Monthly Archives: July 2010

Death of A Language

Posted on July 29, 2010
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“Last speaker of ancient language dies”.

Flashback to February this year. I was on my way back to the US from India. Seating myself in the plane, the above headline scrolled past on the display in front of my seat. The article refered to a language, Bo, spoken by some tribals on India’s Andaman Islands. The languages spoken on the islands are considered to be almost 70,000 years old and are theorized to have African roots. Professor Anvita Abbi, a leading linguist is quoted as saying: “(her death was) a loss for intellectuals wanting to study more about the origins of ancient languages, because they had lost ‘a vital piece of the jigsaw’. It is generally believed that all Andamanese languages might be the last representatives of those languages which go back to pre-Neolithic times.”

The last speaker was a 85 year old woman, a survivor of the recent Tsunami that ravaged the islands. The BBC story says: “”She was often very lonely and had to learn an Andamanese version of Hindi in order to communicate with people. But throughout her life she had a very good sense of humour and her smile and full-throated laughter were infectious”. What might’ve gone through her mind as she lived those years knowing that with her would die the language. Only last week, I read a short story by the acclaimed Australian author, David Malouf, titled “The Only Speaker of His Tongue”. He writes:

“Now to the remotest dark, far back in each ordinary moment of our speaking, even in gossip and the rigamarole of love words and children’s games, into the lives of our fathers, to share with them the single instant of all our seeing and making, all our long history of doing and being. When I think of of my tongue being no longer alive in the mouths of men a chill goes over me that is deeper than my own death, since it is the gathered death of all my kind.”

Even before Maya was born, Shanthala had started campaigning for Maya to speak Kannada. She insisted that we speak as much Kannada as possible when we’re with Maya. I, a self-proclaimed global denizen, was a little skeptical of this goal. After all, Shanthala and I spoke to each other mostly in English, especially when we had to discuss something complicated. I thought in English. Having been raised in different linguistic lands during my childhood and adolescence, I was barely conversant in Kannada, my mother tongue. I read it with difficulty and my vocabulary was limited to the few words needed to get by on the street. Why should we insist on Maya speaking or learning Kannada when we didn’t ? I asked. She’d imitate us anyway and thereby speak mostly a mixture of Kannada and English, more English than Kannada. Duh! That is why I want us to speak Kannada more, said Shanthala.

To me, the primary purpose of language seemed to be about getting past our separateness, to communicate. Here in the US, Shanthala and I have not sought out Kannada-speaking friends, we’ve not joined groups for Kannada speakers or done anything to sustain the language part of our upbringing. It seemed impractical to insist that Maya learn a language that she’d not hear outside the house (and even that, only when her parents discussed simple subjects). We have friends in India whose kids, despite living in Bngalore and having Kannada spoken almost exclusively in the house, have switched to speaking only in English. It all seemed a losing battle to me. With so many battles to pick from, why pick a sure-fire loser ? But, as Maya grew, so did my fluency in Kannada. Maya’s first word, “Agua”, was that of a Californian, in Spanish. But, Maya came up with her own Creole, constructing sentences that are a mixture of English, Kannada and Spanish, picking the words that were easiest for her to say in each language. “Leche beka”, she says (Leche is Spanish for milk and beka is “want” in Kannada. In Kannada, “beka” is actually a question, “do you want”, for which the answer is “beku”, I want. But having only heard the questioning form of the verb, Maya uses beka to mean I want).

The end of Bo has stayed with me all this time. The main reason may have had something to do with my (then recent) experience in India. It began with my purchases of the English translations of some major local literary works. I purchased House of Kanooru by the popular and acclaimed Kuvempu. The blurb at the back said that the book documented the life of a group of people in the highlands of Coorg, a famous and distinctive part of Southern Karnataka, a life that was fast disappearing, if not already extinct. The foreword by the distinguished playwright, Girish Karnad, lent the translation some heft, I thought. The other book that I purchased was the translation of an autobiography in Gujrati by a Dalit, titled The Whole Truth and Nothing But the Truth: A Dalit’s Life by N. Kesharshivam. The introduction by the author was written in simple English that I felt (in my patronising way, I suppose) had the right voice and tone for such a tome. I thought that these would help fill the gaping hole in my awareness of India.

