I had the sudden urge to be like him, you know, the part when he starts running non-stop and had followers behind him and all. And so I have decided and psyched myself up that I will complete a marathon or a half-marathon at least, before I leave this country and no, I don't know how or what compelled me to do so. It's like a sudden revelation: I have to run. I think I can compare it to the sudden feeling of eating something, like for no reason you feel like eating sushi or something like that. This urge pushed me into utilizing the power of the internet to search for marathon training programs and the do's and don'ts.

Seems like you have to be running for at least a year before you can even start training for a marathon but I don't care, I'll do the necessary conditioning. I have been sporadically playing football and I know I can jog for 40 minutes (maybe more) non-stop and run 5 minutes (maybe 3 though) non-stop though I don't know how far that would take me.

I would also like to blame my dad's gene for this urge to run, he's a marathon runner and it does seem like I'll be following his footsteps. I don't know if there are any diet or extra nutrition I should take like my dad does but I know I would have to keep myself hydrated the whole time.

Today I begin my first day of training, I'm eyeing to be fit for running by June or May next year, hopefully. God I love the feeling of stretching my muscles, it's ecstatic, I've always wished I could pull more but that would cause more harm than good. Maybe I should learn how to do the split but I don't know if that's a good thing to do on your own. Hmm, I should've done this years ago.

On another note, there's more and more countries are going into recession, which is very worrying seeing how my country is worrying about their party elections more than the economy and the top leaders going off to god knows where to do god knows what, effectively making this country leaderless for the moment. I'm also worried about my scholarship, since its government-sponsored, I wouldn't want to be like the scholarship holders during the SEA economic recession, which forced them to come back to the country. The government told the people to save their money and all, but I think that wouldn't work.

When you take into account loans (car loans, house loans, etc, etc, weekly expenditure for necessary goods, supporting your children, paying your kids' fees, books, new uniforms, shoes, allowance, then there's income tax, gas, electric and water bills, and maybe emergencies if anyone got sick. A family that has an income of around RM5000 monthly would definitely feel the pinch, what more to those that earns RM1000 monthly, I don't think they would have enough to support themselves. And this is all happening while this country of mine is not in recession, I can't imagine what would happen if it does go into recession.

How can we actually get ourselves out of this mess created by greedy people? I've no idea and maybe if I stumbled across a good advice, I'll post it here. Meanwhile, it does help to save some money or grow your own food for the moment. Being self-sufficient should be of the utmost priority but even this might pose problems as this country is focusing more on building condominums and apartments which provide little or no land for anyone to grow or breed anything.

I did come across a book which talked about the prospect of oil crisis and what to do if it happens and the funny thing is, I stumbled upon it long before the oil crisis began. One of the advice it gave was converting all your savings to gold, as gold isn't affected by currency and the rate of its increasing price can only go up (god I'm using the third derivative here).

So, do take note of this economic crisis and brace yourself for it even if you have absolutely no knowledge of the economy. You don't wanna end up on the wrong side of the scale when the black day comes.