Saturday, December 15, 2018

Where there is a will, there is a way…


This saying came true to me today.  Yes, I could run continuously for 15 minutes, around 1.5km near the place I live in.

In these 22 years stay in Hong Kong, I am always slow in walking and incapable of walking continuously.  While going for trekking, I need rest at regular intervals to continue my journey. We moved to Tung Chung 11 years before.  It has a very calm surrounding with many parks and jogging paths.  When I go for walking or trekking with my husband or friends, I need to rest frequently before continuing to walk.

This year I had a major change in my walking skill. I jumped from the incapability of walking even 1km without break to walking 5km at one stretch because of the City U Walk of City University of Hong Kong in February and Step Challenge of FACE Club of Hong Kong Computer Society in November. Thanks to both the contests. 

I have enrolled for 10km running in Standard Charted Marathon 2019. I found that I need to complete it in stipulated time.  My walking speed is very slow. I am sure that I will not be able to complete the Marathon at my walking pace. So while contesting for the Step Challenge, I decided to pick up running skill. When I hear my friend Raji sharing about her daily running experience and participating in Marathons, I always look upon her.  Within one year, my husband picked up running and now he is able to participate in Marathon.  I used to admire his spirit. When I see many people doing long distance run, I always admire their spirit as well.  Therefore, I wanted to try. When I do running practice, I found that my capability to run was less than 50m at one time. 

Slowly and steadily, I increased the running stretch to 100m, 200m and 300m on the days I went for walk.  In last 3 days, I was capable of completing 2km with intermittent walking while running.  The spirit of running ebbed high today and was successful to run the whole stretch of 1.5km without any break.  I am very excited as it is building my confidence to run.

When I think back to few decades of my life, I am happy to know that I have been constantly walking at least 1km almost every day. However, my walking experience is always less than 2km at one go. Went to college for around 7 years walking every day for around 500km one way.  Went to work in Bharat Electronics for 3 years where I need to walk a corridor of length around 1.2km one-way from the bus stop to our department. During my pregnancy for my first child, I walked every day to office 1km one way. Later when I was having training in Kyoto, I walked around 1km every day for around 6 months from Kyoto railway station to the company named Nissen. Coming to Hong Kong, during my pregnancy for my second child, again I went for walking every day. Once my children were little grown up, we started to go for trekking where we easily walk for 5km.  In Tung Chung, whenever possible, we go for a walk of 2km around our area. However, all these walking will be at a very slow pace with stops at regular intervals.

Wow… I had walked so much in my life.  Now I got the confidence to run.  I need to see how much of running I will be able to do in future. When there is a will, surely there will be a way.

We have a friend in our block whose mother was sick and admitted to hospital for few months.  He was very upset when he was sharing that experience.  However, now she had recovered and goes for walk every day. During that time, I always think that she had the will to recover and now she is happy to go for that walk. In her case also, will gave the way to survive and be happy.

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