. There's no deadline. Nobody's paying me to write this. Theoretically, I could just leave it be, get a beer and watch TV.

But I guess I owe my readers...

...all three of them.

I maintain that idealism as far as I can, however, Indifference, sets in by Wednesday or Thursday.

I don't care anymore. The blog is dead. Was fun while it lasted. Writing this damned thing is too much pain, and for what? Nobody really likes this whiny little thing anyway. Those who say they do are just being polite. Nobody'll miss it. Not even my mom. What-ever...

Time to go for a run.

You've heard all the cliches, right? Running is meditation... it clears my thoughts... it's my conversation with my soul... it's spiritual introspection... my time with myself...

Any non-runner who's heard that definitely thinks it's bullshit. We promise you...every cliche is dead on true.

There is definitely something that happens during nice, long runs that stick-shifts your brain into a different gear. You don't know it's happening, but believe me... it's happening.

On Friday mornings, I'm done with my midweek runs. Over the week, while I've been riding my rollercoaster, I've also been putting miles on my shoes, and somewhere deep inside my head random thoughts, like tetris blocks, are falling , being flipped and turned by the shock of footstrike as it travels up my legs and spine to my cerebrum. Patterns form. Shapes align.

Suddenly, I know exactly what gibberish to unload on you kind, unsuspecting folk...

I spend most of Friday on a Writers' High, as words appear magically across the monitor. Mr Block slinks away, decisively defeated.

But alas, not all of Friday. Because, once I'm done, just to be sure, I read what I've written... and invariably, that leads to Despair.

It's never good enough. I put on an Editor's cap and start working on making it better. This, as you can probably tell, never works. Sometimes sooner, sometimes later, I give up.

This is where I am right now, people.

Time to click that little orange 'Publish' button, and begin my weekly ride again...

Week five of eighteen. The tempo run yesterday was extraordinarily satisfying. I was able to keep up a 4:29 pace for 8k. It wasn't too long ago that this was my peak pace for 2k intervals. To be fair, a lot of credit goes to the exceptional weather we have in the mornings nowadays.

You may recall that in an earlier post, I had said that there's just about a week in October and March  when the weather is ideal for running. This may well have been that October week.