Project 245 Week#4

Blame it on the wind and other stories

Life is often unfair, right? And being an adult is difficult because you need to take the responsibility for the decisions you take. I get it. I feel the same way. So did Bill Watterson, apparently. I don’t know if you’ve had the pleasure of reading Calvin and Hobbes. But if you haven’t, write to me and I’ll send you the 700 MB PDF file I have (because the original comics were in the newspapers before I was born and I do have the 4 books with all the comics but they are heavy and difficult to share). But Calvin and Hobbes is a wonderful comic about a 6 year old with a vivid imagination and an incredible vocabulary, who with his imaginary childhood explores with the various facets of adulthood from a child’s perspective. It is quite wonderful.

For example, this one aptly describes my conflict with running for the heck of it versus running in competitions:

Adulthood is challenging. There are very few things I learnt in my childhood which prepared me for being an adult. And I am not stating the obvious stuff like doing taxes or repairing broken things. I am talking about the general adulthood which creeps on to you. Eventually you begin to realize that your salary shouldn’t be solely earmarked for pleasure because no matter what they tell about the fickleness of life, most people do end up being old. And I would take being homeless at 25 than 65. At 25, it is called a “heroic struggle”. At 65, it is called “destitution” and you end up regretting not being hit by a truck when you crossed the street while being on your phone casually spending 400 bucks on the Nike Alphafly 3s.

I have to begrudgingly admit that I have grown up in the last few years. I desperately hold on to the past by making childish jokes but I am now a responsible adult. Took it long enough but my prefrontal cortex seems to have formed fully. But even so, going day to day and looking at stuff happening to and around me confuses me, angers me, bothers me. I often joke about having a little of bit of the youthful optimism left in me, which would allow me to still believe that good things will happen. But, I am getting old enough to know that just because you work hard and you do your best, it is no protection from the fact that life will still come and fuck you. And there’s no deeper lesson there. The lesson is that life will suck and you need to deal with it.

Adults deal with this helplessness in many ways: some get angry, some get horny, some get angry, some lose faith and then there are some like me who get all of that, but then we change our attitude towards the problems. It is not the attitude of indifference. I am very empathetic to the problems I face. I have just reduced the number and amounts of fucks I give to problems (Yes Mark Manson, I listened to you). And like stoicism taught me, I am learning to deal with my life’s problems through humor.

So, we have this runner in my club who is very talented. Well, more than most of us atleast. He has run fast times. But he has this habit to whine about everything which pisses off quite a few people. Or maybe it is just me, but listen, my version of God hates the whining habit of this guy too. It so happens that my version of God tends to hate the same things that I do. But anyways, to me it seems like this guy is incapable of seeing the good in things. At least it is the case as per his Strava (which is why I don’t follow him on Strava). Once when we ran together he complained about it being too windy. And then he even ran in both directions afterwards to compare the wind speed. I was left quite confused as to why he did 100 meter strides in either direction but the more I have grown to know him, I have realized that for him it was perfectly normal behaviour. I guess the wind blows specially for him because the others are usually a fair bit more grateful and happy with their “lesser” performances. In general he is a very nice guy and I am not dissing on him, but his whining about wind has given me the perfect scapegoat for my own life: Wind.

“Why is your table such a mess?”
It was too windy.

“My screen is not working. Could you help me?”
It’s too windy, I’ll come when it dies down.

“Why didn’t you show up to my party?”
It was too windy.

“Why did you commit this homicide?”
It was too windy.

Basically I blame everything in my life which is not working: The cluelessness and cruelness of my employer, the storm in my head with respect to racing, the misbehaviour of school going teens (who are remarkably similar to Football hooligans in their demeanour) on the wind. David Goggins asks “Who’s going to carry the boats and logs”, I say “The Wind”.

I know as an adult dealing with life’s problems is your responsibility. And I own that shizzle dear reader. I was so good at it that I was taking the blame for others problems. And then I realized it was called co-dependence and had to stop doing that. But I am all caught up on the blame which is mine. Last week while talking to Béné I was telling her that “Everyone is an asshole” and then I told her “So am I. I might be the biggest one out there. That’s why I try to forgive others for their mistakes and try not judge them despite their fixation with the wind”. In the end our life is a sum total of our choices and yes, we are to blame for everything but you can diffuse the seriousness of this by telling yourself “It is too windy”. Or too sunny. Or that you have too much hair on your legs.

