What wakes you up?

It has been over two years since our small exercise group disbanded. It is often said that familiarity breeds contempt. Everyone took each other for granted, or they grew too big for their boots. In the eagerness to self-motivate and right the wrongs, ego got in the way. The bottom line is that everyone has flown the nest in pursuit of other things in life. 

So, what is the difference between exercising in a group and alone? For one, the fun factor is eliminated. There is nothing like having many people with the same mental illness flock together to do the same thing week in and week out and expecting a different outcome, to quote Einstein, if he actually said that. 

I take a special kind of motivation to push the sorry ass up in the early mornings to start the exercise. If previously the motivation was to keep up with the rest of the gang, now it is just you, yourselves and your sorry ass. 

During training, there is a push and pull factor that tickles the ego to outperform oneself. Sadly, when one is training alone, this is missing. The worst part is that the inner demons remind us to slow down and not to overdo it. It takes a different kind of something to slay that beast. 

Given that background, I registered for this year's Powerman duathlon, as I have been doing since 2020. This will be my fourth participation, having been shelved for a couple of years due to COVID.

After sending and parking my bicycle in Putrajaya and moving around with the competition wristband, my wife asked me, "So, all running and torturing your body gives you happiness?”

“Oh yes,” was my reply. "As much as you enjoy going to the temple, meeting the same friends, updating the obituary list, doing the same rituals, eating the same vegetarian food and coming back in bliss, feeling blessed."

As for me, the competition went smoothly. A 5 km run was followed by a 30 km cycle around Putrajaya, then it concluded with another 5 km run. Over the years, my speed has been steadily declining. It could be due to the ageing process or perhaps a lack of peer pressure to motivate me. 

Come to think of it, even at the finishing line, finishers were served the same snacks that the organisers had been providing for donkey's years - a dry O'Brien sandwich, a Cavendish banana, and 100-plus isotonic drinks to wash it down, along with a finisher's medal.

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Life is a battlefield!

My body and mind went overdrive as things typically do while partaking in one of those age-defying mindless Sunday morning recreational run-cycle-run combo of Powerman Malaysia 2023 Edition. Staying mindful of the traffic flow of fellow madmen, the condition of the roads, my heart rate, race timing, the remaining distance to cover and gears, I had my hands figuratively full on top of everything else I was doing.

Behind it all, buffering silently in the background, basking in the inebriation of all sanguineous perfusion of flurry vascular tributaries is the creative part of the brain. It wants to keep up with the rest of the body. It, too, tries its hand at neuroplasticity. It sprouts out dendrites to establish long-lost connexions. And it engages in its internal soliloquy. I just happened to be there eavesdropping the murmur. 

Life is a battlefield. In modern times, the enemies we are supposed to fight are no longer the co-creations created in His image but the one in the mirror. The demons have all gone internal, so we tell ourselves. The jihad that they were fighting to steamroll our ideology has gone underground. Now, it seems jihad refers to fighting the inner demons.

Now, we are supposed to be kind to each other, come together and feel alright. We are not supposed to be having ill feelings towards the other. Instead of all these, we should focus on fighting the inner demons that lurk within us. Then there will be heaven on Earth. 

In real life, it does not work this way. In Nature, there is a constant need to push to a higher level. It is a question of the survival of the fittest. Darwin proposed it. We condemned it but cannot sweep the reality under the carpet. 

Even as a newbie starts cycling, running or trekking, he always tries to keep up with the group's oldest and weakest link. If he can reach the stage when he can outperform the slowest of the pack, he knows he has qualified to be a legitimate fellow group participant. 

You are given one life, not to brood over but to make the best

despite all the seemingly unending adversities that come and 

go. Sisyphus, given the life sentence of rolling the boulder up

the hill will have to find joy in reaching the pinnacle, 

knowing very well that the boulder will roll down and he has to

repeat the process again and again.

When training for a competition, a participant has to train with someone stronger than himself to improve. During the actual event, he has to benchmark himself against the better ones if he were to outdo himself. There is no meaning in merely pushing ourselves to improve without a yardstick to follow. In competitive mode, we look for prey, the feared 'the other' and the potentially beatable. We want to improve our standing by overtaking others, one at a time.

There is a place for active competition. The world is cruel and does not give concessions to the weak. So, affirmative action will work only in a short time. When used indiscriminately, it would be counterproductive. Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And weak men create hard times. (G. Michael Hopf)

Like it or not, we improve as a human race by challenging the status quo. Jealousy can be a healthy virtue as long as to push oneself, but not in destruction. But he would be devastated, nevertheless. As long as he knows, he will return bigger and stronger. 

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Psychopath's Handbook?