Alas! The translations were awful, to say the least. The House of Kanooru seemed transliterated rather than translated. Some of the phrasing and sentences that might have read well in Kannada read horribly in English, with awkward, anachronistic phrasing and choice of words. I can’t recall the exact phrases, but I remember something like “When the beautiful damsel saw her consort, she felt like she was cavorting in the heavens”. Somewhere within the first 20 pages, my goodwill died and I gave up on the book. No wonder, Kuvempu is virtually unknown outside the pages of Kannada (even though he’s a recipient of India’s prestigious Jnanapith Award). The autobiography was equally bad. One particularly unskilled sentence stood out: “So, at the fag end of my life, at the end of my youth, I became a Class 1 Officer”. When I packed for my return, I was happy to leave these books behind.

Over the years, as I watched writers in various languages other than English win the Nobel Prize, I wondered at the paucity of Indians in that list. Prizes for works in English such as the Booker Prize or the Pulitzer Prize have had their share of Indians recently, but we didn’t figure in the Nobel Prize (yes, I know that awards are an opinion and Gandhi never won the Nobel Peace Prize while Kissinger did). I had wondered if poor translations were the primary reason why they haven’t become more universally known. Not all translations are this bad, I suppose. When I read Rabindranath Tagore’s Short Stories or even his famous Gitanjali, the work which won him the Nobel Prize, I was struck by how beautiful the English translation was. They had been translated by Englishmen in the early years of the past century.

Back to book purchases. I wanted to buy books in Kannada for Maya. Maya was not yet two and if the books were made of regular, adult book paper, she rent them into the waste paper basket in short order. In the US, many infant and toddler books (called board books) are made of thick cardboard making it difficult for the toddlers to damage them. In Bangalore, I could hardly find board books in Kannada. A search for even basic Kannada alphabet books was surprising in its paucity. In the US, there are a million books on the English alphabet, presenting the information in entertaining, eye-catching ways. The only toddler-proof books that I encountered in India were in English. In India, usually only the not so well healed read non-English books to their infants. They cannot afford to buy board books, which are more expensive to make, thereby forming a vicious cycle from which only the loss of the language is the winner.

This is how a language dies, I thought to myself. And was reminded of this again as the headline chronicling the extinction scrolled up the display screen in front of my seat.

There are about 6800 known languages in the world remaining (as of 1999), 96% of which are spoken by only 4% of the world’s population. 51 languages have only one speaker left and 5,000 languages have less than 100,000 speakers.

In “How Language Works” by David Crystal (a link to the chapter is here), writes that there are many reasons why a language dies, from the violence of natural calamities and genocides to the seeming benevolence of cultural assimilation. The most potent force for the past 500 years however has been cultural assimilation.

The author speaks of three stages in the death of a language by cultural assimilation. The first is the enormous pressure – economic, social and political – to speak the dominant language. Crystal writes: “‘To achieve a better quality of life’ is a commonly stated reason why someone decides to learn the dominant language”. The second stage is the ascent of bilingualism as people build a bridge between the old and the new languages, crossing back and forth between them. The final stage is when a new generation increasingly adept in the new language uses less and less of the old one, until at last the bridge to the old falls down in disrepair. Crystal writes: “This is often accompanied by a feeling of shame about using the old language, on the part of the parents as well as their children. Parents use the old language less and less to their children, or in front of their children.”

I’ve lived these stages. Growing up, my father looked down upon speaking in Kannada, listening to Kannada or Hindi songs or watching movies in the vernacular. He was not unusual in this regard. He only wanted his son to grow up with as many opportunities as possible, opportunities that shrank dramatically if I wasn’t fluent in English. And now, if Maya grows up in the US, her children, if not her, will surely know next to nothing of Kannada.

But why should we care if a language dies ? Is it important ? Surely, if the language were useful, it’d have survived.

One utilitarian argument is that each language is a repository of vast, accumulated knowledge. In a recently published article, “In Defense of Difference”, the authors, Maywa Montenegro & Terry Glavin, write:

“The way Maffi (Luisa Maffi is a linguist and anthropologist) tells the story, she was interviewing Tzeltal Mayan people waiting in line at a medical clinic in the village of Tenejapa when she met a man who had walked for hours, carrying his two-year-old daughter, who was suffering from diarrhea. It turned out that the man had only a dim memory of the “grasshopper leg herb” that was once well known as a perfectly effective diarrhea remedy in the Tzeltal ethnomedical pharmacopeia. Because he’d nearly forgotten the words for the herb, he’d lost almost any trace of the herb’s utility, or even of its existence.”

