Love thy runners!

On the day that I write this, I haven't run a single mile. But there are folks I have around me, close friends, who have gone that mile, maybe even that extra mile.

But first, a bit on running. 

As Jason Statham says in the movie Lock, Stock and two smoking barrels,

"Squeeze in if you can. Left leg, right leg, your body will follow. They call it walking.", just hasten the whole process a bit and 'they' will call it running!(whoever 'they' are)

Running is one of the most simple things that a human body has been made for. As a sport, it didn't even have to be consciously 'invented' as such. And it is probably the most beautiful thing our bodies can do, obviously apart from all the 'other' beautiful things the body can do.

Now, coming to the runners....

They are a separate breed among us. They have definitely not been rare. Go out on the street early in the morning. Be it any village, any town, any city anywhere on the planet where humans are residing, one is bound to find a few pair of legs moving faster than the others. And they are a sight to watch!

These folks come in all shapes, all sizes, all age groups and move a wide range of distances on land. Some do it to reach somewhere early. Some do it to lose weight. Some do it to socialize. Some do it for a cause. Some do it without one. Some do it just to find out how hard, how fast and how far you can go till you can't anymore. And they are all over the place. In the gym, on the treadmill. In the garden, on the road, on the beach, on hilly roads, on rocky roads, in the wilderness, in the desert, on snow and every possible turf this earth can throw at us! Sometimes when you pass by them, you feel a strange sense of kinship with the fellow. Well, that's only if you are in a vehicle and they are huffing and puffing. 

But what if they are in your way?? "Eh! Chuck the brother/lady...I'm overtakin' !"

They do their thing irrespective of the weather. They do it when people are laughing at them, specially when they look a tad bit flabby. They do it when their legs are screaming in agony. And they do it so that they could fly for a moment before their next foot came down.

And they know they are in love with what they are doing. Then we ask "Why love them??". It is because running takes effort. And anything that takes effort is completely worth appreciating. Maybe the end result is not beautiful. Maybe it is not as graceful as it should/could be. But hauling one's arse takes determination. A lot more than sitting around and watching other run. 

More than everything, what excites a runner is the last leg. There's always this restlessness inside a runner the moment the Finish line is visible. There is an extremely apparent change in their body language. Everything about them gets progressively faster. In the runner's head, this is the time when Bill Conti's track "Gonna fly now", the song in Rocky, starts to play. The runner visualizes him/self as Rocky Balboa (Or whatever a Female 'Rocky Balboi' may look like), and they gun it!! All the way to the end!!!! "Flyyyyyy!!!!!!!!!!"

And at the finish line, they raise both their hands, as they would in victory. A small victory, before the next bigger one tomorrow.....

Fighting to get close

Two people who apparently have nothing common between them at first can go a long way, for some very strange reason. Logically speaking, each friend one makes is a stranger before he/she becomes a friend. But then there are a few specimens in your friend-list, (not the Facebook friend-list....) whose presence is somehow inexplicable in life.. After reading the last sentence, I realized that 'this' part of my life is what I call 'overdoing'.

Two years ago...

It was  my freshman year. I was sitting jobless in my room, when a very close friend of mine(No.. I won't mention the fellow's name) walked into my room. We chatted and yapped for a while and everything was going fine, just that five minutes into our conversation, we both knew we were dead bored. We gave each other this blank look, both thinking "So what to do now?". This friend of mine can be annoying at times. He had collected the numbers of  'many a ladies' from all over the freshman year, some by asking the girls, some..... by hook or crook. He said "Let's prank the girls by calling them.". I still remember the twinkle in his eyes when he said that. I didn't exactly feel any emotion till the time it was my turn to make a call to a girl. If I remember correctly, at the time, there was this controversy around one of the teachers leaving the college for some very strange reasons. There were rumors all around about the same, but no body knew exactly what was happening.. Okay, that's my way of saying that I was probably the only one around who had absolutely no idea of what was going on.

Moving on.....

So, looking into the 'contact list', it was  a matter of pure 'eenie-meenie-minie-mo' to choose any one number, dial it, and press the 'Green phone button'. So that is exactly what I did. After I pressed the dialing button, I got this very strange feeling in my belly. But I couldn't exactly connect the 'strange feeling in my belly' to the weird feeling I was getting all over my body. I could specially not understand my sudden urge to fart. Hmm.. not good!

