I Registered for a 10K as a Joke. Then I Actually Ran It.

I still can’t believe I actually ran 10 kilometres.

The funny thing is, I never even took this race seriously when I registered for it.

My friends were like, “अरे, पाँच किलोमीटर क्या होता है, दस किलोमीटर की race कर लो।”

And I was like, ठीक है, कर देते हैं registration. जाना कौन है वैसे भी? मैं थोड़ी जाऊँगी।

I genuinely thought I’d register, eventually not show up, and that would be the end of it. कोई बात नहीं, registration कर दिया था, ऐसे ही चल जाएगा।

Except, as the race date started getting closer, my friends kept asking me to practise. Run on the treadmill, try five kilometres, try ten. And I did absolutely none of that.

I wasn’t serious about running. I went to the gym for general fitness and fat loss, did 35–40 minutes of YouTube workouts, some light weight training, a little treadmill incline, and called it a day. Sometimes I skipped that too. Office meetings, weekends, life. You know how it goes.

I wasn’t following any special diet or training for a marathon. In fact, I wasn’t even convinced I could walk ten kilometres, forget running them.

But then the date started approaching, and suddenly, the joke wasn’t funny anymore.

How was I going to do ten kilometres? I couldn’t even run continuously for 30 seconds without struggling. What if I got tired halfway through? What if I couldn’t finish?

I went from not caring about the race at all to Googling everything. How to walk 10K, what to eat before a race, how to hydrate, what to do, what not to do. We’d collected our bibs and T-shirts, and somehow, this thing I’d signed up for without a second thought had become a real event.

And then, on race day, I woke up at 3:30 AM and actually went.

Not to prove anything to anyone. Not to show people that I could do something they couldn’t. Honestly, I didn’t even know if I could do it myself.

I just wanted to see what would happen if I tried.

And then I started running.

One kilometre done. Okay, one kilometre ho gaya.

Then two. Then three.

And somehow, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, and ten.

I wasn’t stopping every few minutes to check my phone or record my progress. I was just moving, concentrating on the next kilometre, and trying to keep going. Something I’d spent weeks worrying about was happening right in front of me, and I was actually doing it.

My official chip time was 1 hour, 35 minutes, and 34 seconds.

The cutoff was 90 minutes, so I missed it by 5 minutes and 34 seconds. I had thought it would take me two or even two-and-a-half hours to finish. I’d never imagined completing the distance in anything close to that time.

I was exhausted, emotional, and genuinely surprised.

I had actually done it.

And almost immediately, another thought came to me: I could have done better. I can do better.

Which is such a different place to be mentally. Before the race, I was scared I wouldn’t finish. After finishing, I was already thinking about how I could improve.

But the biggest thing this race changed wasn’t my running. It was how I started looking at myself.

For a long time, I’ve been unhappy with my body. Before becoming a mother, there was a version of me who was lean, fit, and full of energy. I remember what I looked like, how I felt, and how comfortable I was in my body.

After having two children, my body changed, and somewhere along the way, my self-image changed with it. I started looking at myself through the lens of everything I’d lost. My weight, my belly, my fitness, the way I used to look.

I think I’ve been judging myself so much on how my body looks that I’ve forgotten to acknowledge what it can actually do.

Because here’s the thing. I’m a mother of two. I don’t have endless energy. I’m not at the fitness level I want to be at. I still have a long way to go with my fitness and weight loss.

But I also gave birth to two babies, showed up for a race I was convinced I couldn’t do, and completed ten kilometres in 1 hour, 35 minutes, and 34 seconds.

भाई, that’s actually something.

And for the first time in a long time, I wasn’t looking at my body and thinking only about what I wanted to change. I was thinking about what I’d just managed to do.

I’m a lot stronger than I give myself credit for.

What’s interesting is that I didn’t even post my race updates looking for appreciation. I wasn’t trying to get people to tell me how amazing I was. I was happy with what I’d done, and that was enough.

But the appreciation came anyway. People at the office were surprised that I’d managed to wake up, show up, and complete a 10K while raising two children and managing everything else. Even the management appreciated the effort. People were surprised by my timing, especially considering that this was my first attempt.

And I realised that maybe I’d been withholding credit from myself for something that deserved it.

I had also expected to be completely dead for the next two days. I thought my legs would refuse to cooperate and that recovery would be terrible. There was some soreness and pain, of course, but it was manageable, and my recovery was much better than I’d expected.

Even that surprised me.

I keep coming back to this thought: I’m so quick to look at myself and say, I’m fat. I need to lose weight. I need to get back in shape.

And yes, I do want to get fitter. I want to be stronger, build my stamina, and work towards the fitness level I have in mind.

But my weight isn’t the only thing that’s true about my body.

My body is capable of so much more than I’ve been giving it credit for. And my mind is capable of pushing past things I’ve already decided are impossible.

I don’t know how long this positive feeling will last. Maybe I’ll have days when I’m back to being critical of myself. Maybe I’ll look at old pictures and miss the person I used to be.

But I want to remember this version of myself too.

The one who was scared of ten kilometres. The one who almost didn’t take the race seriously enough to show up. The one who got up at 3:30 AM, went anyway, and surprised herself.

I went into this race thinking I might not even finish it. I came out of it knowing that I can do things I haven’t yet imagined myself doing.

And maybe I don’t need to keep comparing myself to who I was before becoming a mother. Maybe I need to give the person I am today a little more credit.

Because I’m still here. I’m still capable of learning, improving, and doing things that scare me.

And now, when I think about running ten kilometres, I don’t think, यार, मुझसे नहीं होगा।

I think, I’ve done it once. I can do it again. And I can do better.

For now, I’m holding on to that feeling.

I ran 10K. And somewhere along the way, I started believing in myself a little more.

Someone said “All those who got out of their comfort zone and ran this race are all winners today and that had my heart”