Pencil Shavings

Wednesday, June 29, 2005

Oh boy, oh boy!

I am listed! Lonely Runner (who ran 24 hours straight at East Coast to raise funds for tsunami victims) listed me last night!



It is such an honour to be listed among the REAL runners that I feel like I should be posting about my pace, my heartbeat, the route I took like madman, but that would just be too embarrassing. Seriously, all the runners in that blog are very zai (good). So I will stick to the literary side of running. These are the top three reasons why I run:

1. The sense of accomplishment
Running is one of the few things I can control in my life right now. I'm somewhat stuck in a corner in my job and relationships, and being able to set running goals and meet them gives me that extra motivation to cope with the rest of life.

2. To prevent osteoporosis
I am petite. I'm also Chinese and female, which means I have all the genes for osteoporosis later in life. Running (unlike swimming) is a weight-bearing exercise that helps build up my bone density. Bone mass peaks at age 30, at which point it starts to decrease, and so I'm trying to run as much as I can before I reach the big 3-0.

3. Oh, the places you will go!
And the things you will see! Nothing beats the light of the setting sun reflecting off the water at MacRitchie Reservoir. Or the feeling of your first 10km along the coast of East Australia. Or running in the rain at Bishan Park. Or weaving in between ancient Chinese gravestones at Bukit China, Malacca. Or nodding and smiling at people with large dogs. Or simply finding yourself again...

So what are your reasons?

7 comments:

mis_nomer said...

oh I forgot, it's free too!

colinrt said...

congrats... good on ya....

on being petite... this is due to natural selection, according to this website: http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a2_319.html

mis_nomer said...

Hmm colin, how do you pre-empt what I would have said? My original post included the top reason why I don't like running, no prizes for getting it right!

colinrt said...

how?

1) i'm a net for the flotsam and jetsam of irrelevant knowledge... bits of information that encrust my mind like forever... they come in handy every now and then... funnily, i can never remember the big and important stuff (eg. birthdays and anniversaries, or my boss' wife's name)... sigh...

2) call it coincidence or a knack for making wierd leaps in logic... i trawl the web... and connect things that seem to naturally fit... obvious to me but not so clear to others... wierd, huh?

don't ask me to do it every day tho... it comes and goes as it pleases... like flashes of inspiration that hardly ever strikes twice in the same place... or on demand... heh heh...

mis_nomer said...

eh, boss' wife name very important leh!

Mostly Another Gaudy Grouch In Exile said...

Sense of achievement, definitely!

mis_nomer said...

Eric - Fire Ant Gazette is a great read. I like the name as well. Thanks for the link!

"Even four miles"? :) You are a seasoned runner.

sf - Can I call you sf? Your moniker very hard to type. :) Yay, someone agrees!