Besides loss of knowledge, there is also the loss of ways of thinking and being. Malouf writes that each language is: “a whole alternative universe, since the world as we know it is in the last resort the words through which we imagine and name it”. Imagine if you will the following scenario. As the world moves increasingly towards nuclear families, imagine that we will lose all the Asian languages. With that loss, it’s possible that we’d lose the knowledge that once, societies existed that valued the social web so much that they had specific words to express the relationship between two human beings instead of everyone being an uncle, auntie or a cousin.

Another reason, the basic premise of the article “In Defense of Difference”, is that with increasing homogeneity and a loss in diversity comes a reduction in resilience. After all, it is diversity that accounts for much beauty and resilience in the natural world. Complex systems and ecologies thrive in the presence of diversity and homogeneous systems vanish when catastrophic events occur. I haven’t encountered this idea as applied to language before and so can only speculate that it rings true because of the analogy with the natural world.

Yet another reason it seems to me has nothing to do with utility, but is similar to preservation of Van Goghs and Mona Lisa and the Dead Sea Scrolls. They are precious heirlooms. And the people who speak those languages are often interested in preserving their language, if they can be supported in their efforts. The preservation of art and culture that we take for granted come at a pretty high price, one that we discount easily when it comes to Mona Lisa, but object when it comes to something like the Bo language.

The face of the last speaker of the Bo language has stayed with me since February. I wanted to write it up, but for some reason or the other, couldn’t find the words. Then yesterday, I ran across a buzz in the online world over articles written opposing the viewpoints of “In Defense of Difference”. I learnt of the buzz and the article via the excellent blog, Neuroanthropology. In “Language Extinction Ain’t No Big Thing ?”, the author is furious at an entry by another blogger, Razib Khan, who writes the blog, The Gene Expression, hosted at the Discover science magazine. Khan wrote “Linguistic Diversity = Poverty”. In slightly longer words, rich Western intellectuals and liberals like to keep alive things like exotic languages like Bo while the people who speak those languages want to escape them because it is a cause for poverty.

In one way, I suppose Khan’s argument is not very different from what David Crystal said. But Khan makes other false arguments (some which have the malodor of social darwinism (eg: “First, we’re not talking about the extinction of English, French, or Cantonese. We’re talking about the extinction of languages with a few thousand to a dozen or so speakers”) and overall, makes a specious case according to Neuroanthropology. I haven’t read Khan’s original posts, primarily because I had been put off by his writing earlier on some other topics that now elude me. The article on Neuroanthropology is long (almost 10,000 words), but fascinating and comprehensive in its coverage of why preservation of language is important, what is being done and why arguments such as Khan’s are incorrect. I highly recommend putting aside some time to read it.

As any reader of my blog will know by now, these are weighty matters and I don’t dwell on them for the sake of intellectual stimulation. These are matters which have a bearing on the world we leave behind for our children.

A breath leaves the sentences and does not come back
yet the old still remember something that they could say

but they know now that such things are no longer believed
and the young have fewer words

many of the things the words were about
no longer exist

the noun for standing in mist by a haunted tree
the verb for I

the children will not repeat
the phrases their parents speak

somebody has persuaded them
that it is better to say everything differently

so that they can be admired somewhere
farther and farther away

where nothing that is here is known
we have little to say to each other

we are wrong and dark
in the eyes of the new owners

the radio is incomprehensible
the day is glass

when there is a voice at the door it is foreign
everywhere instead of a name there is a lie

nobody has seen it happening
nobody remembers

this is what the words were made
to prophesy

here are the extinct feathers
here is the rain we saw – Losing A Language, W.S. Merwin

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What Color Is The Sky ?

Posted on July 25, 2010
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Of late, Maya has begun to insist that she wants her milk in the blue milk bottle rather than the yellow one.

