Courtney and Ben from my course invited me to go to their Halloween party last night (apparently they purchased 24L of alcohol for the occasion!), but I thought I've already spent too much of my recreational time this week already (a pity, for I was planning on dressing up as Dr. Horsfield a.k.a. Horsface, with bow-tie and all).

On Wednesday, when I was checking my email after getting home in the late afternoon, I saw a post on my Classical Guitar Forum message board offering a free ticket to see the great violinist Itzhak Perlman in concert. I had nothing to do that night (except for work...), so I quickly emailed the guy back and arranged to meet him before the concert. John/Sohei is a fellow guitar enthusiast working in IT, and we rendezvoused some time before the concert began, so we had a nice chat about our shared interest.

Itzhak Perlman is one of the most famous violinists in the scene today, and he's definitely the most distinctive appearance, because he's crippled from polio. When the lights were dimmed in the concert hall, the audience went silent as Perlman slowly hobbled onto the stage on a pair of crutches, while his accompanyist carried his violin for him, and handed it to him after he sat down. I shall not say any more about his playing because it's impossible to describe in words. I generally do not like the violin as a solo instrument, but Itzhak Perlman converted me that night. The second half of the concert was slightly bizarre though...the listed programme for the concert was a Debussy sonata which lasted all of 10 minutes, and after that he and his accompanyist took out a huge stack of music, and then he apparently started flipping through the stack picking out random pieces ("The next piece is called...'The Little White Donkey'"). His playing was top-notch at all times, but I would have prefered that he played something more substantial.

And on Thursday, I had dinner with a few friends, so I decided last night not to go to Courtney and Ben's party. Instead, I settled down to read a condensed version of the Maha-Bharata, the great Indian epic. As epics go, the Maha-Bharata is even full of melodrama and supernatural intervention than the Iliad (appropriately enough, since it's apparently 8 times longer than the Iliad and Odyssey combined). It's basically the story of a feud between five brothers of divine origin, the Pandavas, against their 99 cousins (all of the same father!!), the Kauravas. It IS an extremely fascinating story, and it gave me an insight into the Hindu religion and Indian psyche in general. And from what Bollywood movies I've seen, the general zeitgeist of the plots and characters definitely seem to be influenced by the Maha-Bharata!

Those of you who didn't know me during childhood are probably not aware that I used to suffer from asthma and eczema (I still haven't fully recovered from the latter, and there's still some rashes under my knee joint, but nowhere as bad as it was). As asthma isn't particularly good for stamina, and eczema meant that I itched when I sweated, I wasn't particularly enthusiastic about physical activity as a child.

I remember the first time I had to run more than a hundred metres or so, when I was 13 years old in high school. I was completely out of breath after a couple of hundred metres (it didn't help that I was a rather plump child). I'm not sure at what point I start to get enthusiastic about sports, in particular football and volleyball (mostly the latter nowadays), but when I did, my perfectionist self took over and I was never satisfied with my ability. Even more startlingly, I somehow gained the determination to run long distances. It might be the knowledge that many people are capable of lasting the full 42km of a marathon at full pace, yet there I was breathless after a few hundred yards. The fact that I was so unfit probably made me determined to improve, and I intermittently started to jog during my free time.

The first few years, I didn't really do it with much determination, running distances of only a couple of km before letting my physical pain stop me (to be fair, the terrain around my house is extremely hilly). It wasn't until a couple of years ago that I realised that the trick to running isn't to run without effort, but to endure for as long as one can. When you see the marathon runners on TV, they may seem almost nonchalant, but inside they're almost certainly burning with pain.

Nevertheless, there is a lot of training which is required in order to run for any distance. Part of it is to gradually build up the stamina and muscle endurance, but equally important is the mental training. One needs to know one's body, gain comfort from the fact that the initial pain and discomfort will not get worse for many kilometres yet, and have the stoic determination to continue even as the muscles start to scream out and the lungs start to heave.

The last time I managed any consistent training was during summer last year, and I managed about 12-13km at my peak in the murderous terrain near my house. Since then, I've only managed at most a run a week or so, which isn't enough to improve, and there have been periods of indolence where I didn't run at all, so my fitness is nowhere near its best.

These days, I've actually managed at least a couple of runs a week, and in lieu of increasing my distance, I've settled for increasing my running speed. A particularly neat thing I've discovered that during rush-hours, it's actually faster for me to run home than to take the bus, which means that I'll be running quite regularly, if only to get home!

An additional source of motivation....running while listening to the LOTR soundtrack. Nothing like the entire hordes of Mordor to motivate me!