About a year and a half ago, I couldn’t get myself to run half a kilometer without huffing and puffing and wanting to stop. I couldn’t hold a plank for even 30 seconds, or do even half a push up. My physical activity was limited to amateur badminton, which I played mostly just for fun. I didn’t know or bother too much about fitness, especially since fitness is often equated with thinness, particularly for women.
Today, I’ve run two half marathons, four 10k runs, and one full marathon. I can do a decent number of pull-ups, lift moderately heavy weights, and hold a headstand for about a minute. I won myself two middle-distance medals in an inter-college running competition. I have two city-wide long-distance runner-up trophies to my name, one for a 21k and one for a 10k. More importantly, fitness has become one of the most integral and dear activities in my life. When someone sees me at the gym or running on the roads, they assume I’ve been doing this stuff for several years. And every time they do, it’s not their admiration or compliments that are so satisfying, as is the realization of how much I’ve actually grown and improved.
I took my very first steps towards this progress when I started to go to the gym last year in May, mainly because I had vacations and wanted to get out of the house for some meaningful and new activity. I didn’t have any goals in mind, nor was I particularly inspired to live the “gym life”. However, I began to enjoy it, and thus continued even after my vacations. And then, in late August, I started running. I was going through an academically and emotionally stressful period, and decided to try this completely alien activity to distract myself from my problems temporarily each evening. I was never good at any sport before that. Not that I was a terrific runner in the beginning. I didn’t like it at all at first, but continued only because I needed to get in some cardio before the gym (and I found the treadmill boring).
In the first month or two, I hadn’t improvised on my running form or stamina greatly, but still ran my first half marathon. I didn’t even think I’d complete it; I just went along with a friend for the kick of a new experience. But I managed to finish. Of course, my timing sucked, because I was completely unprepared. But the fact that I was able to get through those twenty one kilometers put into my mind the crazy thought that maybe I couldn’t be all that bad, maybe I was actually worth something. That maybe if I practiced seriously, I could actually clock a good timing the next time. This thought really drove me crazy, because up to then, the idea of being even fairly good at any sport was an impossibility. And when impossibilities show the remotest of chances of turning to possibilities, it makes a person ecstatic.
I spent my childhood as a complete stranger to sports, and in general, any intense physical activity. Each one of my extra-curricular activities was unrelated to sports of any kind: elocution, writing, debating, poetry, and the like. It’s not that I didn’t try: I briefly did try my hand at a few sports like badminton and basketball, but never developed any real skills, because I’d have to drop them too soon because I felt I couldn’t “pick them up” fast enough. Undoubtedly, there was a lack of opportunity: most schools I studied at were not encouraging or even serious when it came to sports, particularly for girl students. But, to be honest, lack of opportunity was not my primary barrier. Rather, the main thing that held me back was an obstruction I’d created myself in my own mind.
For as long as I can remember, the mental image I created of myself was of a non-sports person. I could excel at science, mathematics, languages, public speaking, maybe even dancing, but sport activities were something I could never do. I believed that athleticism was something that did not come naturally to me, and never would. I admired famous athletes and my friends who were into sports. I acknowledged and appreciated the physical and mental benefits of engaging in a physically demanding hobby. Sports were a wonderful thing, but just not meant for me, because I was naturally and incurably bad at them. Perhaps I was dejected and ashamed by my initial small failures in this context, as most people do get, and decided to stop trying. I perhaps subconsciously decided that I was destined to be incapable in this domain, and that it was best to focus on other things that I was meant to do.
While I do sometimes wish that these thoughts did not keep me from engaging with any sport for so many years, the experience has taught me a very important lesson. It taught me that the cliche, sometimes annoying, quotes we hear about hard work, dedication, and endless practice, are actually true. Success really is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration, and the secret to getting ahead is really simply to just get started. I started off with tiny, interspersed steps, not knowing what I wanted to achieve, or not even knowing if I’d achieve anything at all.
I grew to love the activities I had begun, only somewhere along the way. Running, strength training, and weight-lifting became important to me only after a while of exploring them. Inspiration did not come to me as a raging fire, but built up slowly, spark-by-spark, fueled by consistence, willpower, and practice. Some of my beginnings were by mere chance, and I could therefore never emphasize enough that some of the best things in life happen when we least expect them. I found one of the major things that I truly love and find meaning in, only after I turned twenty-two. What started off so casually turned out to become a new important direction in my life, in which learning, hard work and improvement provide immense satisfaction.
Actually working towards and achieving something that seemed impossible, at a time that seemed far too late, renders one the unbreakable courage to set one’s minds towards new, perhaps more difficult “impossibilities”. Never be afraid to try out something new, it might just change your life!