“Azul”, she cries, as I reach out for the yellow milk bottle.
“But Maya, the blue bottle is dirty. It still has to be washed”, I say.
“No”, she starts to whine, “Azul”.

The process repeats for every item which we have in blue, exactly two: a blue water glass and a blue bowl. My father was thrilled with the news. Many moons ago, some fortune teller told my dad that blue was his lucky color. He immediately proceeded to paint everything he could blue, as I and my mother shuddered and thanked god that the fortune teller hadn’t picked some more easily off-putting color like pink or purple.

When Maya first began naming the world, I wondered how we would teach her the colors. Pointing at a dog or a ball or a car and naming it was easy. How could we point to the color of the thing ? Intuitively, I felt that naming colors would come after naming the things.

Scientific American carried an article last week about the acquisition of the language of color in humans. Melody Dye, the author of the article and a researcher at the Cognition, Language and Learning Lab at Stanford University, begins with an anecdote on testing a two year old for his color naming competence. She says that most two year olds have difficulty naming their colors, despite their parents’ insistence on their complete mastery (she narrates how the parents of the infants being tested had to be blindfolded because many got aggravated and started helping when their kids failed to be as stellar as they were hailed to be). Children even as old as six continue to have difficulty naming colors correctly, despite training.

Maya can confidently, almost dismissively, identify a dog or a cat or a bird, no matter what shape, color or size the animal is. She can even identify one from cartoons and caricatures. But identifying colors is a lot more difficult because identifying colors has a cultural component: not all cultures identify the colors and its hues the same way. The author quotes how in a Namibian dialect, Himba, their name for a color “zoozu” amalgamates the colors English speakers identify as black, green, blue and purple or how another name, “serandu” does the same for what we would distinguish as red, pink and purple. The linguistic erudites know well how the Russians have not a single name for the color blue but instead use two different words, one for the lighter shades of blue and one for its darker shades (but, apparently vodka is a cure for either shade).

The author of the article also points to the problem I pondered about. Children can learn the names of things quickly because they’re used within a context. Cats and dogs have usually easily distinguishable characteristics (Maya did get confused initially with some small dogs) and so can be called out easily. But colors can’t be called out that easily, at least not until the names of the objects have been mastered first.

The denouement of the article is fascinating, another insight into how language shapes thought. Here is Melody Dye:
“As it happens, English color words may be especially difficult to learn, because in English we throw in a curve ball: we like to use color words “prenominally,” meaning before nouns. So, we’ll often say things like “the red balloon,” instead of using the postnominal construction, “the balloon is red.”

When kids were trained using the postnominal construction, they mastered the color much more quickly.

“What color is the traffic light, Maya”, Shanthala asks.
“Red”, says Maya confidently.
“What does red mean”, I ask.
“Go, go, go!”, Maya shouts exultantly.

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This Middle Class American Life

Posted on July 19, 2010
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I’m still catching up with all the things that I’ve been meaning to blog, but have not been able to.

Back in May, NYT carried an article about a new UCLA study that attempted to capture every waking moment of 32 dual income, multiple child, middle class American families. The 32 families chosen cut across racial, sexual and nationality lines including black families, Japanese and Latino families and families with same sex couples. Totaling over 1540 hours of video, the study prompted a professor not associated with the study to exclaim, “This is the richest, most detailed, most complete database of middle-class family living in the world.”

From the article: “After more than $9 million and untold thousands of hours of video watching, they have found that, well, life in these trenches is exactly what it looks like: a fire shower of stress, multitasking and mutual nitpicking. And the researchers found plenty to nitpick themselves. ”

Some interesting observations and conclusions from the study:

  • Mothers still did most of the housework (27% compared to 18% by fathers).
  • Husband and wife were alone together in the house only about 10% of the time and the entire family was together only 14% of the time.
  • Flexible, on the spur division of work amongst the parents added to the stress. Couples with rigid divisions of labor had the least stress, even when the division was unequal.
  • Mothers had half as much leisure as the fathers (11% compared to 23%).
  • Mothers spent 35% of their time alone with kids compared to 25% by fathers.
  • The backyard is almost never used.