How to Win Friends & Influence People 

Dale Carnegie (©1936)

I must be exuding the aura of being a loner with very few friends that someone actually loaned me this book. He must have thought that it must be a sure way to end all my perceived 'woes'. Generally, I do not cherish books of this nature. To me, they appear like learning swimming by reading. Some things can be acquired only through practice, experience, and dents from the School of Hard Knocks.

After reading through it, I find it to be more like a handbook for psychopaths. It tells its readers how to skew others' thinking and actions towards the readers' self-serving needs. The psychopath would slowly play mind games to influence his victims into thinking that they are doing something altruistic akin to how Piped Piper would rid the town all the mice for nothing (thank you very much). And how the children would be mesmerised to his enchanting flute music to march in like zombies into the caves and never return.

Many of the topics illustrate the insincerity of people in making friends and influence them. They try to make people like them. They attempt to control people with their way of thinking, to be a leader without offence or resentment.  

Nobody, I mean nobody, can teach anybody anything. We cannot even make them learn. The yearning should come from within. 99% of the time, people, even hardened criminals, do not blame themselves for the mess they create or the mayhem that they are privy to. Criticising does not change anything, only creates resentment said Lincoln. People have to feel important. They want good health, food, sleep, money, sexual gratifications, the wellbeing of their children and perhaps a good after-life. We have to remember these when we want to influence people. 

Even though the methods that are suggested simple enough, most of us take them for granted and end up doing just the opposite; with disastrous outcomes. It is all about dancing to the tune of the intended 'victim'. Some of the strategies include making the others feel important, be free with appreciation but not flattery, arouse the interest of the other, show genuine interest, remember their names, be a good listener, talk in term of others' interests (while keeping in mind his true intentions, I suppose), be friendly, use diplomacy and not to run anyone down, be sympathetic to others' views, be dramatic and throw challenges to maintain the interest. 

We should remember that a drop of honey attracts more flies than a gallon of gall. The results seem more important than the means.

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Be imaginative, they say!

David Bowie - The Chameleon!

The management gurus will always come in say that in order to stay in vogue with the ever changing times, we have to re-invent ourselves. To stay relevant, we have to re-brand, re-train and to stay afloat with the flow.
Errr... It doesn't sound right of you are an accountant and you start getting creative in your accounting. What about your trusted medicine man who starts becoming imaginative with his treatment modality and decides to experiment with new treatment avenues just to be different, giving a new meaning to the name of his office - the practice. He gets creative to make you more sick than you really are! And when things go wrong, he would say, "Oops, I'm sorry" and carry on with his next client/patient/victim. Of course those in the artistic arena would benefit and survive from regular face lifts. Their clients are easily bored and forever yearn for something new and fresh.

Bowie - still strong! 30yrs on

Fresh face actors, avant garde inventors, revolutionary designers and attention craving performers need to shed their exoskeleton every once in a while to turn heads. Even lawyers have to repeatedly think of ingenious ways to dodge their clients' wrongdoings ( the truth does not come in the equation) by creatively creating loopholes or doubts in the legal framework to sketch an element of doubt for their 'pathetic' clients to escape punishment!
Even conmen and thieves are becoming more and more slick these days. And the Nigerians with money stuck in frozen accounts... Do I need to go on?

Why drive when you can run?

Now that we have upped our marathon training to hyper-drive, the mileage have increased - just finished a 32km run.
Just when you pat yourself on the back for a job well done through life, you get a smack at the back of the head (ala McGee getting a thud on the head from Gibbs in NCIS), which brings you down from your perch in cloud nine to ground earth!
As you are cruising in the still of the 5am darkness at your heart rate pouncing at a steady rate of 150 beats per minute and a pace of 7 minute/km, swoosh like a zephyr overtakes a 74 year senior citizen with a perfect energy efficient posture and no lateral tilt in an almost robotic stance.
Then you meet up a 66 year old  who confesses that he is finally going for his first marathon and was jittery about it. He also reiterated that it would have been easier if he were 40!
Everyone thinks he had it bad. He had endure this to do this and strive hard to do that in spite of the adversities of life. We forget that there others who had it even worse but still came out pretty like a lily from a pond full of stench and creepy crawlies!

NCIS

I just heard of a son of a lorry driver who made it to do medicine in the local varsity. His father could only afford to pay the first semester fees. For the rest of his studies, he earned more than enough money through his ingenious schemes of running a tuition centre to be finance his studies as well as to be able to send back money home!
All these thoughts helps to drive the motivation to reach the outer boundaries of human capability. It is only left for us to explore and not be complacent.
To the naysayers who say, "Why run when you can drive?", I tell them, "Why drive when you can run?"