The running high is like having a prolonged orgasm.

I have a love-hate relationship with running. At the core of it, it is an extremely repetitive act, you’re doing one thing and one thing only, but then it is this simplicity of action that puts you in a trance. If you’re like me, the time before you start running and the time at the beginning of the run are excruciating, there is just no rational reason to subject yourself to such a monotonous ordeal.

But once you reach a stage when you are out of breath, mucus flowing freely and heart pounding constantly, the brain just doesn’t have enough energy to complain. It’s a unique feeling to have, perhaps something akin to how our ancestors must’ve felt in the wild when their survival instincts were at the sharpest. Perhaps that’s what’s so great about running, it awakens your dormant survival instinct.

I first started running for its own sake in Chennai. I was at CMI whose campus is on the outskirts of the city. With hardly any sports facilities, and having given up online gaming, running was the obvious thing to try. Also, the only sophisticated sports equipment on the tiny campus was one solitary treadmill, and so we ran. I’m not a morning person so I used to run in the evening, and this was also the time when the nearby TCS would relinquish its employees from their daily bondages and the hordes of TCS buses would swarm the main street filling the evening air with distasteful exhaust. It did not feel odd back then, every evening at every place in India is after all the same.

I ran my first 5K in Auroville, a tiny community close to Pondicherry, and I don’t really understand what it’s deal is, just that it’s a green oasis in the middle of the desert that is Tamil Nadu. Donning my new and expensive running shoes, finding myself surrounded by people who actually enjoyed running was quite an experience. They gave us t-shirts, which I still possess, on which it reads, “Run for the joy of running”.

Then I ran a half-marathon in Chennai, and this is an experience that’s deeply etched in my memory. We started before dawn and the streets had been cordoned off for the runners, I had never seen Chennai so empty, I felt transported to a different planet with these aliens whose silly behavior was beyond my comprehension. I remember running over the Adyar bridge watching the horizon grow visibly brighter. I had been lazy and had not prepared well and my mileage was nowhere close to a half-marathon, but once you started, stopping was not an option. I walked with a limp for more than a week afterward, but if I were to repeat it I would do it in a heartbeat.

I haven’t run much since I came to Baltimore. Recently, I was feeling depressed and was looking for things to do and decided to run outside simply out of Boredom. And all the forgotten feelings came flooding back to me. After the run, I was lying on my house floor unable to think anything and feeling nothing but pure joy.

Spring is coming and it is getting warm enough to run outside. I ran by the water today, on the wooden piers by the sleeping yachts. I plan to run a lot this summer. Might even run another marathon, but that reason is irrelevant.

The only reason one should run is for the pure joy of running.