The biggest problem at blogging from another place is that your gadgets would not talk to a new computer. So, even though I have three cameras I cannot make them talk to this computer. As a result this week, the pictures are going to be from my Picasa web albums only, all old ones.

Yesterday after a very long time I went for a small jog. I have lost some weight and I do not want to gain it back with eating a lot and sleeping through the day. I have not felt like running since a very long time. It has been ages since I left athletics. I was a pretty decent athlete and used to work really hard. Running something like 10km (when I was 14-15, seems like a lifetime ago) was easy at one time. Then my coach got transferred, there was no replacement. The good person that my coach was, he would send me my training schedule in letters and I would follow it up. I was in 11th standard then. It was a tough schedule. I was a middle distance runner and would run in the morning, go straight to school and in the evening run some more. I was quite regular at studies so managed to score good marks even with all the practice and tournaments.

Then just for fun, I was playing in a basket ball match for my school. I twisted my ankle quite badly and went out of training. A year before, when I was in 10th standard I represented my state in National School Games, I stood first in High Jump, second in 800m (the girl who stood first later went on to win a bronze in Asian Games 10 years later) and third in 400m in the state meet. The next year I wanted to do even better. But with the injury my training went haywire, and during the state competitions (held in Roorkee) during the month of November, I caught bad cold, and no instructor accompanying us was willing to buy me a medicine promptly. I stood third in all the events. After training so hard without a coach third felt like such a blow at that time. I left running after the competition (I started playing TT, and I do so till date) and never really went back to it. Even at IIT I refused to train for running, even though I would play every other sport every day and win almost everything at the Inter-IIT meet. I wonder if in some sense I stopped dreaming after I stopped running.

That is why I felt so happy when I decided to run yesterday. I actually went out for a walk, telling everyone that I do not want to gain weight. When I started walking, I thought let me run. Then I thought let it be, so many people around, hardly used to a woman running alone. Then I told myself that half the time it is just me who is stopping myself from doing things that I like. And then I went for running for a while!