I was showering at the gym last evening when Mr Brightside by The Killers started playing over the radio.
It made me feel like running.
But I can’t. Not till the right leg is fixed, anyway.
This feeling of “I want to but I can’t” is really hard to bear. I never knew how much I liked running or appreciated how my legs functioned until I wasn’t able to run. Typical human behaviour, really, not appreciating what you have got until you’ve lost it.
Oh it’s not like I really love sports. On the contrary, I’ve been terrible at sports, as my hand-eye coordination is dreadful. I could swing my racquet and see the ball fly past me overhead. Or I could suffer from ball-hit-my-headinitis. Strangely enough, when it came to activities that I can do on my own like swimming and running, I turned out to be surprisingly adept. Without much training, I could clock a decent 65-70 minutes for my 10km runs.
Slowly but surely, I’m inching my way towards that goal. It’s been two weeks since I started going for physio and already I can feel the difference. The back no longer hurts when I walk for long and my knee is not collapsing inwards as much as it used to. My poor butt is whimpering in pain, though, because of the exercises that I do almost everyday in the hope of strengthening the muscles.
As I practised running in the pool last night (getting my legs accustomed to the motions of running without too much impact), I decided to set myself a goal: by the end of the year, I’m going to run in a 10km race and try my darnest to clock 60 minutes. I’ll hit the tarmac at least once a week and revel in the sweaty, stinky mess of it all.
“Well do ya/do ya do ya wanna,” sings Franz Ferdinand in my ears on my running playlist.
You bet!
Yannisms 