Inner Demons.

Prelude...

Okay, before we begin... 

The Airtel Delhi Half Marathon is old news by now. I thought I'd write about what an epic race I had there once the euphoria of a race well run has worn off a bit. You know...keep it objective?

That's not happening...I'm going to brag shamelessly in this post.

But don't worry...it'll be all very indirect and subtle-like. I'm actually going to complain like 'O noes! I had such a bad race! What a bummer!'... all the while knowing that I did pretty good. I'm going to do a little veiled narcissism mixed with some false modesty and sprinkled with the usual pointless soulful insights and bad self-deprecatory humor that you guys want to strangle me for so much...

Without further ado...

Inner Demons

Ah, those quirky things called 'race goals'...

Or 'inner demons', as I like to fondly call them...because I tend to see them as mental struggles rather than physical ones.

I've battled these demons often enough...

Sometimes, one sets a goal and reaches it, and feels happy. At other times, one sets a goal and misses it, and feels sad. And at yet other times, one sets no goal, and feels...I don't know...something...

And then there's my trademark way of doing it, to wit...

Step One : Set a goal.

Next, get cocky.

Consequently...set another goal.

Go to race confused about which goal is your actual goal...

Achieve one goal. Miss the other.

Sit around for a while not knowing whether to feel happy or sad.

Then feel happy and sad, and write a blog post about it that makes no sense.

Simple enough? You should try it sometime :p

For the longest time, I had been telling myself that a 1:35 Half Marathon is my goal for this year.That's a target I had set for myself when I did a PB of 1:44 in March this year. That is a realistic goal, right there.  So far, so good?

During the summer, then, I ran some races that really made me feel like I would keep surpassing myself, no end...

The first was the mid-July Beer and Breakfast Half Marathon, here in Gurgaon, in which I cut a fair two minutes off my best by running 1:42. Stress on 'mid-July'. Trying conditions, to say the least. Very frankly, I surprised myself.

The next was the Airtel Hyderabad Marathon, where the term 'trying conditions' was redefined for me. And yet, on my way to a PR in the full, I managed to lop off another minute at the Half Marathon split.

And finally, end September, with the weather getting slightly better (but not much), the Dwarka Half Marathon, where I finally broke under the 1:40 mark.

At that point, I still had two whole months of training to go before ADHM. And suddenly, I was not so sure that 1:35 was a worthy goal anymore. Still trying to maintain a scrap of sensibility, I told myself that I'd try for a 40-minute 10k, and if I'm able to do that, I'd surely be able to break 1:30.

I never did get around to trying that (Actually, I'm still not sure if I can do it). But then, a couple of really strong training runs, a speedwork and a tempo that I've mentioned in my last post put me right on the edge of it. I spent a lot of time anxiously fretting over what I should aim for at ADHM...

...And I was still fretting as Bipasha Basu blew a kiss at me when I crossed the starting mat that Sunday.

A Half Marathon in 1:30 requires a pace just a morsel shy of 4:16 per km. My quest for the ever elusive negative split started well on race day. I did the first kilometer in around 4:30. But no sooner was I out of the start-out rush, my subconscious panicked. I started banking time almost immediately, and the first 14 kilometers flew by at an average pace hovering between 4:10 to 4:15. I found myself running my fastest 5k in 20:46, and my fastest 10k in 41:44 enroute.

Predictably, this fast pace streak came to a sudden end after that.

No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't cover any subsequent km in less than 4:20, dropping down to 4:33 for the penultimate km. I remember barking an extremely impolite expletive at the sign saying '300 meters to go'  as my watch flashed 1:30:00.

Final time- 1:30:59, which, to me, two weeks later, still reads...

This is what a demon that has handed you your ass on a plate looks like.

Week11 and 12 of 18. Took a week to recover from all that, physically. Morale-wise, nothing like a good long run on the weekend to lift up your spirits. There's another 20-miler I'm doing...a night run...tonight. That ought to be fun. Can't dwell on my defeats or my victories...water under the bridge...miles to go... bigger fish to fry etc.

In the words of Kipling...

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

    And treat those two impostors just the same...  

Training Report.

It's been some time since I last wrote here.

Was waiting to see if the world would end if I failed to post every weekend.

To my incredulity and heartbreaking disappointment, it didn't.

However, moving on...I am inordinately excited about this particular blog post, people, because believe it or not, it is the result of an epiphany...

After being unable to think of a single word worth publishing for almost a month, I finally approached the whole blog-writing thing from a new angle.

Instead of trying to write something clever, and failing, I thought to myself today, why don't I try to write something tedious, and succeed! The end result will be the same, no? 

Notice the bland, uninspired title... 'Training Report'. Yup, that's what this is. Why dress it up?

For a thumbnail illustration, I present to you, a grey square, with the words 'Training Report' unnecessarily emblazoned across it in that most boring of fonts- Comic Sans. That smiley face is the best I can do right now to spice it the hell up...

The month has been eventful, to say the least.

The Delhi Heritage Half Marathon.

