Joining a fun run after ten years, where is the fun?

3 years to be exact - 10k finished!

9-1-2019

Aside from this social media photo I can upload, I think its time to remind myself again why I join fun runs at all.

3 Ys and 3 Rs

Why pay to run a route you can run by yourself for free?  For a dri-fit shirt you can buy at a much lower price? other than that, why not run the trail or the oval, roads are for cars? (you are causing traffic, omg)

1) Running the road is the human body's raging revolt against the machines!

The road is for cars, sidewalks are for pedestrians. Nope. Roads are for people- regardless if they have cars or not. Roads are for travelling, regardless if you go around in circles in your everyday existence or you just travel. Are road built for cars empty of people? No. (unless you use them as parking lots...err)

Travelling these days entails that you, for long extended hours, assume a sitting position on a vehicle. Running the road I believe is but a return to simpler times, when people just march on on foot (saka saka). It is the human body's raging revolt against the machines, who are slowly taking over the body's functions, from travelling to thinking.

whatever, adu la amin?

But seriously every fun run tries its best not to cause traffic. Check the routes and run times and schedules - Wee hours, not on working days. But if ever they do and you are pissed, please just think that human bodies are under reconstruction (please read below).

2) Running for a cause, two of them.

The proceeds from the fun run in the picture above was for a baby's liver transplant - you can look it up how much that costs. We will ever know the true value of a stranger's goodwill (hundreds of them in this case) until a goodwill is the only thing that will save us or save someone we love.

Secondly, every fun run by the its very nature is already a cause for fitness, all its publicity and its very activity is a promotion of healthy living. I cannot imagine anyone  running 5k or 10k well (injury free) without prior training, running elsewhere.

3) Surrounding yourself with the motivated. 

It was quite refreshing to see familiar and new faces in that run especially knowing what some of them have to overcome just to show up here full costume and on time. People who excel and overcome challenges show us what is possible, in doing so, they invite us to do the same. Sure, we find camaraderie with people who share similar struggles, misery loves company, but if that is all that we share, perhaps that camaraderie is nothing more than a rather selfish and self serving feeling of comfort knowing that you are not the only one suffering, there is someone else. 

I believe that while it is comforting to find a fellow sufferer it is more comforting to find a fellow fighter - an ally even. (Unless you are both masochists, flagellating yourselves, then enjoy!)

We are our own environment it is also said.

Congrats to all those who ran today, see you on the road, and thank you coach Jeyk and the fitness group.