The Half Marathon I Wasn't Ready For

 Sometimes in life, you go a little crazy.

Even though, by traditional standards, I generally live life a little crazy anyway, this was a notch higher—even for me.

On a day when I was soul-searching for my younger self, or perhaps an older version of myself I'd somehow misplaced, the possibility of a half marathon casually came up. Then a conversation with K took everything to the next level, and somehow I found myself signing up for 21 kilometres after seven long years of doing any meaningful running.

My life's focus has shifted so dramatically since I last did things like this for funsies (as K would say).This time, it felt like a challenge. Like something genuinely hard. Like something my heart had been quietly yearning for.The original plan was simple. Train for the race, and let that training help fix a few medical readings that had been moving in the wrong direction.

Nothing went to plan.

I managed exactly two long runs. The longest was 12 kilometres.Then I fell sick three weeks before race day while on what was almost an impromptu holiday. A holiday that didn't really feel like one while I was living it, but somehow did once I came home.By the week leading up to the run, I'd almost forgotten I had even entered. Life simply took over. I went about my normal routine until I collected my race bib from Kia Arena. Standing there with the bib in my hand, I made a small promise to myself.

I'll turn up.

Maybe I'll run 5 kilometres.

Maybe 10.

But I'll honour the commitment I made to myself when I signed up.

The night before was probably the least prepared I've ever been for a race.

I ate a carb-heavy dinner alright and then thought briefly about what I'd wear. Packed... almost nothing. No bag, because in my head I was only running 10K and wanted to leave straight afterwards. No elaborate hydration strategy. No nutrition plan.No race-day checklist. I slept well. When the alarm went off, I got up.For the first time since the Chicago Marathon in October 2019, I pinned a race bib onto my shirt:) As I walked out the door, Prash shoved a gel into my hand."In case you run longer."

He made me a bowl of oats with chia seeds for breakfast—something I normally would have soaked the night before if I'd actually been thinking about this race.I arrived nearly an hour before my wave start. I left my warm jacket in the car and stood there in two-degree Melbourne cold waiting for the race to begin.Around 7 a.m., the crowd slowly came alive.The familiar nervous excitement started building.That strange mixture of curiosity and anticipation.What's going to happen over the next few hours?I closed my eyes. I took a few deep breaths.I imagined my breathing and my legs moving together for all 21 kilometres.For a moment... it felt completely doable. And that's really it, isn't it?

Sometimes you simply decide something in your mind and the body quietly follows.Or at least, mine did that day.

My fingers were frozen solid for the first five kilometres. The course was far more undulating than I'd imagined. Somehow I'd convinced myself Melbourne would be flat. It wasn't. I drank water or electrolytes at almost every station. Every three kilometres. Running through familiar streets felt strangely emotional.The Sun rising with rays streaking through the tall buildings made for a great start.

Past Fitzroy Gardens.

Near Flinders Street Station.

Along the Yarra.

South Wharf.

Southern Cross.

Marvel Stadium - the Ed Sheeran concert K and I came to, felt like just yesterday

Docklands.

Back through South Wharf.

The Botanic Gardens - air so fresh and the color of leaves and flowers so bright.

The Shrine of Remembrance.

Around the Tan.

Then finally back to Melbourne Park.

Exactly what I'd wanted.

To run through the city I'd called home for almost five years.

The climb near Southern Cross was the first section that really challenged me.

Then came the endless flat stretches around Docklands between six and eight kilometres. By the time I reached the Botanic Gardens, somewhere around the 12-kilometre mark, something changed. Runner's high. It arrived quietly.

From that moment, I knew I was finishing. Whatever happened, those remaining nine kilometres were mine. What fascinated me most wasn't my legs.

It was my mind. I heard myself saying exactly the things K and I have talked about so many times."Come on.""You've got this." I even clapped my hands a couple of times.

"Slap your thighs, Be kind to yourself, Be your own biggest cheerleader"

The advice I'd spent years giving her, somewhere along the way, I'd unknowingly learned to give it to myself too.

