Running Journey Thoughts #2

Since I was young, I have always ran. Shorter distance though. I remember my first ever race was with my primary school in Hong Kong, the last leg of the 4x100m relay. I trained 'hard' for it and we took home gold. But I never ran much. I specifically remember the running track in Victoria Park in Hong Kong, 600m long and I would complain I was feeling dizzy about may be a lap, or even less. Then I would wait slightly impatiently for my parents as they were completing their multiple laps. I always admired how my dad was able to run 20+ laps. To me, that 600m distance was like a marathon.

Then secondary school came and we were all made to do athletics. Out of 30 or so students, I was second in both 1500m and 800m, for all the years we had to run it. I was quite proud of my results. I was quite proud of most of my results in school when I took part in athletics. I was never the best, but It made me feel good that I was at least in the top something percentage when I really tried.

When I would travel home for holidays, I still tried to go to the park with my parents and run with them. But often I would give up after about 2 or 3 laps. The best I did was 5. But I really really really made myself do it. It was a, it can't be that hard right?

My running life never really took off. I had great time participating in all the other sports available to me in school. I really enjoyed playing team sports. I was extremely competitive and wanted to be a chinese that did well in sports. Even though I took lessons in table tennis and badminton and swimming, I should have known my favourite sport was running. I mean, I was probably the only one kid that got excited whenever I found out we had to do the 'bleep' test. How I loved that test.

After school, when I moved to London I pretty much gave up sports in exchange for dancing in high high platforms until 3 or 4 in the morning, fuelled by mix of alcohol and fried chicken. I guess this is a common rite of passage for anyone moving into the big city (I was in a girl boarding school until the age of 19, with a curfew at 10pm on a friday night in Bristol). My body took a turn for the worse. I lost a lot of weight but that was not healthy. I was eating terrible frozen and takeaway food. I wasn't living an ordered life. There were times when I have a photoshoot coming up (Yes, people wanted to shoot me before, for some reasons…) I would basically starve myself for a couple of days to a week. Then I would binge thinking I can reward myself. I lost a lot of weight, and then I put on a lot of weight, way more than I lost.

At one point, I was looking at size 14 and large size clothing in shops.

I thought, I really needed to change. So the second year I was in London, I joined a gym after I moved to my new home for the next 3 years. I started off by running my butt off on a treadmill (often racing the guy next to me in terms of, who can run the longest). Then I transferred those energy onto those stepping machines that is meant to be better for your knees than treadmills. After that, I started looking at classes. At one point, I was doing Body Combat 3 times a week, Body Pump once and LBT twice. I started to feel better about myself. However all these intense exercise starts to create muscles in unwanted places in my body, more specifically my calves.

I am going to say this now, I STILL HAVE MAJOR PROBLEMS WITH THE SIZE OF MY CALVES.