Soon after my last post, I ran the Delhi Heritage Half-Marathon. It was the day of my first 20-miler for this training cycle. Starting at a smidgeon shy of  half past four AM, I ran eleven kilometers to the race flag off at Qutab Minar, before joining in the race at half past five.

I wanted to run it out at an easy, non-competitive pace, but, thanks to some mid-run inspiration, finally ended up going faster than intended in the last ten kilometers or so. I do think that gave me some confidence in my ability to face my nemesis, the negative split, in a long run.

All said, it was a great race... ran through the spectrum of the capital, in sublime weather, with a splendid crowd of friends and fellow runners.

The only low point of the day was being forced to abandon my post-run breakfast after just nine parathas...just nine! Can you believe it?!

The Conquering of the Intervals.

The following Wednesday found me at Leisure Valley, resolved to overcome the ghost of intervals past.

Like the mule that I tend to be, I went about it with stubbornness rather than wisdom, despite all the big deal I made out of learning lessons from bad runs in my last post. Still started out faster than planned, and made it a prestige issue.

Inexplicably, this time, something clicked.

Maybe it was just that the body had now, a week later, adapted to the stresses that this would take. Whatever it was, I ended up running an immensely rewarding speedwork session. Four x 2ks at an average pace of around 4:07, with the slowest at 4:13 being at par with my fastest in my last speed workout!

Going Long.

Long runs are, to me, the cherry on top of the training pie. And the past month saw a couple of really good ones besides the Heritage race.

I was introduced, by a group of friends to whom I shall be eternally grateful, to a completely spectacular route that runs along the Najafgarh canal (it's depressingly called the Najafgarh 'drain' on Google Maps). I did a a brisk 26k there, once again practicing the feel of a negative split.

And the next weekend, I decided to do another 20-miler, preponed to allow me a two week taper into the Airtel Delhi Half Marathon, instead of the one week that I would have got had I stuck to my training plan.

That was, again, a memorable run that started in Gurgaon and ended in the exuberant environs of Connaught Place in the throes of the weekly Raahgiri Day, followed by a chocolate shake at Keventers, and a leisurely ride back home on the Metro.

Taper Tantrums.

Taper sucks. And no taper sucks like one you must do in the middle of a training cycle.

I'm in training for the Mumbai Marathon on the 18th of January next year, but the ADHM, for all its shortcomings when compared to that, is still a big event worthy of keeping as a target, and therefore worthy of tapering for.

While my stated target time remains a 1:35 Half Marathon this Sunday, a couple of really excellent runs at the beginning of this taper now have me thinking that maybe I should be breaking 1:30...

A moderate-to-easy  effort 'Twilight Zone' 12k last week was something I did at a 4:38 pace. And then a 10k Tempo (my fastest 10k yet!) at 4:15! This was a pace I was doing speedwork at, barely two months ago! At the end of these runs, I felt that a 1:30 may be achievable, albeit with a substantial amount of effort on race day.

As has often been said, If it was easy...it wouldn't be worth it...

Following that, I was hoping to have a few uneventful, low mileage runs/walks leading upto the race. Until a strange hamstring tension after an easy 8k this last Tuesday stopped me in my tracks.

That was scary, while it lasted. I have resorted to some yoga over the past couple of days to chase it away,  and today, on the eve of the event, it seems to be gone for good.

Week 7,8,9 and 10 of 18. A good month, in which the 5 AM weather went from pleasantly warm to pleasantly cool to 'I-cant-feel-my-ears', which is where it stands today. I feel primed for a good race at the ADHM tomorrow.

I sincerely wish everyone who is running tomorrow, a great, great race!

May the road rise to meet you, may the wind be always at your back...

True Failure.

“I feel the need…the need for speed!”

                                    -Maverick & Goose, Top Gun(1986)

Speedwork!

I approach these awesome workouts with an ambiguous cocktail of sentiments in my head, which is equal parts eagerness and anxiety, served in a tall glass with a little umbrella...

Make no mistake, if you do them right, Intervals are hard. In general, I enjoy running. But Intervals, I only enjoy finishing. 

My program calls for mile repeats with half-mile recoveries. I’ve never really understood miles as a unit of distance, and I don’t have a track near my home where I can do these workouts on laps, so I just do 2k repeats with 1k recoveries on the road.

This was my second speedwork week in the cycle.

Yesterday, I woke up feeling confident and rested, ready to kill it. Jaw set in determination and all that sort of rot, you know? The weather, in its trend, was superbly cool. I ran an easy 2k warm-up, and then, on cue from my Garmin, shot off for the first of four planned repeats.

A quick glance at my watch at the end of a kilometer showed that I had done it in 3:58.

Now frankly, I would have been extremely happy with a 4:10 which was what I was aiming for, and which would have been a good 3 seconds faster than my last time… But the moment I saw that figure flash on my watch, I assumed that my body was telling me it was strong enough to make a 10 to 15 second pace jump… in Speedwork!

Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

I kept up the pace, covering the next kilometer in 4:03, before I slowed to a jog to recover.

For all of about a minute, I felt great... but then...

I half-realized that something was wrong. Suddenly, I wasn’t looking forward to the next repeat. My recovery interval is usually paced at around 5:30, but I was shuffling along at 6:30. Ignoring the warning signs, I set off for the next repeat, still determined to meet my heavily modified target pace.