From 12 to 16 kilometres, I simply took it one kilometre at a time.I found myself overwhelmed with gratitude.Grateful that my mind and body still allowed me to chase things like this in my mid-forties. Grateful for the beautiful weather that morning. Grateful for Prash.For K.

For the way they constantly support me, challenge me, and somehow convince me I'm capable of more than I think. Grateful for my parents, my family and friends.

It was one of those rare moments where gratitude wasn't something I was trying to practise. It simply existed. By 16 kilometres, I realised there were only five left.

Five kilometres. I knew exactly what that distance felt like.

From our house to the turnaround point along Scotchmans Creek. I'd run that heaps of times."That's all this is," I told myself. I finished the gel, drank some water and kept moving. 16 to 17 felt endless. That single kilometre refused to finish. 18 and 19 climbed before finally dropping downhill. Neither was enjoyable, but I never hit the wall. No cramping. No dramatic collapse. Just one foot quietly finding its place in front of the other, again and again.

When I've trained seriously in the past, running became meditation. Everything around me there, yet somehow also not. This run wasn't like that. I was positive, I was grateful, I was genuinely happy, but I never quite found that deeply quiet place inside my head. Maybe that's why I need running regularly—not to chase medals or finish times, but to solve problems, to become more resilient, and to meditate.

With two kilometres left, I found myself looking for Prash and K. I kept expecting them to appear beside the course.

I remembered my very first half marathon in Masterton. K was barely ten months old, and I was wearing one of Prash's rust-coloured running shirts because I didn't have any long sleeve dry-fit shirst of my own. He ran the final two kilometres beside me, pushing her in the pram and encouraging me not to give up. Years later, at the Mumbai Marathon, he ran the last 10k with me, doing the same.

Before this race, I'd casually asked whether they might come for the end. Nothing specific—I was simply hoping. But I was also completely prepared to finish it alone. As I passed the 7-Eleven aid station, I slowed ever so slightly just to check. No familiar faces. I smiled to myself and kept going.

The final stretch through Melbourne Park felt wonderfully familiar from all the Australian Open visits over the years. The only thing on my mind was how long they must have been waiting. I imagined them getting bored, yawning, wondering where I was. With about 400 metres to go, I stopped thinking about the time altogether and simply decided to enjoy the finish. I crossed the line smiling 2hours and 48 min later. There is something magical about crossing a finish line. No matter how many times you've done it. No matter how slow you've been. No matter how imperfect the preparation. Eventually I found K, and I cried. Just a few tears. Not because of the distance, and not because of the time, but because I'd done it. Without fussing over it. Without the perfect training block. With every excuse available to stay in the warmth of my bed that morning, I had simply shown up. I had stood on the start line, and now the finish line was behind me.

Sometimes determination looks remarkably ordinary. It simply looks like showing up.

Leo came too, completely unconcerned with medals or finish times, only enthusiastically licking the salt off my face.

We collected protein shakes, sunscreen and the usual collection of race freebies before heading home. Burger. Fries. An hour-long nap. When I woke up, my right upper thigh and my left knee made sure I remembered exactly what I'd done. By the next morning I could walk upstairs, and by Tuesday evening I was teaching my regular yoga class.

I have to give yoga the credit for that recovery. Four years of yoga and pranayama have quietly changed my body. It moves differently now. It feels stronger. Heavier perhaps, but stronger.

Maybe that's what years of practice really do. They become muscle memory. The body remembers long after the mind has forgotten. Seven years had passed, but my legs and lungs still knew the way. Life, I once read somewhere, is about doing hard things. Maybe not because the hard thing itself matters, but because every time we choose one, we become someone who no longer doubts they can.

Perhaps that day, when I was soul-searching and impulsively signed up for the half marathon, I wasn't really trying to rediscover the woman I used to be. Perhaps, without knowing it, I was finally ready to meet the woman she had quietly been preparing me to become. 

