Life of Tanisha

[lifeoftanisha]

Regular Exercising is a blessing!

Until a couple of months ago, I was not at all an individual who would go out for a run by herself. But around new years week last year, a friend of mine introduced me to this podcast called Couch to 5K by NHS UK. It is a series of podcast that goes upto 9 weeks, where the person following the podcast can go from being a couch potato to running 5 Kilometers in one run.

When I heard about all these facts about that podcast, I was very scared and resistant on attempting the run. But on my first day with the first podcast, I started running as per the instructions from the lady in the audio, and to my utter surprise, it was not even close to being as hard as I thought it would be.

The podcast is divided over the period of 9 weeks and every week, the runs get a little longer. The first week consists of 3 runs of 8 cycles of 1 minute each followed by 90 seconds of walking. Second week it goes to 90 seconds of running and 3 minutes of walking with 8 cycles. By the end of 8th week, when you enter into the 9th week, the cycles are no longer there and you are able to run 30 minutes in one run without any breaks.

The first week I did the usual schedule and did not feel anything different in my body at all. But as I went for 2 runs in the second week, I could really tell that the body was liking the runs and the new exercise routine, as I was completely unaware of the psychological benefits of exercising regularly and the additional health benefits were the cherry on top. I was able to think much clearly about anything I needed to, running, and exercising became like a medium of venting out my stress and anger. As I got deeper into the routine of exercising on a regular basis, I was able to tell a clear difference in my body internally and visually, I was looking fit and feeling good, I don’t know when the last time was I felt so good about my body in a long time.

Now, it was the end of the 7th week yesterday and I completed a 18 minutes run without stopping, I feel as if I have achieved something great and I can conquer the world in my own world in my head. The feeling of being so fit and athletic is indescribable in words. I thank that friend who got me into the running and exercising routing every exercising minute that I spend. It is not only the feeling of being physically fit that gets you to exercise, but also the mental bandwidth it frees up, all these factors help creating an environment in your head that lets you think and process things more freely and with a much more mature sense of gratification regarding the things we have, the abilities we have that we took for granted in the past and many more little things in life.

[lifeoftanisha]

My First Flight

It still feels like yesterday when l landed at Toronto Pearson Airport. The flight I took to come to Canada was my life’s first flight which made it all hectic, scary, and one of the unforgettable days of my life.

I never thought that I was this brave to handle such big things in life, like living alone in a hotel room, managing everything on my own, and most importantly, living in a country where I didn’t know anyone.

So, you guys can imagine what a rollercoaster ride, oh. Sorry, rollercoaster flight it was!

I was supposed to come to Canada in April 2020 and booked the flight in March, and everything was planned, but before I could even take off, Covid19 landed, and everything changed. I deferred my application to September 2020, hoping that everything will get normal by then. However, nothing went as planned; I boarded my first flight wearing a mask. It was challenging to wear a mask on a non-stop approx..14 hours flight.

In that time span, I watched several YouTube videos and read many blogs on what things to take on the flight, which documents are essential to carry in hand, and lots more. It somewhere prepared me but not completely. As some things you get to know by experience, the same was there in my case.

I reached New Delhi Airport around 8:00 PM, four hours before my boarding time. When I saw the airport for the first time, it felt like a different world where many people were rushing from here to there. But everyone was very cooperative, which made it easy for me to cover all the tasks. In-plane I got a window seat, but we had no access to open the blinds, so the window seat didn’t help much. Thankfully, the person sitting next to me was a nice lady who was going to Canada for the fourth time. She helped me a lot and told me many important things about when you will get the food in flight, how you can seek help, and where you will need to go after landing. When the flight took off, I wore cotton in my ears (told by my friends and relatives to do); it helped avoid the loud noise.

But it was the first wave of the pandemic, so everyone, including me, was scared of what would be our Covid19 result when we landed and had so many questions and what-ifs in our heads that made my fourteen hours flight a hectic one. There were a lot of difficulties like the food was not as good as I hoped for. One person in our flight fainted, making it difficult to process what would happen now. I watched the world map on the screen to see how much distance was left. 

Soon the wait was over, and the plane landed. When the plane landed, a girl sitting near me closed her eyes and was very nervous; I tried to comfort her and asked her to look outside the window (she felt a bit better). To my surprise, I found landing the most exciting and amazing part of the whole flight.