About

See the grinning guy who’s kneeling?  That’s me.

For those of you who don’t know me that well, I used to be a sportsperson of sorts; I was a sprinter, played tennis and basketball at various points in high school and rugby in university. I wasn’t that great at any of it, but you could say that I was reasonably fit. Fast forward a couple of years (and it ain’t that many years!), and the image suggests otherwise. I’m not gonna give any bull-crap excuse as to why this happened to me. What I am gonna say is that within the past two years, I’ve met a bunch of like-minded people (read: heavy alcohol consumers) who have this strange obsession about running. I’m like, “Why run?” So I figured, let’s give it a shot and signed up for the Singapore Marathon in 2007.  Did the 10km run; although if you wanna get all technical about it I actual did a 10km walk since I was probably walking more than half the time.

That didn’t do anything to me. But I stayed back to check on my good mate Hafiz finish the full 42.195km marathon. Watching him cross the finish line at just over 8 hours got me thinking that, hey, there’s a lot more to this running than trying to cross a tape in the shortest possible time. As the cliché statement goes, it’s not the destination but the journey that counts.

Nope, I didn’t experience epiphany from this but I decided to give it another try. A couple of runs later made me realize that, hey, even a fat bloke like me (the last time I checked I found out that a third of my total body weight was fat. If that isn’t fat, I don’t know what is) can run. And as an extension to that, given the work-till-you-drop, couch-potato, fast-food-nation world that we live in, I bet there’s a whole bunch of others like me who can run as well.

My take is that people run for a whole lotta different reasons other than to keep fit or be good at it. The problem is that they haven’t discovered their reasons. I hope that you would find enough curiousity in you to lace up and hit the road once you’ve read this journal of mine. And my greatest hope is that you discover your personal reasons for running.