I love sufi music. I love the coke studio songs from Pakistan even better when they have the sufi singers on them. I am even bigger fan now, because it helped me start running.
My brother Aditya told me he started running. I follow @Sidin on twitter. He posted about running 5k with c25k. @bharati.jacob, our board member changed her profile pic with the one where she completed a half marathon. It was time to get off my ass.
So i downloaded the c25k app from blackberry app world and set on the job. It was a disaster. I could barely run 30 secs. My legs cramped up very badly, and went numb half way. I was standing in the middle of the road for about 40 mins to recover. It was hilarious because, i was not out of breath. Just COULDNT move.
I almost gave up, but for three reasons.
1. I believed that if Adiya, Sidin and Bharati could do it, i could do it.
2. I wanted to do it because every five years, its my thing to do something new which i never thought i could. This five year, its about running 5 kilometers. The purpose is to stretch my limits.
3. And a heavy dose of luck helped immensely.
Once again the deadly combination of Belief, Purpose, Luck (and later i found the rhythm) to help me get through four weeks.
– I started with the “c25k podcasts” on my blackberry. It was great motivation, but i just could not run as per plan.
– Instead of giving up, i did alternate days of walking 4 kms and sticking to the c25k plan on the other days.
– Two things happened. My daugther dropped my blackberry and the key board went wacko! (Luck/Coincidence). I found an old Coke Studio CD at home (Luck. Luck). Actually, my daughter had destroyed the CD, i found the cover.
The back story on this is, at the TEDIndia Conference in Mysore in 2009, Ashar Hasan handed out a bunch of Coke Studio CDs. I was hooked. And have all the episodes and albums now on my phone. My favourite now is “Saeen Zahoor”.

So i went shopping for a new phone. Zoned in on the HTC one.
Boom!
Andriod has a app called RunDouble which was life saver. HTC One has a killer music player. Now we were talking.
The great thing about RunDouble is the ability to play your own music. I put sufi music on as my playlist and i was on a roll. Another great thing about RunDouble is the periodic alerts and stats that you can hear about your pace, timing, interval etc. My personal favorite is “You are half way”.
So, here i am in the fourth week of the plan. Not quite there to run a 5k run. But hey, my purpose, belief, luck, and rhythm are now aligned.
*And yesterday, at our board meeting, all our board members decided to run the TCS 10k next year.