Inconsistency? Insanity? Or Plain Ol' Spontaneity?

Jogging this morning at MacRitchie proved the negativities of inconsistency. If there's one word to associate exercise and I, that would be it - inconsistency. It's been ages since I last ran, the most recent being the night when I met Pau on her night run, and we all know that was a gazillion years ago. Since then, Pau's probably had twenty more night runs, while I've been doing everything BUT running.

So Lorraine's message on Saturday came as a pleasant surprise:
Run at macritchie wed (3.2k) and fri (4.8k). Meet @ carpark, 7.30am. Going: me and jj. Asking: shan and lester. Please reply if going or not. Thanks.

Today's 3.2k route was one I'd never taken before. Part of it was the same as the route used for training for Standard Chartered last year, but the later half involved running up to the main road and along it. There was one part of the route which involved going uphill to get onto the main road, and something happened that was really almost surreal. The hill wasn't very friendly, rather dim and dark, rocky and mossy, and I was mostly concentrating on ensuring that I wouldn't trip and fall flat on my face. At one point, however, I looked up (just to see how much more of the treacherous hill there was, to scare myself into running faster so as to get it over and done with), only to see a light at the end of the tunnel - no kidding. At the time, I didn't know we were headed for the road, so my first thought was "whoa - light at the end of the tunnel, man", and it kinda inspired me to dash up a little quicker so I could find out exactly what the light was.

I'll admit it was a tad disappointing when I emerged on the main road with cars zooming by and the air full of pollutants, and not on the clouds up in the sky somewhere, but that moment when I saw the light - boy, that was quite something. It's a beautiful image that I believe will prove quite unforgettable.

While the run did get pretty tiring, especially near the end (due of course, to my inconsistency in the area of exercise), the whole experience was actually damn good. It felt like AGES since I'd seen Lorraine and Jean (even though I'd just seen Jean the other night at GIB!), so catching up was great. Shan didn't go in the end though, so I didn't get to meet her.

The fun in torturing myself by waking up at 6am and running 3.2k (it's a long distance for someone like me who hasn't done anything more than walk for a couple of weeks) seemed to me pretty queer. I mean, where's the fun in that? Couldn't have been my inconsistency...maybe a better word would be spontaneity.

Yup, the spontaneity of it all. The random message of an invitation to go running. My random positive reply. The whole spontaneous move of deciding to go on an early morning run when normal people would be studying, then staying on beyond the run itself to talk about random things like JC and who we thought was going to top the class, and about prom, and about ACS(I)'s prefect selection camp (my poor suffering brother) and all these other topics, which if they weren't spontaneous, I wouldn't know what else to call it.

Then I performed another act of spontaneity when I decided to run home.

No lah, not from MacRitchie (that'd be insanity), but from the bus stop outside all the way in. I nearly killed myself doing it, because the sun was WAY up by then, and I'd already run earlier (what was that I was saying about inconsistency again?), so I was super tired. But in a way, it was rather fun, all because it was completely unplanned. One minute I was walking, and the next minute I started running, overtaking an old lady, a maid and a student along the way.

So maybe there is something to TET after all, about how life is unpredictable and that spontaneity is the key to happiness and all that? Yeah, I think I agree.

Which reminds of how I haven't even touched the book (how do I study Lit??). Oh, and that I have Lit Mentoring in school in about fifteen minutes, and there's no way I'm going to be on time because now I have to walk all the way out and take a bus, and that's definitely going to take longer than fifteen minutes. Great.