How Running Saved My Semester (Not a Metaphor)

I started running in the second semester of my third year because I was not sleeping and I needed something to do with the 5 to 7 AM window when I had been lying awake anyway. It was not a wellness decision. It was not a fitness decision. It was the decision of someone who had run out of productive things to do with his insomnia and needed to put his body somewhere that was not his hostel room.

NIT Warangal at 6 AM is one of the most peaceful places I have been in my life, and I say this as someone who has now been to quite a few places. The campus has old trees. The roads loop through residential areas where the faculty live, past the stadium, through the academic complex that at 6 AM is empty in a way it is never empty otherwise. There are dogs. They are peaceful at 6 AM in a way they are not at noon.

What Running Did to My Brain

I want to be careful here because I am aware that fitness content has a particular genre of exaggeration that I find annoying. Running did not fix my anxiety. Running did not solve my startup problems, which during this period included a co-founder disagreement and a stalled product roadmap. What running did was give me a 40-minute window every morning where the only decision I had to make was where to put my next foot.

After about three weeks of running I noticed something: I was starting my days slightly differently. Not dramatically differently. Not in the way that self-help podcasts describe, where every habit transforms your whole life. Just slightly. I arrived at my 9 AM lectures having already done one thing that was only for me. That margin — the margin of having already done one thing before the demands of the day started — turned out to matter more than I expected.

The Running Group

By the sixth week I had been joined by four other people who had seen me running and decided to join for reasons I still do not fully understand. We never discussed joining. It just happened. We ran in comfortable silence mostly, occasionally talking about the startup or about courses or about nothing. There is a particular quality of friendship that develops between people who have seen each other struggling uphill at 6:30 AM and neither of them has said anything encouraging. It is honest friendship. I recommend it.

I ran 400 kilometres over that semester. I have no idea if this is a lot by any objective measure. It was a lot for me. My GPA that semester was the best of my B.Tech, partly because I slept better, partly because I could think more clearly, partly because I had a daily reminder that I could start something hard and finish it. The startup stuff remained hard. The semester was fine.