One aspect of the study that I can take heart in is the stress levels caused by flexible division of labor. Shanthala was raised in a house where everyone pitched in and from what she says, did whatever was required. There wasn’t much of a rigid division of labor when it came to doing household chores. I was raised in a house where my mom did practically everything with some ample help from servants. Shanthala and I have had several disagreements over the division of work in our house. I’ve told her several times that I prefer a fixed schedule and job as opposed to picking up whatever happens to be available. That way, I’m not scanning the horizon constantly for what needs to be done. Untrained in all my formative years, my eyes unconsciously glaze over what needs doing.

UCLA’s own publication of the study, put out way back in 2005, when the study concluded, has some other interesting tidbits:

  • “When they are together, today’s families tend to stay in motion with lessons, classes and games. Or, they go shopping.”
  • Researchers say parents effectively have relinquished the steering wheel to their children. That’s because most family decisions and purchases are geared toward the kids’ activities.
  • Elinor Ochs, a principal researcher says: “We’ve scheduled and outsourced a lot of our relationships. … And we’re moving from a child-centered society to a child-dominated society. Parents don’t have a life after the children go to bed.”
  • For Ochs, the most worrisome trend is how indifferently people treat each other, especially when they reunite at the day’s end. “People just don’t come together very frequently in our society,” Ochs said. “They might say they want community, but they don’t seek it.”

What kind of society, what kind of life are we bequeathing to our children ?

… O parents, confess
To your little ones the night is a long way off
And your taste for the mundane grows; tell them
Your worship of household chores has barely begun;
Describe the beauty of shovels and rakes, brooms and mops;
Say there will always be cooking and cleaning to do,
That one thing leads to another, which leads to another;
Explain that you live between two great darks, the first
With an ending, the second without one, that the luckiest
Thing is having been born, that you live in a blur
Of hours and days, months and years, and believe
It has meaning, despite the occasional fear
You are slipping away with nothing completed, nothing
To prove you existed. … – The Continuous Life by Mark Strand

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The Sorrows Of A Modern Parent

Posted on July 19, 2010
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“Despite what we read in the popular press, the only known symptom of the ‘empty next syndrome’ is increased smiling”.

I read this sentence back in 2006 or so, when I first encountered the brilliant mind of Daniel Gilbert in the pages of his bestseller, Stumbling on Happiness. The book was an eye opener on so many levels that I filed the sentence away in some corner of my brain’s attic and forgot about it. I wasn’t yet a father then and given the difficulty we were having conceiving, I probably sniggered at this statement, thanked my fate and moved on to the next eye opener.

Even then, however, the statement stayed with me because it flew in the face of the popular culture. Everybody I knew who had children thought the world of them and wouldn’t have it any other way. So despite my parent’s covert and overt references to how proud they were of having raised me, I attributed their pride to how I turned out, not their accomplishment in parenting a brat.

Last year, I noticed one of our neighbors, who had just entered the empty nest phase, look at Maya several times with what I thought was wistfulness and a little tear. The look in his eyes stayed with me.

Of course, parenting would be hard, I knew at some intellectual level, having heard that statement from my peers who were far more successful than we were in figuring out how to make babies. But I didn’t realize the depths of despair I could sink into sometimes, the relentlessness, the almost complete lack of time for myself and the total ennui of reading the same book over and over again. Being in the here and now with a child can be mind-numbing.

I attributed this difficulty to the insular life we lead here in the civilized, developed, West. Back in India, grandparents, neighbors, friends and other people pitched in to look after the baby, providing the parent with some much needed breathing time. Further, women of my mother’s generation were raised to expect the life they grew into. They had neither TV to glue their eyes to nor much money to spend. Cook, clean, make babies and raise babies was their life. They were not promised much and most didn’t expect much more. Here in the West, our expectations are much higher as is our sense of control and freedom.

Last week, New York Magazine carried an illuminating article that provided a comprehensive analysis of This Parenting Life. Titled “All Joy and No Fun”, it went behind the scenes to dissect Daniel Gilbert’s statement and in the process explores the cultural and psychological landscape of modern parenting.

The article, written by Jennifer Senior, starts with a study published in a scholarly journal last year that challenged Gilbert’s view. “Contrary to much of the literature, our results are consistent with an effect of children on life satisfaction that is positive, large and increasing in the number of children”, said the paper. The kick in the story however is that the author withdrew the paper a few months later when he discovered that his analysis was based on a coding error.