Suddenly, someone picked up on the other end.. SHIT!!! SHIT!! I sort of scrambled for words for the first five seconds. Then I managed to pull off my 'Robert-Downey-Jr.-baritone', which would have made me sound something like.... err... Mila Kunis... Never mind, it's all in the head. So I blabbered something.. Not sure I remember what it was I said... Oh yeah!! I asked her for her name. She told me hers. She asked me for mine, I told a fake one... but you see, not that it mattered(or so I thought...) and I asked her if she knew what the controversy about the soon-to-be-leaving-teacher was. I don't remember what she said about what she knew. She sounded a bit skeptical about who the oerson was on the other end, I suppose. She asked me who I was again... This time, I said who I was....or at least who I thought I was in my dreams....

"I am BATMAN!". I was planning on saying the whole thing "I am VENGEANCE, I am the KNIGHT, I am BATMAN!!!". But then, even back then I had the smarts to understand that would be a bit too much for her to handle.

So I kept it short, and pressed the 'red phone' button as fast as I could with my almost frozen fingers.. Somehow, I managed to not fart. So that way, I saved two people. Guess who? One's my friend(Duh!). The second one's the girl. She too would have died of the smell perhaps. So I really was a super hero on the day it turns out... Eh! Chuck it!

After my turn, my friend called another number and did his part of the bargain.

Somehow, I felt miserable for losing my time making that call. It did give a rush of a strange kind. But the excitement got killed at the end of the first call, and I decided not to do it any more. But the next thing I was planning on was a suicide mission. I decided to apologize to the girl I had called. But I wasn't up for doing that over phone. That would have just made things a bit too 'Phoney'. So I found out which class she was in, and decided to go to her the next day.

Come the next morning.....

I waited for the break session at 10 o'clock.  I was slightly hesitant about the whole 'apology' gig. For all you know, you never know when it's your chance to get pulverized to pulp at the hands of a lovely lady. After I saw who I had meddled with the previous night over phone, I was certain about that day being my turn to get pulverized at the hands of a lovely lady, To the extent, that I actually decided to flee from the place. It wasn't anything about her looks or anything. As a matter of fact, there was something extremely endearing about the way she looked.But it was probably my preparedness to get beaten up that helped me stand my ground. Strange thing was, she was nothing like imagined.

Here's what I had imagined: The person would be this fire breathing dragoness, who, if given a choice, would burn me to ash with her fiery eyes... I know that not a word of that sentence makes sense, but at the time, nothing made sense to me either. So we just started to talk... err... or rather, I just tried to apologize and get my sorry-ass out of there as soon as I possibly could, before she turned into the lady dragon I was afraid she would turn into. But she started smiling and talking back, and it all went fine. Maybe it wasn't all that big a deal. ORRR I was already in hell, sleeping, tied to a big log of wood, dreaming for the last time,  before those puny beings in hell burned me in my sleep!!

Thankfully, it wasn't all that big a deal, it turned out. I even told her my real name after that.....!

And hence, the two of us parted ways smiling, I specifically smiling because I came out of it miraculously unscathed!

Two years hence......

There's this atrocious process called a pre-registration that my college subjects us to, each semester, without fail. And it would be absolutely frivolous to describe to anyone what the pre-registration is all about. Each and every student goes around the college to-and-fro about 2-3 times, just by chance if all formalities fall in place on time. Otherwise, forget your pre-registration

So, somewhere about 3 months ago, in my last semester, while I was running around the college to get my pre-registration done, I walked into a girl and asked her for what time it was... When the girl turned her face to me for replying, a current ran through my spine....

I forgot what time it was she told me. And then, she looked at me, squinted at my face and said "Hari, right?".

After taking five more seconds to register what she'd said, only one picture can describe how I felt at that moment.....

She remembers my name! Yeah!! Beat that!

 But then I realized that as a proof of how big a joke I would have made of myself in the Ladies-Hostel..... just because of a single phone-call...

Over the next few days, we kept running into each other at random. It's kind of cool to still realize that I am still alive, given that she has had sufficient chances to make a pulp out of me, but so far, has gracefully shown restraint to any such behavior that would be a cause of great humiliation to me. I mean, what will my friends say?? "Look at that chap! He got beaten up by a girl! Ha... Ha... Ha...".