It’s no secret to anyone who knows me personally that eventually I took shame and did everything I needed to lose weight, and it’s no secret either since I don’t tire of telling in detail the whole story more than once, and this turned into a process that lasted approximately a year.
Approximately because depending on the standard used I would already be “thin” before the end of my count, officially I count from the moment I started taking practical actions until I reached my minimum weight, where I stayed for a good time until the pandemic arrived (why eat bat, people?).
The fact is that in this process, besides doing the so-called “sacrifices” (which you get surprisingly used to after you start) of diet and exercise, I ended up discovering something I really like to do: Running.
Of course, by “running” at the beginning, when you’re fat and sedentary, it means taking walks. Then walking fast. Then walking faster each time for longer continuous periods. Until the moment you’re no longer fat and are actually running long distances and periods.
There is indeed a small Tostines Paradox involved, running helps to lose weight, losing weight facilitates running. But as anaerobic exercises (look how cultured I am, I was going to call it “weight training”, but I remembered the name kek) and diet are factors even more important, I give myself the right to abstract this part of the equation.
But I admit, running is not for everyone. If you don’t like taking walks, maybe you can’t like running either, since running is basically “Walking 2.0” or “Walking with steroids”. When I say running, always understand doing this in an open place, it’s outdoor running (or as the fancy people call it, “outdoor run”), in different geographies and environments and sometimes having to dodge passersby strolling as if all public space was made for them, it happens.
I always liked walking the streets almost without direction, I do this Indian program alone to this day. Since I moved to Porto Alegre I have already mapped a good part of the entire north zone just walking to know the streets. Running is doing this to the extreme and without paying attention to 95% of what happens around.
Running on an ergometer treadmill is something for an even smaller audience. Spending 30min-1h running without purpose and without leaving the place, surrounded by other people doing the same and with at most a TV tuned to the worst possible channel (thanks, Smartfit), which will inevitably be showing the worst program of the schedule (seriously, thank you very much, smartfit), is for few. I always did religiously my 30 minutes on the treadmill out of obligation and knowing that it would help me run better on the street, conditioning doesn’t come from nowhere. But my only real fun there was competing with the other poor guys running. Obviously they don’t know they are participating in a competition and never will. In other words, some may even notice, but the truth is that bad luck is theirs ¯_(ツ)_/¯
This started as something natural that I did only with people who insisted on starting to run on the treadmills right next to me. If the person was at speed 9 on the machine, pff, I was already starting at 10 (warming up is for weaklings and people who want to keep their knees working after 60), if the person was striving at speed 12 it was worthy of a silent not_bad_face.jpeg and then me having to endure running at 13 or 14.
In the few times people were running at the same speed as my limit (for info: speed 14 on the most common treadmills at Smartfit, but varies by model) I turned it into a battle of endurance and forced myself to win, I already did 1 hour of treadmill on days that were supposed to be 30 minutes by pure stubbornness (remember: the person doesn’t know they are formally in a competition with me).
Obviously in 1 year stroking my ego at the expense of innocent gym-goers, I found people who could run faster than my limit. In these cases I pretended I didn’t care and followed my normal rhythm. It’s important to know how to lose.
Maybe the change in metabolism has left me more competitive.
Fact is that this behavior of creating competitions with people who have no idea they are in a competition is my standard behavior when I’m running, since the time I ran on the Rio port boulevard until now that I run in one of the many street parks of PoA, the worst that can happen to me is not having anyone nearby so I can create overtaking goals.
In Rio, the port was a rather empty place and I did my runs at night. Not so much a problem already since I was at the beginning and didn’t have much condition to compete against people, but I already created time goals at reference points, such as street clocks and specific positions. Today my goals are to overtake in the shortest possible time all people who appear running in front of me, regardless of the distance they are at, even if they are in unfavorable areas (approx. 1/3 of the route is uphill, or as they call it here, lomba)
But one thing I never forget was my saga to overcome the “arm-in-cast uncle” still in Rio. My route was fixed, Rio Aquarium <-> Praça das Barcas, basically the whole boulevard (check maps), I ran around 21h, was just starting and couldn’t even run the entire route, they were short running sessions with rest moments.
One day I was practically halfway through the first leg (the route was back and forth, so closing ¼ of the total), which left me near the entrance to go back around the Museu do Amanhã (seriously, gMaps), when a middle-aged man, bald, and even more mockingly, with a cast on his arm, passed running by my side. And then passed again already returning. While I was still in the first stage.
This affected me seriously, from that day on I started to maintain the CobSentido monitoring the presence of this man during my runs, something more complicated to do when you’re no longer with a cast on your arm, and always trying to avoid taking a lap around him.
So we do the “fast forward” a few good months for when I was already running not only each leg of the route (the return point was, obviously, at the gym’s height and I did the go as warm-up), but was already able to go and back running without needing any pause, when I finally managed to lap this man for the first time. Small victories.
Still talking about metabolism, and going back a bit on the issue of liking or not liking to walk and run. This endorphin thing must really be addictive.
This is a thought I constantly have when I’m going up the Goethe (the hill in the park where I run) on the penultimate or last lap. Blaming an alleged addiction is what takes the weight off my conscience and allows me to concentrate all my hatred and turn it into strength to climb that street once more, keeping me on the thin line between trying to kill myself suffocated by so much effort and failing in this attempt.
If it weren’t so good the feeling of having survived at the end, I would certainly never go back to running the way I run, much less bother to time how long it took me to do my route already thinking about improving this time next time.
Now if you give me permission, I’ll sleep early because I have to go run tomorrow morning ;)
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