the making of an ultra runner… As I crossed the 100 km mark after about 17 hours and 21 minutes, around 9:30 PM on Sunday the 22nd November, 2020, to the roaring cheer and applause of my running mates and their families, I felt elated, relieved, accomplished, thrilled, excited, joyful and above all a deep sense of gratitude and love with utter disbelief! A sea of emotions and memories flew past my mind in a flash traversing my 7 years of running experience. I still vividly remember huffing and puffing after less than 100 meters of attempted running on a May morning in 2013. My friend Prasad was a regular runner and one day I told him I’d also like to join him and try my hand on some fitness as I was over 90 kg heavy and had shock of my life when I couldn’t run up to my office the previous week in order to urgently get something that I had left behind. I lost all hope of running any further – the voice in the head said, ‘if you couldn’t manage 100 meters of running comfortably, what’s the point!’ Nevertheless, Prasad encouraged and I went with him once in a while to walk around the Race Course circuit. I used to take 55 minutes to cover two rounds of the 2.5 km stretch. Still I kept going, as I had company. To my surprise I found that I was getting comfortable with running and even started liking it. But after a few weeks, Prasad had a knee injury and couldn’t continue running and so I too...
Picture Source: https://listtribe.com Vipassana means ‘observing as it is’. That is what Gouthama The Buddha, at the age of 35, did on a Chitra pournami night around midnight, under a peepul tree. He sat with an ‘adhittana’ (meaning self-determination) that he would not move until he attains ‘nibbana’ – the ultimate state of realisation. And it is said, within the hour after midnight the whole secret of life was revealed to him. Of course it was not the result of a day’s effort, but the culmination of years of (may be lives of) searching, seeking, practice, and learning from many gurus of his period. All his earlier practices did take him closer to self-realisation, but none revealed to him the secret behind human suffering. Even though the religious and philosophical thought of those times did mention the reason behind human misery is attachment to objects in the form of raga-dvesha (like-dislike) and therefore propagated that the only way out of this vicious cycle is by developing the state of detachment, none of the systems showed him how. What he discovered on that full moon night was exactly that – the key to mitigating human suffering. My rudimentary understanding of the chain linking the objects outside of us and the suffering we experience within us, based on the teachings of The Buddha after attending the 10-day Vipassana course for the second time, can be summarised as: when our six senses (eyes, ears, nose, tongue, skin and mind) come in contact with an object (any outside stimulus) it is subject to the 4 broad functions of the mind. Initially the sense...
Can one learn a new habit in their late 40’s? That too something one has never attempted before in their life? My answer is an emphatic YES. I started running for fun during the mid-2014, just about 15 months back, and I was 45 then. I was so euphoric after my first half marathon at the Coimbatore Marathon 2014 that I wanted to write a blog of my experience of running… just 3 months old. I did not do it then partly due to writer’s block and mainly because I wanted to give myself time to see if the euphoria sustains. So I decided then that I will write after a year if I could continue my interest in running long distance. Now with 5 half marathons under my belt and preparing for my first full marathon next month, I am convinced of my resolute on this and hence the birth of this blog. This is NOT a runner’s guide for dummies. Nor is it an expert treatise on running and its benefits. It’s purely the ramblings of an overly enthusiastic middle aged man, about his new-found love – running! As I noted down my lessons from my running experience I noticed an interesting pattern emerging. So I decided to list them in the same order. One at a time: There are several ones that helped me to keep the interest alive and kicking. One step at a time: ‘Journey of a thousand miles starts with the first step.’ To my amazement I realised how the whole thousand mile journey is only made of single steps. We run with...
Wishing people ‘best of luck’ is a very common practice. I too used to do it as a routine for a long time. One fine morning when awareness dawned on me that we are responsible for our actions I started questioning the purpose of wishing best of ‘luck’. Then it implied to me that I was ascribing the outcome of my actions to an invisible factor called ‘luck.’ In Tamil it is called adhirshtam. I thought then that when I wish ‘best of luck’ I was implying ‘I’m not sure if you will do well, so anyway I wish you achieve what you want through a stroke of many chance factors coming together.’ How silly of me! I thought it was very superstitious and disempowering. Therefore I stopped wishing best of ‘luck’ and instead just wished ‘all the best’ – a very impersonal wish. Now after years I’m back to wishing people ‘best of luck’. What happened to bring this change of mind? While I was reading the Bhagavad Gita I came across the concept karma phala which literally means the fruit of an action. On detailed study I understood there were two types of karma phala – drishta phala and adhrishta phala. The former meaning fruits that are visible and the latter meaning the fruits that are invisible. The real meaning is not ‘visible’ in the sensory sense but in the sense that the fruits that can be ascribed to factors that are known to us are called drishta phala while those factors that are not detectable to our conscious sensory mind are called adrishta phala. Then I...
For a few moments on the 6th day of my first 10 day Vipassana meditation retreat I got a glimpse of what it is to be the Buddha. I think that is what Samadhi is… it was an exhilarating experience and I said to myself, ‘this works and that is it!’ It was almost like having found the key to life! This is my first blog and I can’t think of a better experience to write about! I had been wanting to do the Vipassana retreat for many years now. In fact I had registered and made all travel plans twice and had to cancel in the last minute due to personal exigencies. But this time I resolved that come what may I will make it and I did! The most intriguing part for me from the time I heard of Vipassana was that one has to be silent for 10 days. Whoever heard of that said, how is it possible… it’s very difficult. But at the end of the retreat I realised that being silent was the easiest part of the whole process. As I entered Dhamma Setu, Chennai, on the 19th of December 2012 I had no clue what I was setting myself upto. The registration process went off smoothly and I went to my quarter. I was happy I did not have to share the room with another student. But that joy was shortlived as another student walked in within a few minutes. However, he was so understanding and nonintrusive, I had no problem sharing the quarter with him. The best part was he did not...
