Counting my blessings, not the calories

“Florence Griffith Joyner, the fastest female sprinter, dead or alive; her best time 10:49 seconds”, a channel on YouTube chimed, like a wake-up call, as I tried to turn off my phone alarm one groggy weekend morning and inadvertently turned on the video-sharing app.

A controversy surrounding the use of performance-enhancing drugs notwithstanding, Flo Jo’s world record is still out there, I think, but what are the odds of a video clip about the deceased United States athlete popping up on my phone screen to remind me of my awkward 100-meter run, in roughly as many seconds, to catch a train from Tianjin back to Beijing.

Hungover from a night of binge drinking and yet oddly hungry, I zombie-walked to the fridge and fished out a slice of walnut Napoleon from behind yogurt bowls, before subjecting myself to a short session of self-admonition.

Now, it wasn’t always like this. By that I mean two things: first, I was agile enough to race against time after class and catch the late-afternoon “local” (a term used in India for suburban trains) home from college, and second, I never before had complaints about how my maker had granted me an overabundance of adipocytes (fat cells).

Genes didn’t matter. Despite being born to district-level athletes, I was a plump kid. And an overweight teenager. And an obese adult. In my defense, I did somehow win a 100 m silver in high school. But that was then.

Let’s start here with the trip to Tianjin. Two colleagues and I made it to Beijing South Railway Station with time to spare, ordered coffee at Starbucks and took our seats on a train that clocked 347 kilometers per hour. In less than 30 minutes, we reached our destination.

A long(ish) walk along the Haihe River brought us to the Europeanstyle street. We visited the heritage museum, made our little contribution to the local economy in the form of souvenir purchases and indulged in fun photo ops with cultural volunteers in giant panda and monkey costumes. By then our ravenous insides were rumbling in revolt.

One of my colleagues recommended an Italian restaurant chain and we followed her lead. From the meat lovers’ pizza and the beef bone marrow pasta to the lamb chops with feta cheese and the tender pork ribs — and then the humongous slab of tiramisu — the grub at Pizza Bianca was annoyingly scrumptious.

We decided to take a post-lunch stroll to purge ourselves of one of the seven deadly sins — gluttony. We walked past heritage buildings, some of them crumbling, some well-maintained and some, it might seem from photographic evidence, my overly curious colleagues were trying to break into. Disclaimer: we are all law-abiding (temporary) residents of this country.

As the sun melted into a riot of red, magenta and purple on the horizon, we hit a bar. A couple of Martinis and an Irish dry stout later, it was time to head to Tianjin station. That’s when an otherwise perfect day went a tad awry. While my click-happy camera shoulders partial blame for the last-minute rush, the ID/ticket scanner at the automated turnstile also spurned my colleague’s passport several times before it finally relented.

It was two minutes to departure. I was on my mark, ready for a platform sprint. One of my colleagues was already near the finishing line, or coach No 6, while the other was a human speck on the distant escalator. My camera and lenses cursed me in chorus as I ran. Out of breath, I made it to our coach as the whistle blew, gained a foothold on the vestibule and turned around only to see my colleague still halfway away. The other one was unfazed about the possibility of her missing the train. Both of them knew that Chinese high-speed trains have a gangway connection between two coaches and she could board anytime, while I was caught in an Indian suburban railway time warp where coaches do not have such linking corridors.

Note to self after the vivid flashback of my embarrassing run: Go on an austerity drive, battle the bulge. A nanosecond later, a little voice in my head: Meh, life’s too short, dig into another slice of Napoleon.