Run for my life

Yesterday marks a very important milestone in my quest to invest in my health. I woke up at around 8 am and the weather was cooling. I packed up my running gear and went out for a run immediately. The run took me around 1 hr 41 minutes to complete. I have, for the first time after my army days, managed to run 11.45 km. You can never expect a fat guy like me able to do that. And please my dear friend, I am not lying to you. My leg was hurting the whole of yesterday.

For the last one month, I was being urged by my dear friend, Wee Yeh to take on running challenges. I signed up for Sheares Bridge Run 10 km on Sept and also signed up the Standard Chartered half marathon in Dec. I think most of you probably think I must be crazy especially some of my closest friends. I want to let you know, my friend that I didn’t do that blindly. It is an important turning point in my life that I choose to invest more of my time in maintaining and improving my health.

All of us are busy chasing after something at some points in our life. We are working hard for academic results when we are schooling. We are running after cute pretty girls at our teenage years. We are spending countless hours at work to pursuit our careers’ dreams. The sad thing is most of us will ignore our health for a long period of time until it breaks down. I have seen this procrastination of investing on health all the time especially in my family and friends. A good friend of mine recently told me the reason for this sort of phenomenon: ‘Health is rarely our priority in our early days of our life. We have so many other priorities to pursuit that health is usually right at the bottom of our list. But let me give you a proposal to consider: If I am to give you 1 billion dollars on the condition that you run everyday until you reach 65, I bet that suddenly running will become the top priority of your life. The truth is at 65 your health is easily going to worth more than 1 billion dollars’. These words awaken me of the danger of procrastination. That is also the reason why I started agreeing with my friend, Wee Yeh to ‘run for my life’.

It may seem difficult for you to understand why a fat guy like me enjoy running. Do allow me to elaborate. Way back in my NS days, I have always enjoyed running. I was in Police National Service. And I guess because police always needs to catch thief, that is why policeman needs to be good runner. In those days, running was like eating meals. We ran in the morning, we ran in the evening and sometime we even ran in the afternoon. Our training goal was simple, complete 5 km within 20 minutes. When we achieved that, we were asked to go for long 10 km run. It was during that time that I fell in love with running. Granted, I have not come back to this passion of mine for quite some years amid my pursuit of my career. Deep within, it has always been my passion.

It is hard to describe why this is so, but let me try. My greatest pleasure of running is not in the beginning nor the end but at the point of time where the ‘second wind’ arrived. This is the time where the body starts to utilize your body reserves (a.k.a fat) as all the energy in your blood gets burned out by the run. You will get a ‘kick’ much like taking drug and suddenly you feel like you can conquer the world. That is the feeling I fell in love with.

My mom is sick recently. As I looked upon her in the hospital bed, I made a commitment to myself that I must continuously invest in my health so that I can have a body that allows me to enjoy life to its fullest even at my old age. And so I made a promise to begin this long journey to ‘run for my life’ and to make ‘investment in health’ my top priority in life. I hope my sharing motivates you to do likewise too. If I can do it, so can you.

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