There was no one thing that triggered my desire to run. I remember trying to run, and not being able to complete the 1.8 km circuit around the lake in Jamshedpur's Jubilee Park in 1990, when I was in my first year at XLRI. After a few months of trying, when I was effortlessly completing not just one but two or three rounds of the lake, I started noticing a well built man who sometimes would run around the lake. With my new found confidence, I tried to race with him.

He didn't try racing me; I tried to race with him; yet, by the time I would finish one round he would have finished two. This was more than enough to make me feel bad. This continued till a friend from Jamshedpur told me that the man I was trying to race was Charles Borromeo, the 1982 Asian Games Gold Medalist (800 m).

The incident stayed with me, but the lesson dawned on me slowly. You run only against yourself, and the longer the run, the truer this principle. This may not apply to competitive runners, but it does to me, and I think to others like me who run just because they like running.

In the 16 years I have been running, I have run in more than a hundred places across about 20 countries. I run wherever I travel to, even if it's a one day trip. I have realised that one can discover a running track with ease anywhere in the world, even in the busiest cities. Every track is unique. Some are good; some, really bad. I categorise the tracks in my mind: Spectacular, Nice, or Horrible. Running on Goa's Calangute Beach or Nepal's Pokhra is spectacular. Running in Chennai used to be horrible, since I usually stay on the wrong side of Anna Salai (the arterial road), till I discovered that you could pay an entrance fee and run inside the verdant campus of Loyola College.

There are scores of nice runs: almost any track in Kerala, Bangalore and Bhopal, Delhi's Lodhi Gardens, Mumbai's Juhu, on the banks of the Brahamputra in Guwahati, the streets of Stockholm and Tokyo, Singapore's Botanical Garden, and more.

There is a fourth kind of run that I experience only once in a while; this kind cannot be categorised as easily; it's just that these have stand-out character. Spectacular, nice and horrible is about the view, the air, the cleanliness, and the continuity of track. Runs with character are much more special. For all the lovely tracks in Kerala there is none that has the character of the run around the fort in Palaghat. The small fort, surrounded by a dry moat, and circumscribed by a track makes you wonder: why did some one build something so perfect but so ineffective (the moat cannot be a deterrent)?

Running on the streets and the sea front of Barcelona is akin to being part of a languid landscape, replete with Mediterranean music and romancing couples. This, at 6.30 in the morning. So, did these people not go to sleep, or did they get up really early? Whatever the answer, there is something about Barcelona which is sparklingly alive.

Every track with character has its own tale to tell; the runner just has to be prepared to listen and it took me a while to do that. Some of the most fascinating tracks are those where the stories have changed over the years, mirroring the global upheaval of economies and societies. It's not only tracks in Shanghai and Bangalore that tell these stories, but those in places like Nizamabad (in Andhra Pradesh) and Indore. In these towns the tracks tell stories of new money and new squalor, booming private schools, crumbling government buildings, and changing priorities, stories that you don't necessarily find on the pages of a newspaper. Each story deserves its own page somewhere.

I have learnt that the best time for me to battle, in my mind, with the most serious issues at hand, is when I am running. Running focuses me, on the running and that issue. I enjoy the run and the battle.

Now it takes a lot of will to not get up at 5 in the morning and go out and run, irrespective of the temperature outside. Addictions are all the same, drugs, deals or running.

Anurag Behar is MD, Wipro Infrastructure Engineering