No Agenda, No Checklist

How can you be like a tree I was thinking as I was reading a book that my brother gave me 'How to be more Tree' ? Or rather, why would you want to? A tree's parts serve the same function across years, decades, a lifetime. We humans are a constant assortment of context switches. One minute I'm driving K to a tennis match, the next I'm on a work call from the car. Time isn't dictated by the body clock anymore — it's the watch, the calendar, the next notification.

Anyway, I hadn't even gotten around to packing my bag till the very last minute. At 9 pm the night before, I chucked in the basics I can't do without and closed the bag. Four am alarms are no fun, especially when it's freezing cold outside and, quite frankly, I love my daily routine. Leaving it for a few days was already making me second-guess the whole thing.

But boy, was I glad I went.

It was a Friday-to-Monday trip to Bali. Four of us. No agenda, no checklist. The only thing booked was accommodation at a villa that looked good on the website — pictures of a pool and a swing. How much I'd end up loving lying on that swing, looking up at the sky while dipping my toes in the pool and sipping gin — I couldn't have guessed even a day before we got there.

I love airports. They feel like transit do-nothing-by-force zones, where the only right things to do are browse through duty free, eat, and read a book. The seats on the flight were dismal — the last row, no option to lean back, right next to the toilet. It stank. A rather large man was crammed next to us making the whole thing deeply unpleasant. S and I were determined to stay positive and made up for it all by talking non-stop for a couple of hours. Then we spotted empty seats in the middle of the aircraft and jumped to take them. I read through most of *Darling Girls* — it was OK.

Landing in warm Bali, vacation vibes hit me right away. I kept tracking K's tennis match score for a few hours and it took some time to shake off the Melbourne state of mind. A was already at the airport, and we all sat down for a meal together. My falafel pastry was fluffy, non-oily, and surprisingly great for airport food. This was already topping my expectations.

The ease of being around your people — where you don't have to overthink or pretend or complicate anything in your head — is one of the greatest gifts in life I am starting to understand.

The taxi drive was remarkably easy. The streets reminded me so much of small towns around Mangalore. Cobblestones. Green everywhere. Low-ceiling shops selling everything from tea to clothes to utensils. Slanting roofs with orange tiles, humid air, carved stone and wood temple-like structures at every corner.

The villa was beautiful and we wasted no time — toes in the pool, snacks ordered in, catching up begun. All of our lives similar but not quite the same. That shared context of life in Wellington from 18 or so years ago, to being mothers, daughters, and women with dreams and hopes and ambition.

We headed to a rooftop bar at Double Six. Easy decisions — someone looked up a place, and we were in a taxi soon after. That became the rhythm for the rest of the trip. The rooftop was something else, more for the view and the vibe than anything on the menu. We got gin cocktails and waited for M. In true vacation spirit, she got a taxi straight to the bar from the airport, and I loved that so much.

Good shared plates, sunset, fireworks, cocktails. Heading home, I realised I'd not packed running tights. We spotted an outlet store near the villa and went late at night. I bought green Adidas tights — a clear deviation from monotone Lululemons.

Late-night conversations about many varied topics, easy and flowing, just like the water in the pool.

Next morning, M and I set out to run on the streets of Bali. Wary of stray dogs and main roads, but determined. It was so hot and humid I stopped at 3-something kilometres. M, to her credit, finished 5K.

The breakfast spread looked unimpressive at first, but I loved the tropical fruit platter. The food turned out good and we ended up eating the same breakfast for the rest of our days there.

Getting a massage was top of the list for all of us, so after some AI-assisted searching, we picked a place offering complimentary pick-up from the villa. Two hours of massage and facial, most of which I slept through blissfully. The other two chatted away and caught up on all things business in addition to the pampering.

We gravitated to Indian food for lunch — tasty! A disaster in the making was averted when A's fold phone dropped onto the street as we climbed out of the cab. Pure luck that no vehicle or person stepped on it in the whole minute it lay on that busy main road.

