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- 05 - Why do I run on roads filled with traffic?
05 - Why do I run on roads filled with traffic?
Instead of running on a treadmill
Rajesh Raghavan
October 23, 2022
Hey friends 👋
I had an epiphany during a run this week. It was Thursday morning; I woke up with an extremely bad dream. The dream felt so real that I woke up terrified. It was already noon, but I had planned to go for a run early that day. Things didn’t feel aligned, but I pushed myself to go for the run. I was frustrated, and I wanted to push myself hard that day. So I decided to go for an 8km run.
I put on my shoes and get outside, to see that the sun was shining bright. I changed my goal from running an 8km to running a 5km in under 30 mins. I haven’t been that fast in the past few weeks, so I wanted to take up that challenge. I slowly walked down the road to reach my starting point and I started crying internally! I had never seen so much traffic on these roads before. The road was jam-packed and bikes were fighting to go in the front by taking the footpath.
A bad mood, hot weather, & heavy traffic. I thought of an instance of going back to my home & just sleeping again. Somehow, I pushed myself to start the run & wanted to finish it faster than ever. I started running faster than usual, went through the standing cars & bikes multiple times, and jumped across a few potholes to finish the first lap. But I was exhausted for the second lap. I barely managed to run and somehow finished both laps successfully. I couldn’t finish 5km in under 30 minutes but still, I was super satisfied with the run. Why? Because I had a beautiful realisation during the run.
In this whole chaos, while running through the traffic I realised that running on roads is similar to flowing like water. Just like water, you just have to sense the smallest of the gaps and go through them to reach your destination. It doesn’t matter if it's a wide-open lane or a small pinhole, you just have to flow through both of them to reach the other side. The heavy traffic, sun, or the guy blocking your path cannot stop you from running. You either flow through them or crash and break through the obstacle in front of you. You just FLOW.
This is the reason I don’t prefer running on a treadmill. A treadmill is a controlled environment where things are laid out for you and you just keep running. Life is not the same, things keep coming at you & it's our job to flow through them and find out our way out of this chaos. Running on the road reminds me to flow like a water. And that's how I would always like to move (flow) in life.
Here's a quote by Bruce Lee:
💫 This week in Read Write Run
I haven’t completed the book yet but I'm enjoying the read. Gautam curates & talks about a lot of fundamental principles from compounding, first principles thinking etc. Here are a few highlights from the book:
"Curiosity is antifragile, like an addiction; magnified by attempts to satisfy it."
Michelangelo was once asked by the pope about the secret of his genius, particularly with regards to the statue of David, one of the greatest sculpting masterpieces of all time. Michelangelo responded by saying, “David was always there in the marble. I just took away everything that was not David.”
Nassim Taleb calls this “subtractive epistemology.” He argues that the greatest contribution to knowledge consists of removing what we think is wrong. We know a lot more about what is wrong than what is right. What does not work (i.e., negative knowledge) is more robust than positive knowledge.
I wanted to dive deeper into the concept of “subtractive epistemology". This concept is fascinating & this article has good citations to dive deeper into this.
A good but not a great episode if you are interested in tech, building companies & investing. Here's an insight that I really loved from the interview (I'm paraphrasing it):
Revant Bhate mentioned that in India, the markets are not deep enough to scale companies easily. So even after reaching 0 to 1, you cannot stop innovating. 1 to 10 in India is basically three 0 to 1 journeys that need to be done. But in the US, the markets are deep enough to kick in the repeated motion once you go from 0 to 1. Scaling is easier in deeper markets than in India.
This reminded me of this quote I saw on Twitter:
🏃 Run
This week I completed my weekly goal & also did my fastest 5k yet!
I ran for 5 days and finished 5 km every day. I managed to run 5 km in 31 mins, which is my fastest run in the past 4 weeks. And I also completed my 4-week streak 🥳 A wonderful week, hope to continue this forever!
So that's it for this week's issue. Thank you so much for reading till the end. If you have anything interesting to share or discuss, do reply to this email & let's chat!
Wish you a wonderful week, bye-bye!