The article posits that a large factor in this Unhappy Parent Syndrome is that the experience of parenting has fundamentally changed. From a time when we thanked the gods for letting our children see the light beyond the first year of their life, we’ve come to a place where anything less than admission to a top school, a high paying job and a trophy wife is considered a failure. And to this end, parents have to do everything. Nothing is too much. Thinking that we’re solely responsible for how our children turn out, we rush them to expensive private schools (or expensive homes with good public homes), swimming lessons, karate classes, dance and a host of other activities designed to give them a leg up over the others. The stress to be the perfect parent is one major factor in what ruins the joy of parenting.

Other factors that affect our experience of parenting include the the later ages at which we have children and the support we get as parents from society such as extended time off when babies are born and decent childcare and public schools. According to the author, the only study that showed happy parents came from Denmark, where the state provides substantial support for parents.

Another key observation of the article is that parents tend to be unhappy in the daily moments of parenting, but look back on parenting as a most rewarding time. The author quotes two studies that lead to this conclusion. One is a study in which people categorized activities along the dual quadrant of pleasurable and rewarding. Activities such as work were considered rewarding, but not pleasurable while activities such as eating and watching TV were considered pleasurable but not rewarding. Raising children ranked behind volunteering and prayer as activities that were both pleasurable and rewarding. Another study found that childless couples were more depressed than couples with children and that single fathers without the custody of their children were the most depressed.

The author thus questions whether all these studies that conclude with the happy empty nest syndrome are those that define happiness as the immediate experience of positive feelings instead of being concerned with eudaimonia, of having lived a good life.

I liken parenting to running a marathon. No one who runs it can consider the experience painless. But after it is over, the euphoria of accomplishment is so overwhelming that many rush to run another one.

In any case, do read the article. Highly recommended.

Happy Maya

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Ten Miles

Posted on July 14, 2010
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On Thursday last, I decided to run ten miles, my longest in a long time. The last time I ran ten miles was over a year and a half ago. I found it appealing to aim for a distance that has two digits. The last time I had run anything close to that distance was back in January, when I ran eight miles, once.

My running has been heading downhill for a long time. The stress of parenting is the most recent excuse. Before that, it was Kitty’s death. But the sudden loss of interest, a runners’ equivalent of a writer’s block, began before Kitty’s death. Its origins remain murky.

Some people find Jesus as they approach middle age. I found running. Unable to conceive a child, we followed a doctor’s advice that I stop biking, not that I biked much. Worried more about gaining weight more than losing shape, I took to the unused treadmill that lay in a room frequented only by Kitty to relieve himself. A couple of months later or so, I ran the first 10K of my life. A few days later, Shanthala told me of a friend of hers who was looking for company in her pain as she trained for a marathon. Shanthala asked me if I wanted to volunteer. I said yes. I don’t know why I said yes. Maybe it was the euphoria of having run a distance that had double digits. Or maybe it was because I was dropped on my head when I was a baby.

To me, running a marathon is akin to climbing a peak. I knew somewhere deep down that I’d never attempt a mountain, at least not one with ice axe, ropes and crampons. I don’t have a death wish. But I did have some deep desire to push myself physically. Marathon provided an out for that desire.

Less than a year later, I had run two marathons, one of them (Big Sur Marathon) considered one of the toughest marathons in the US. I had finished in the top 10% of my age group and in the top 12% overall. A year more and my running resume read as follows: best mile time – 5:40, best 5K – 20 mins, best 10K – 40 mins, 10 miles under 70 minutes and half marathon in 92 minutes. For over two years, I ran a half marathon every weekend. Once, for two weeks, I ran a half marathon every other day. But when it came to running the 10 miles on Thursday, my mind was filled with dread.

Thursday dawned cool and a little cloudy. The nanny was coming and so I was free to run alone. I took my time getting ready to run. I returned phone calls that could have waited. I checked email more times than usual. I did everything possible to delay the inevitable. The strategy had worked well in the past. I would look up at the clock in mock horror, decide that it was too late to run long, run four miles on the treadmill and postpone knowing that I couldn’t really run ten miles, at least not in eighty minutes. But, I had asked the nanny to come early and so even after one more phone call, the clock still showed 10:30. The sun continued to hide. Out of reasons and time, I booted up and headed out the door.