I tried drinking from a coconut straight out of the shell. It was OK.

Next stop: head massage and manicure/pedicure. We walked and scouted a few places, eventually landing in a near-new head massage parlour. It was blissful. They reached places that haven't been reached before — strong hands working all the muscles and joints on neck and shoulder. We found a cool coffee spot after, took photos, laughed silly, and admired the way our hair and skin felt after hours of pampering.

Then we went to watch Devil Wears Prada 2, despite M's reviews. She'd already watched it but sportily joined in for a second viewing. A pretty low-key mall. Clothing so cheap we had to buy. Dinner for four so cheap I checked twice that they'd charged us correctly. The movie was meh, but the company made up for it.

Reaching home late didn't feel very late. We asked the driver from that morning to take us around Ubud the next day. It felt like a very productive, very slow, very relaxing fun day — just magical how it turned out that way without a plan. We talked late into the night and had one too many gins but still slept alright.

Next morning, repeat breakfast by the pool. Then a day trip to Ubud, a good hour and a bit away.

It was fascinating to watch the districts pass one after another — handicrafts, batik, silver, woodwork, stonework. Skills from ages ago, and whole settlements built around those skills. Women designing and drawing batik prints at an emporium felt similar to watching an Indian artisan work with fabric. So skilled, so deft, so confident in their strokes.

We stopped to taste luwak coffee. I felt sad looking at the two luwak cats they had on display — I hoped the sleepiness really was nocturnal behaviour, as they claimed. There were twenty varieties of coffee and tea to taste. Coconut and avocado were flavours I'd never have guessed could be coffee. The teas ranged from a vivid blue to usual ginger, lemon, and the like. If someone had told me I might like poop coffee, I'd have stopped being friends with them — but I did like the taste of it. Fruity, less acidic. Genuinely good.

Next stop was the famous Bali swing. The drive up to it was an attraction in itself — a stretch lined with massive wooden and metal art and homeware. Admiring them, then nodding off to sleep in between, we reached the rice terraces. The only imagery I'd had of Bali was this — rice terraces. They looked grand. The swing theatrics looked touristy, but also fun. If not there, where else?

M and I decided to play along and go on the swings. A and S sipped on juice, patiently took pictures, and indulged us in the act. The swings go up so high it's almost an adventure activity — especially when the guys, so adept at getting the shot, ask you to let go of the grip and hold the long trail of your dress instead. The photos look dramatic and pretty. The adrenaline rush in doing it is something else entirely.

Lunch was at a good-looking but not-as-tasty place. Then the Ubud markets — so familiar, like alleys of small stores selling similar things, people haggling, so much like India. Earrings, bracelets, necklaces. Lots of them. We ended up in a local designer's store with fixed and reasonable prices and bought more pieces collectively than we could count. I snagged a teak cutting board, all the while quietly worrying about the cabin bag — the only luggage we'd booked for the trip.

One more shot of luwak coffee. Then back into the cab toward Seminyak, where the villa was.

The driver had warned us: after 6 pm, traffic builds up, could take two hours. We assumed he was exaggerating. The minute we got in the cab and checked on maps, reality hit. It did take that long. We ended up in an Indian restaurant, craving comfort food. Walked back to the villa — less than a kilometre on the main road, scared of stray dogs. Talked for hours. Way longer than we thought we would after that long day out.

Last morning. Complimentary 30-minute massage, decent but no match for the day before. Easy, long breakfast. Customary photos. Checked out of the villa at 1 pm and headed to Potato Head Beach Club. Luxurious. Views that will stay with me. Authentic Indonesian food, at last, tasting so good and abundant.

Then a temple — so peaceful inside, multi-coloured frangipani flowers everywhere.

Taking the taxi back to the villa for the last time as a group felt like time's up. We changed, booked a cab for S and I to the airport, and headed back home recounting all the good times and great memories we'd made together.

So glad this happened.