It is the time of the year when everyone who is aspiring to apply for higher studies, begins to dust up their GRE or CAT materials and starts to brush up the concepts so that they acquire a stranglehold on their confidence levels before the actual exams with their improved performance in the mock tests. Instead, as specified in the earlier post of mine, my performance, which steeply goes down everyday leaving my life meaningless, is a very good indicator of how I'm going about this business of mock tests n stuffs.
People don't know what to call me, insane, freak, nuts and what not! People close to me already feel that I'm the best example of the waste of prodigy wherein casualness breeds casuality. My friends have called for atleast some amount of practice being necessary towards the CAT inorder to stand a chance to even dream about the test, but those barks have fallen on deaf ears till now, as always.
I do not know why I possess such a nonchalant attitude towards life, but it is simply the drive which I lack to an extent, to survive and succeed in my career. Prabhu, my close friend, has started shouting at me that it's high time I start working hard for CAT, or be prepared to face the worst. And I've been deferring the start of serious preparations as much as I can, coz of my laziness. And I am a person to complain of life being full of boredom with nothing to be done! :(
Two weeks back, myself and my friend Vivek, struck upon a random thought that we would run the Chennai International half-marathon (21.1 kms). We never know how we could come up with such queer thoughts, as we both have nothing to go in common with athletes. But still, we took it up randomly as an endurance test and decided to give it a try. Some 5 days before the event, we started to practise running, so that we would not have a nightmare on the race day.
For about three days, we both would run for about half an hour in the evening and for this sake, we would stay put at the hostel for over five hours, doing absolutely nothing but sleeping n chatting. And thus went the whole week, doing nothing but wasting time in the name of practice.
THE RACE DAY:
On the 27th of last month, the day on which everyone would have woke to worship the goddess of knowledge, I woke up early at 4 o clock and left for college. Halt there guys! not to study, but to accompany Vivek from there to the venue of the marathon. We started from college by 5, as we had to be there at the War memorial by 5.30. We went in Vivek's bike and parked the bike at the Island Grounds parking lot and went to the War memorial.
We reached there on time, and waited for the race to begin. It was announced that the International runners would be present at the start of the grid, then the national level runners, and then the state runners. So we were at the very back of the grid and waited for the race to begin. By the way, the guy who announced talked that much badly that none in the crowd could have understood his so-called English language. The race was finally flagged off at 6.05 by MP Kanimozhi, who is the mind behind this charity event.
The route map is shown in the figure given by the side. We both had this map in our pocket and started the race together. We had to start from the war memorial, and run through the marina, santhome and till besant nagar via adyar. and take a U-turn and return back to the war memorial. The very thought of the huge distance sweated the whole body of mine, as I had not run a distance greater than 8.5 kilometres in my entire life.
As expected, Vivek lagged behind and I started trotting along at a decent pace. I know that I'm not a good runner, but the thought of finishing the race spurred me on without halt. But when I crossed the 8 kilometre mark in about 35-40 minutes, the eventual winner of the event, John Wambus from Kenya was on his return way (i.e) he crossed the 13 km mark! From then on, my motivation and pace slowly waned off. I was simply jogging slowly as I knew I could finish the race within the deadline of 3 hours anyways. What's more, the women leaders, who started the race 20-25 minutes after us, overtook me when I was at the 9 km mark! :(
I reached the halfway mark and on my return at the 11.5 km mark, saw Vivek who was slowly jogging at the 10 km mark on the opposite side. Then it was a painful run back to the war memorial, as I had developed a serious sprain in my knees, as a result of which I could not move my legs properly for the whole of next week. The rains in the morning didn't help our cause any further, as the feet in the shoes went heavy and running became very difficult on the waterlogged roads.
Then finally, I completed my race in about 2 hours and 20 minutes, almost twice the time taken by the topper. :( And I waited on and on expecting Vivek to reach there. He finally made it in the exact duration of three hours viz, at 9 o clock. Then, we both came to college, took our bikes and drove home. I've never experienced that much physical pain in my life as that day, but the cause of charity for which we ran made us forget everything. But how the very thought of participating in the marathon sprang up suddenly in our minds, is still puzzling even to myself.
Later,
Vijay.
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