Of good running, swimming pools and the Monsoon

Finally. Finally. Finally.

I hit the track today after what seems like eternity. I had hard intervals and after these last couple of weeks, I was sure I would have lost significant fitness.

I made up my mind that I would run according to RPE – keeping it somewhere around the 6/7 mark and settle for whatever time it showed for these maniacal kilometre repetitions.

When I woke up, it was raining down relentlessly, the skies a discotheque of flashing lightning and booming thunder.

I made my way to the track, the pelting rain reducing to a drizzle and reached a near bone dry track.

Coach Ravi ran the warm up rounds with me, chatting about shaking up my routine. He suggested it cautiously. Eilish wouldn’t mind, I smiled to myself.

Monu and a new kid, Nikhil, ran the interval efforts with me. Kilometre intervals at the track always seem longer than on the road.

A piece of paper near the hundred metre mark on the front straight looked like a folded five hundred rupee note. Every loop I watched out for it. It reminded me of back in the day at Friends Club when I swam as I kid. My memory tells me that all manner of small objects or goggles and what not were at the bottom of the pool. I would fixate on one object that I would peer at each time I did a length. That folded paper was a beacon to me today.

I wish I could say kilometre after kilometre flashed by. It didn’t. It was hard work and at the end I was grateful and somewhat famished.

At home, the young boy was missing school, so he ran instead and I took my workout outside – medicine ball in hand – enjoying him go through the paces. Maybe he had his own folder paper to look out for.