A free application on the iPhone, RunKeeper, showed me the distance, instantaneous speed, average speed and calories burned as I ran. It also tracked my run using Google Maps and produced a final map of my run. I had only the estimated distance of the path I covered during my runs. Now, I would finally know the distances accurately and know what my actual pace had been over so many of the long runs that I had done over this path.

My heart lurched when I hit what I thought was the 1.5 mile mark. The iPhone said that I had only covered about 1.25 miles. And when I hit what I thought was the 2 mile mark, the iPhone said 1.7 miles. So, all this time when I had thought that I had run some really fast paces on this track, they were wrong (my best times at various distances didn’t change as they were run on a different track). Since the trail has mile markers every half mile, I decided to check if the iPhone was accurate. At the real 2 mile mark, the elapsed time was 16 minutes. I winced inwardly. That meant a pace of 8 minutes to a mile. I felt like I was running a decent pace and I had internally hoped that the pace would be just a little faster than the 8 minute pace. I worried that I couldn’t complete ten miles at this pace. As I crossed the next half mile marker, I checked the iPhone. It was measuring the distance correctly. I couldn’t doubt its clock. I was face to face with the primary reason I had avoided running this distance.

Three years back, I added biking to my workout and started biking extensively. But my prowess at running didn’t transfer to my biking. While hardly anybody overtakes me while I’m running, just about everybody overtakes me when I bike. Biking in addition to running tired my legs and one day, I woke up to find that running even a mile exhausted me. I had overtrained. I cut back on my biking and running.

I was running alone all this time. Occasionally, someone would join me for a short run, but that was rare. At home, I ran the same trail because I didn’t want to use the car to get anywhere to run. With no specific goals to aim for and my running having levelled off, crunching down the same path thrice a week, alone, probably began to demotivate me. Then, Kitty died. Nine months later, Maya was born. And my running never recovered. I had internally set myself a pace of 8 minute mile as an indicator of my fitness level. If I ran slower than that, mentally I considered myself finished. I began to fear running distances that showed me that I was finished.

As I continued my run on Thursday, the day continued to remain cool. There are a few highway overpasses and underpasses on the trail, but the trail is flat otherwise (RunKeeper says that the total elevation gain for the distance is 217 feet). As I approached the three mile marker, I saw the clock register 23 minutes and felt a little better. What I had thought of as the 3.5 mile mark was only the 3.2 mile mark. So, all this time when I thought that I was running 7 miles, I was actually running only 6.4. I typically do an out and back run and so deciding the midpoint was important. I began to have doubts if I’d complete 10 miles. I didn’t want to run 5 miles one way only to find that I had to walk (or worse limp) at the end.

At my peak, I’d run three, sometimes four, times a week. One run was what was called threshold training, one was interval training and one was a long run. When I threw biking into the mix, I couldn’t sustain the three runs and bike. So, I began to cut back my running. I figured that I’d let biking pick up a bit before I went back to my running regimen. But, not only had I overtrained, I had also upset my training rhythm.

I had been a couch potato till I married and even after then, my exercise was limited to hiking on weekends. When I started running regularly, I had to force myself out the door for a long time. I had to fight hard to overcome my old habits. Running a marathon was a simple and straight goal and so pursuing it was easy. But, running for the sake of running, especially given the monotony of the track was hard to sustain, especially since I had spent thirty five years of my life not bothering to do anything physically more strenuous than turning the page of a book or type on a keyboard. Furthermore, I had no company or support.

How long does it take to form a habit that becomes natural, that doesn’t require a ridiculous amount of willpower to sustain ? A popular answer is 21 days. Back in 1960, a cosmetic surgeon called Maxwell Maltz published a book called Psycho-Cybernetics (considered the trendsetter in the current self-help movement) in which he declared that it took 21 days to form a new habit. His answer was based on his discovery that it took 21 days for amputees to lose the sensation called phantom limb.

Last year, a paper in the European Journal of Social Psychology revised the answer to 66 days. According to PsyBlog, which is where I learned of this study: “What this study reveals is that when we want to develop a relatively simple habit like eating a piece of fruit each day or taking a 10 minute walk, it could take us over two months of daily repetitions before the behaviour becomes a habit. And, while this research suggests that skipping single days isn’t detrimental in the long-term, it’s those early repetitions that give us the greatest boost in automaticity.” The study also found that some people seemed more habit-resistant and that not all habits are equal: some take much longer to form.

