Be Happy, Be Healthy

As part of my continuing efforts to keep myself occupied, I joined a Beginning Running class sponsored by the Dhahran Road Runners Club. I paid a small fee to join the club and a small fee for the class, which meets for two nights a week for eight weeks. The class is based on interval training, building up longer periods of running in between increasingly shorter periods of resting (walking). This was something of a spur of the moment decision. I want to drop some weight but I’m not having much success. My diet is under control (for example, I eat vegetarian at least three days a week) and I already walk the dogs (briskly) for about an hour and a half each day between their morning and evening walks. I take the stairs at work. By all standards, I eat better and get far more exercise than most people. But I just can’t seem to lose more than a pound or two.

Last night was the first meeting of the class. I showed up on time, quarter to the hour, and was amazed to see an enormous crowd already gathered at the bleachers next to the running track at the school. There were well over a hundred people who had signed up for this class! It was quite a sight: people of all colors and ages and sizes, even kids. There were a few enormous Saudi guys inevitably drenched in perfume. (I will never be able to clear my head of the cloying, nauseating scent of Arabs wafting perfume at every step. It’s everywhere: at work, in the shops, on the running track, it sticks to door handles and seat belts in taxis, even the money reeks of perfume. They reapply it throughout the day and when they get in groups, the combined effect ends up smelling very much like a dumpster in the summer. Last year, I measured the distance between lamp posts on the path around the golf course by pacing it out [40 feet] and discovered that I can smell the perfume of some of those guys over a distance of more than 120 feet while outdoors—it’s that strong! They are continually surrounded by a fug of it.) But back to the beginning runner horde.

As all of you know, being successful at something like a running class often requires an exercise partner. I scanned the crowd to see if I knew anyone, and recognized a few faces from work and dog classes, but decided to get on the track and see what happened.

To my surprise, I was sort of adopted by a Kiwi who is an executive secretary to a manager in the power unit (she’s rather dark skinned, looks kind of Asian, and might be part Maori, which is interesting). She commented on my spiffy neon yellow shoes (you probably saw many examples of these if you watched any of the track events from the Olympics; I told her I bought them because I hoped that they would help me run faster) and then we simply continued the rest of the class side by side.

With our focus on running and walking and setting a good but reasonable pace and a bit of chatting in between, the knowledge that we were on the track with more than a hundred other people sort of faded away. Even though it was work, it was relaxing to engage in such a simple activity. I am looking forward to giving this a go.