Deleting Strava or Deleting people from Strava aka Strava purge:

As you may know that off late, I have been pondering about deleting my Strava account but I don’t think it is a great idea because I kind of like the gamification of running which Strava provides. I definitely do not like all their features like the feature which mentions on top of the homescreen how you’re faring compared to last week and marking it as a failure if you do less mileage or lesser activities than the previous week. That promotes unhealthy behaviour and I do not like it. Other than that, Strava is good for me. I track all my runs on it, you can feed Strava data to other apps and make fancy graphs. I am engineer. I am sorry if numbers and graphs bother you but for me they are joyful. I don’t comment about your ugly son and you should stay away from mine. But the social feature of Strava is something I wish I could remove. Actually I can do it but I will circle back to it.

When I was in India last year, I was doing my workouts in my room. In my room there are huge windows which look out the beautiful garden my father maintains and the park (which he also maintains). It’s all very beautiful. I would love to keep the curtains open and workout while looking at the greenery but I can’t. My grandmother has a tendency to walk 20 times a day by that window and I love my grandmother, but I’m sorry I cannot bear being looked upon as if I were a zoo animal. I appreciate her curiosity and I would talk to her about it but she is my grandmother. I don’t want to have a discussion with her on why peeping is wrong and why it makes me uncomfortable and why I am spending so much time exercising. I love my autonomy and my life and what I do is none of anyone’s business. I don’t do anything drastic. I am not an alcoholic. Yes, I exercise more than others but most people don’t have my levels of energy. You definitely do not have my endurance. Her looking in made me so uncomfortable that I did most of my workouts with the curtains pulled. I value my privacy and that’s why I deleted Facebook and Instagram. That’s why I ignore your messages on Whatsapp. And then there’s fucking Strava. Someone I really like as a person commented on my double yesterday “Twice per day?”. At that moment, I experienced the same loss of cabin pressure as I did when I saw my grandmother looking in the window. I am already at the edge this week and then this happens and I feel like God wants me to be bulletproof but if God keeps firing bullets, there will not be much of me left. Anyways. I appreciate this person’s curiosity, but I politely ask can you not? And again, while I would love to have a discussion on asking people to shut up, there’s only a defined list of people to whom I actually express criticism. To the rest of the world, I prefer to say nothing at all than to say something bad. I prefer to be the bad guy. Deep down I’m not an asshole but also it is not my job to fix the world.

So like I did in 2018, I think I will purge my Strava again. I will leave a note this Sunday and tell people not to take it personally if they got purged, that they are just annoying pricks to me and I don’t love them enough or care about them enough to keep them on my Strava.

Running This Week

This week is not easy for me mentally. You will ask which week is and it’s a fair question, but most weeks I am not this anxious. It’s like someone forced 12 cups of coffee in me and I still feel sleepy but jittery. It’s not funny. I am irritable and I did a journal entry this week where I talked about this. I started by saying I know that Patience is a virtue and then writing the Guru Singh quote “In Sanskrit, Patience is not defined as waiting but knowing the outcome and when you know the outcome you are methodical.” I know it is all good stuff but it doesn’t help the reality of the situation. I have come a long way from having proper anxiety attacks where I couldn’t move and felt paralyzed. Now I am able to even smile and physically move. I know I am overblowing it and dramatizing everything. I know I did my best and now things are beyond my control. Accepting everything still doesn’t change the reality.

So to help with my anxiety I am trying to run twice a day. Well, I am writing this section on 7th of March (Thursday) and I have done doubles on every day this week. Mostly with other people except on Monday morning and Wednesday morning plus afternoon. It is not about running. It is about company or just in general, getting out of my fucking head. If it doesn’t change, I might run this evening too. I know it sounds crazy and I sound like a nut job but I don’t drink alcohol or smoke. I could do weight training but I hate doing it. Yoga and Pilates are great but they don’t get me to the same flow state as running.

I had good conversations with people this week. Monday afternoon with Thibault was about running, with Joan on Tuesday it was about his life history and the wisdom he gained in life. On Tuesday afternoon, it was Jake with his wisdom about running and life. On Thursday morning we started by discussing Electronics engineering with Joan and on Thursday afternoon, Jake and Rafael mentioned stuff about kids, life, nature versus nurture and anti-doping. Everything is better than this high pitched whine in my head.

On the plus side, this sort of mileage is helpful for marathon training but I am bit concerned that my long runs haven’t been long enough. The longest I went was 33k, which is good but not great. I need a couple of 34–36k runs and maybe one which goes to 39k. We’ll try to find that in me later in the build.