Welcome to my blog, Sanjuruns!

This is the blog that I started in 2019. Just a year before, I started to cultivate the habit of running. And that has changed my whole life. It gave me a lot of confidence to share my own joy as well as support the ones who would want to take up running for the sake of recreation and over all well well-being.

So, this is not just a blog but a true compendium of fitness and happiness, which has evolved over time.

I ran my first full marathon in Mumbai – the Tata Mumbai Marathon in 2020.

Initially, I thought I would blog about my own story and my passion for running. So, a lot of my earlier posts will talk about me and my journey to becoming a marathon runner. But, gradually, I realised that this idea has to move further. It has to move to the next level, where it would not be just about me, but for you and for every soul that needs to know this – the idea to be fit and happy.

So, let me start with my own story before I can help you with the objectives of this blog and how it aims to help you and support you in your fitness journey.

A little bit of my background

My early life

I was then 38. It was too late for anyone to start thinking about taking up sports. And I had never been in a sports arena. Never played any. If I could recollect properly, I loved to spend my sports periods in school, going to the library, and reading books and magazines. More than anything, I was a book nerd, and that was the world I knew! That’s it.

But we all change or evolve with changing times. I did my studies. Finished college. Found a Job for myself. And then happily got married. And I thought that I would live happily ever after.

But real life begins only after you have fulfilled your typical ideal goals that are served on a platter to you by society. These are the mandatory assignments that you have to sign up for anyway. But they may not necessarily lead to a happy and healthy life on their own. There is a lot that goes into building one. And this blog is all about that: Finding your health and building your happiness!

Me at 32

As you can see below, this was me at age 32. Plump like a Kaddu(Pumpkin). By looking at the picture, you can make out very easily the kind of person I would have been. I looked everything but fit. Fitness and I were poles apart. That time, I vaguely remember my exact weight, but I do remember that it was somewhere beyond 90 kgs. The ideal BMI assigned for me is: 78 Kgs.

At that point in time, I used to work at a call centre. Call centres were hot and were the most common employers anyone could get into, as long as you knew a little bit of English and had some flair to communicate with people around.

But the odd thing about working in Call Centres is that you work shifts. And if that happens to be working for overseas clients from the US or UK, you not just work, but you become an Owl. You work graveyard shifts. During the course of those 8 years that I was at the Call Centre, I attended all sorts of shifts.

I would be waking up while others were wrapping up their work. I would be entering the workplace while the world was switching off the lights in its workplaces. It was such a unique life I lived those years in the Call Centre.

While you start working, your health does not get impacted that much initially. But with the passage of time, you can not afford to ignore your health – both mental and physical.

Our workplace impacts our health in a lot many ways. The way you spend your time at work could make a huge difference to your overall well-being. In fact, the major part of our lives goes to work. So, having a workplace that supports your health is one of the most critical elements in our well-being.

During the last days at the call center before I wrapped up to join the normal workplace at a bank that gave me normal work hours, I decided to go and see a Doctor.

The doctor was a nice lady who listened to me and allowed me to tell her everything about my problem. After that, she picked up her stethoscope and asked me to lie down. She wanted to measure my Blood Pressure. I was wondering, like, why the hell should the Doc have to refer to the BP monitor? After she took the readings a few times, she told me that I should not mind, but I should give it some more time to confirm. And I asked, What?

I was told that I was running a high BP, and this could be a case of Hypertension.

But I never believed her words.

Mentally as well as physically, I was very exhausted. And my work was getting affected. And I was getting affected by work. My family life was getting affected by the depressive state of my mind. I was clueless about what I could do to save my body and mind.

While I was grappling with multiple issues at a personal level, my work took me to a place that I thought would make the matter even worse. I could not take my family with me. And I had taken up a room in a lodge.

Most of my day was spent at work. I came back to my room to sleep. Worked till late in the evenings. But having nothing else to do, I would still get some time to come down from my room and roam on the streets nearby. That made me feel a little better.

A Tiny Act of Change

After a few days there, I thought of waking up a little early each morning, having nothing else to do. In my chappals and cotton shorts, and a Tee, I would take a stroll around the nearby places.

I found that the morning hours felt so different from the rest of the day. Peaceful and energizing. There would be stillness in the air. The roads wore a clean and empty look. The smoke and traffic noise that filled the day later was absent. And the surroundings were filled with the freshness and abundance of oxygen.

Coming back from these strolls, I felt that I was more peaceful and felt the energy through the rest of my day at work. I noticed that my emotional self was kept in balance. In short, moving my body in the early mornings reduced my stress levels.

I was encouraged to experiment more.

One day, after a few weeks of pleasant morning experience, I decided that I would go for a short jog to the nearby police grounds. Felt breathless by the time I reached there. The distance would have been hardly 2 km. In those days, I would often experience breathlessness while climbing the stairs and doing other chores.

The New Year’s resolution

I ran. And I felt better than walking. That day, I came back and could not take my mind off this enormous mental and physical rejuvenation that I had started to experience by including this tiny fraction of physical activity into my daily life.

I decided to magnify and elaborate on this experiment. The new year was about to begin in a few days. I thought of taking up a resolution. I took out my notepad and scribbled a plan. I came up with a resolution to run a total distance of 1800 km in 365 days.

I was confident that I would witness a transformational mental and physical state if I kept to my resolution.

The new adventure begins.

On the 31st night in 2017, I went to bed at 10 pm. On 1st Jan, I got up at 5:30 am and went for a short morning run.

My goal was to run 1800 kilometers in these 365 days. The morning routine, the good night sleep, the daily diet, etc, became all aligned to work according to the plan. My single status away from family turned out to be a retreat.

I could devote myself to healing my body and mind. It is amazing to experience how our mind and body were built with mechanisms to repair themselves. I experienced an incredible amount of transformation. My body weight started to normalize. I started to get sound sleep at night. My emotional well-being witnessed a sea change.

As you can see, I found a new self, a self-energized and athletic body, and a peaceful and cheerful mind by 2019. I had started running and participating in long-distance running events. There were a lot of lessons learned in these years.

So, I decided that I should come forward and share with you what I learned about health and well-being. We hardly prioritize our emotional or physical health. Or I would rather say that we are clueless about how to care for this mind and body, the two most precious possessions, in today’s world.

What I am sharing here on this blog are not secrets but age-old words of wisdom. And I hope that you would return and regain yourself by reading this blog.