Let me admit, today’s date looks great 20-02-2020, although its not Palindrome, which was on 02-02-2020. Amazing isn’t it, two great looking date in same month.

“I have never been a long distance runner, till 30 January 2020”, let me explain the statement. I have spent my school days playing all kind of sports ranging from Cricket, football to volleyball, basketball. So I have an assumption of my physique of someone as athletic. Although never had a very mascular physique like “athletes”. I passed out 12th standard in 2006 and never regularly engaged in sports or physical activities, except once in a while. Untill 2012, when my weight shot up to 80kg which is slight overweight for my height of 5’10”. This was the period when I started working and sunk into a comfortable lifestyle with friends and did not worry about health.

This period of weight gain brought me back to senses that I should do something about it, although all I did was running in teadmill for maximum 2 kilometers daily along with some stretching and abs workouts. Doing this for approximately 2 months I saw drastic weight loss of 7-8 kgs, which again threw me to my confortable zone and the cycle of workouts broke from 6-8 months, leading to weight gain again. Al this cycle continued for 2 more years, where I lost some pounds 3-4 times leading back myself to sedintary lifestyle and gaining back same weight. All this while the maximum I could run was 2 kms with humungous effort, most of which were on treadmills.

I moved up a bit to 3-3.5 kms range last year while working in San Antonio, where I fell in love with trail running (Leon Creek trail). I reached my peak of putting 70 kms in month of May 2019 where most of the runs would touch at least 3 kms. Soon I moved back to India and with hell lot of happening in life I lost that running touch until January 2020.

Although I restarted with my runs in October last year, they were highly sporadic and went a maximum of 2.5 kms. It wasn’t until 30th January, it was surely a magical day in the way I felt. Because I wasn’t thinking a lot about my speed and taking some brisk walk break during the run, there arose the power, will, excitement that I can push myself. I put 5.5 kms on my Strava that day, had run for this distance a couple of times in past, this was the very first time I was feeling comfortable and enjoying a run. This day gave me a unimaginable confidence that I have something and can push my self further. Since this day, I have run for 14 times in February 2020, 90 percent of these runs being 4-5 kms. Today, again I had some magical power and was feeling good enough to extend my long runs record to 10 kms. There was a certain confidence, confort while doing so.

Snapshot of today's run stats

I know I have talked about this drastic progress in tems of being magical, but as we all know there is no magic, I must admit that most of the credit goes to my improved diet (this is my assumption for now, would update in future as more discoveries arise). Undoubtedly, getting into a diet of greens, fruits, fresh cooked food (entire credit goes to my wife) had transformative change in my runs. My shins feel less breaking, even though I start with tight calves, they soon recover