To make matters worse, old habits die hard. In 2005, MIT published a study that found that the neural pathways triggered by the old habits don’t disappear, but just go  dormant. Once the old contexts are reasserted, the old habits come roaring back. According to Ann Graybiel, the principal researcher of the study: “”It is as though, somehow, the brain retains a memory of the habit context, and this pattern can be triggered if the right habit cues come back”.

While I had formed the habit of running regularly, once the rhythm was upset, the old habit of not exercising reasserted itself and I was back to fighting to lace up each time I decided to run. And as time elapsed, this became more stronger than the relatively newer habit of running regularly. Like an unused muscle, the neural pathway associated with running atrophied.

As I neared the four mile mark, I told myself that I’d turn back and add two additional miles by running the half mile loop around the park near our house. But, I passed the four mile mark and kept going. Another half mile to make the distance nine miles, I told myself. As I neared the 4.5 mile mark, I told myself that the place I had originally thought of as the 5 mile mark was looming close and so I’d run upto there before turning back. As I got closer to that mark, I berated myself for being so attached to times and paces and not just enjoying the damn run. Suddenly, it was like a curtain being pulled back. I felt light and relaxed and told myself that I’d turn back once the iPhone said that I had run 5 miles. If that meant, I’d have to walk the last mile or so, so be it. When I turned back at the 5 mile mark, the clock registered 38 minutes. I was under my eight minute mile barrier!

Slow down or you’ll regret it, I told myself. But I couldn’t. Just another mile at this pace, I said. I skipped stopping at the water outlets along the way. The clouds had mostly cleared, but the heat hadn’t picked up yet. The old joy of running had come back. I felt at peace as I kept running. My legs felt good and my breathing was normal. I measured my strides and found that I was sticking to the 90 steps per foot that is considered a secret to running with minimal impact and thereby avoiding injury. I was going to finish ten miles and to hell with the pace.

All the knowledge about how important it is to be fit didn’t help me return to running as smoothly as I had hoped. My mother’s mother suffered from severe arthritis as does my mother. Many studies have shown that runners have a lower chance of contracting arthritis compared to couch potatoes. My father, like many of his generation, suffers from diabetes. Physical fitness helps fight diabetes (diet is critical too). A friend of mine joked about my running, “Everyone falls ill and dies and all this running means squat”. And then I ran across the theory of compressed morbidity. Proposed by a Stanford University Professor, James Fries, and validated by many studies, this theory states that if you’re physically fit and have a healthy lifestyle, your death will involve a lot less suffering and you’ll die quicker than those who’re not physically fit or have had healthy lifestyles. I ran across various articles that sang paeans to running and its benefits, especially if done well. I read how we evolved to run and how running is in our genes. But, my running regimen continued to deteriorate. I put up a picture of a runner with the sign: “The only way to be a good runner is to run”. I still didn’t return to my old regimen.

When I passed the 7 mile mark, I saw that only 52:30 minutes had elapsed. I was at a 7:30 minutes per mile pace. If I could even do 8 miles with this pace, I’d be thrilled, I told myself. I could walk the rest of the distance, for all I cared. As I neared the 8 mile mark, I willed myself to run just a little faster to reach it just under the hour mark. I sailed past the 8 mile mark when the elapsed time was 59:30. I was ecstatic. I slowed down because my legs felt a little tired. I slowed down a lot. I ran the ninth mile at a comparatively slow pace of 8:40. My legs felt good again and I picked up the pace. I wanted to finish a little better than 80 minutes, my self-imposed fitness limit.

When I crossed the ten mile mark, the clock said 1:15. I had averaged 7:30 minute miles for 10 miles. This was beyond my wildest dreams. I was so thrilled, I couldn’t walk straight (though the cramping and soreness that began shortly after had probably something more to do with this). I felt like my running life had been resurrected. I have started dreaming that one day, I’ll run an ultra-marathon, a distance greater than the marathon. Maybe, just maybe, I’ll celebrate my 50th birthday by running 50 miles.

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