Monday, October 20, 2008

Of Run

Running is 60% mental and 40% physical. Agree?

While more often than not, our feets or our legs will give up on us and say "hey you up there, stop making me run! stop stop! what if we die together now?"

but really.. how many of us have tried running till our legs literally gave way and can't manage standing up again? Basically, there's always that little bit of energy in our legs that keeps us going despite saying and insisting that we can't go on anymore..

back in the training days, we used to run from thomson road all the way to adam road hawker center or orchard road's Shaw.. the runs will typically start in the early mornings and end within the morning itself too..

i recall that once, our FI(field instructor), which was covering for our actual FI(who went for SEA games), entered our barracks at ard 5am and switched on the lights.. i awoke from my sleep still recovering from the exhaustion from yesterday and our FI, in his biking(read:bicycle) attire, declared "gentlemen, its so early in the morning, why are your still sleeping? Fall in in 10mins!"

some 10mins later, a bunch of half-awake guys in white top, white-shorts and black shoes waited for their FI.
"have your done your warmup yet?"
"No sir!"
"never mind, we'll warm up along the way"
And off we went..

That morning, we made the run from thomson towards newton, we crossed every bridge that we came across and then cross back again, so that up,down, up down and back on the same side of the road.. we stopped in weird places to do push-ups and crunches.. and we finally stopped at Shaw in orchard.. not a soul in sight, its the early morning anyways.. and then we ran back.. we hardly stopped.. it wasn't important if ppl were left behind or not.. u knew the way back and we just had to keep going to keep the person or the cluster ahead of you in sight.. traffic lights broke up the squad once awhile, that just means jogging faster to spot another white a few hundred metres down the road.. our FI set our pace, we just had to follow and not stop

amazing, we kept going and going and we made it back in time for flag-raising at 0700hrs.. coming in strong from the main gate.. we took time to regroup and form up.. joggin back into the academy as a squad.. the 39'ers!

left right left! our feets stomped in unision.. nothing could stop us from taking our place at the front of the parade square.. left right left and we came to a halt.. heavy breaths, shoulders raising and falling with every expansion of the lungs.. breathe.. breathe..

a surreal aura of smoke appeared from our shoulders.. those who were close enough would not miss it.. this emission of smoke was from the sheer exhaustion of running and running and not stopping.. the energy that was dispersing from our bodies.. our bodies that we battered this early in the morning..

what gave us that energy? what drove us to achieve?

run guys run

we're the 39'ers

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