Sambal is a spicy Indonesian hot sauce. It’s nothing I would consider special, just basically tomatoes and hot peppers smooshed into a paste that can be bought cheaply (and, as a redeeming factor, can be smothered onto any and every dish imaginable).
What I discovered today is that running, here in the mountains, is like my growing love affair with Sambal. People use Sambal frequently because it burns your mouth, quickly and briefly. The effect, as my food-scientist brother has explained it, is to spur the production of endorphins – the happy chemical. You’ve got to endure the initial pain of your Sambal-smothered rice grains burning your mouth before you can enjoy the endorphin-after-effect. And you don't consciously know it's happening, like 'oh, my brain really likes the after-effect of a tongue on fire.'
Running in the volcano foothills has been exactly that for me. For the past 4 months I have creatively crafted a variety of semi-true excuses for not disciplining myself to run (e.g. ‘everyone stares at me because I’m white; my shoes have grown moldy because of rainy season; there are no street lamps; there are billions of tail-less cats lurking around fallen palm fronds just waiting to swat my ankles’ and on and on). However, now that I’m entered into a 5k race in Jakarta this Sunday, I need to at least remind my legs of what it feels like to run. But as I’m reminding them, I’m discovering that I actually like running in the mountains. The sweet easy downslope of a long hill and the cyclical burn of the incline subconsciously call to my muscles. Tonight, I actually seriously wanted to turn around and run up the hill again, just so I could run down it.
Like Sambal -- you start to crave the sting.
(incidentally, no tail-less cats bit my ankles during the entire duration of my run tonight)
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