At the end of a kilometer, my watch flashed 4:09. It was still faster than what I set out wanting to do, but like an utter idiot, I found it disappointing...

PUSH! I said to myself. And I pushed.

Less than half a kilometer later, I was done...

Not a measly joule of energy remained in me, stitches stabbed my midriff, my quads were numb and the corpse of a long dead IT Band injury suddenly seemed to be crawling out of its grave.

For the first time in a really, really long time, I stood face to face with failure.

I shambled back home slowly, a black cloud over my head, and spent the rest of the day in stoic contemplation.

This is what I learnt...

I have been fortunate to be moving from strength to strength over the past few weeks, feeling everything is going my way, like Bruce Willis as a closet superhero in Unbreakable (2000), bench-pressing ever heavier weights to his own surprise...

That tends to get to one's head. The adrenaline dissolves humility and patience, and flushes it away. And I believe that's what happened to me. I started thinking that I was, well... unbreakable.

Despite what the motivational posters tell you, limits aren't just in your mind. They are tangible things.

Like ornery Haryana buffaloes, you can move them and push them with gentle persuasion and perseverance. Try to kick them, though, and you're asking to be kicked back.


Hard.


In the nuts.

Let me wax philosophical for a bit as I come to terms with this...Good runs make you stronger. Bad runs make you wiser.

And the only true failure, is one from which you learn nothing.

Week six of eighteen. I ran a cautious 12k run today, and thankfully, saw no ill effects of yesterdays fiasco spilling over. Barring an earth-shattering cosmically catastrophic event, I predict a fairly satisfactory conclusion to one-third of this training cycle with a 32k on Sunday, which I plan to run in conjunction with the Delhi Heritage Half-Marathon. That definitely promises to be a fun event.


And of course...

Happy Diwali, People!

Rollercoaster.

Mostly, this blog post isn't about running. It's about writing.

Ever since I started writing this blog a month and a half ago, I have had to get used to a kind of a weekly emotional rollercoaster.

Sometime on Friday or Saturday, I click the little orange 'Publish' button on my blog console...

The first thing I feel is an overwhelming sense of Relief at having managed to write anything at all.

I'm not a natural at writing stuff down.

There's no flow. There are drafts and redrafts and redrafted drafts of draft redrafts, ad infinitum. 

There's no honesty. Good writers are honest. They write with their heart. I don't even know what that means. I write with my fingers. I agonize over words and phrases, their meanings and implications, over metaphors and similes, over grammar and punctuation. It's all very mechanical.

There's no skill. I have the vocabulary of a small dog. If there was no thesaurus.com , I'd probably never be able to fill a paragraph.

In spite of all that, I've written something and put it on the internet for everyone to see...

Which brings me to the next thing I feel. Panic.

Suddenly, everything I've written seems wrong. It seems smug. Preachy. Disjointed. Verbose. Illogical. Inconsequential. Just plain stupid.

And now I've shared it with a whole lot of people. I'm dead sure that soon, someone will write a nice little remark calling me out.

"You suck, Shiv. Regards."

I'll take it. It's better than nothing.

Thankfully, runners are good peeps. The few people who do end up reading the tripe that I wrote and care to give feedback are unusually kind and full of praise.

Elation. It feels good to get reader feedback. Frankly, it feels good to know that someone other than my mother is reading my blog.

Especially since my mother doesn't read my blog.

I check in with the stats on the Blogger console and watch the numbers climb. They don't climb very high. But seventy or eighty views makes me ecstatic.

There's a little section in stats which gives countrywise blog views. Besides people I know and share my blog with in India, I'm delighted that complete strangers from as far away as Canada or France or Spain or Brazil or Ireland or Australia have read my stuff. There was at least one view from Kenya once.

This is why I write.

A writer is nothing without readers.

Moving on...elation lasts over the weekend till Monday, maybe Tuesday. By this time the views have trickled down to three or four a day. And the euphoria is ebbing.

Then comes Fear.

Every Tuesday, It dawns on me that I have no clue what I'll write next. It's my old, fast friend - Writers' Block. Have you met this guy? No? Lucky you.

Mr Block is a right scary-ass bloke. He sits in your head and doesn't let you think. He mocks you in the form of a blinking text cursor on a blank screen.

Tuesday passes. Wednesday passes. Nothing.

I just sit in front of my lappy every day, sweat and curse and chew my nails to the quick. Running is bad for toenails, and writing is bad for fingernails. Between the two of them, I'll soon be completely nail-less.

I'm not sure why I go through that, week after week. There's no deadline. Nobody's paying me to write this. Theoretically, I could just leave it be, get a beer and watch TV.

But I guess I owe my readers...

...all three of them.

I maintain that idealism as far as I can, however, Indifference, sets in by Wednesday or Thursday.

I don't care anymore. The blog is dead. Was fun while it lasted. Writing this damned thing is too much pain, and for what? Nobody really likes this whiny little thing anyway. Those who say they do are just being polite. Nobody'll miss it. Not even my mom. What-ever...

Time to go for a run.

You've heard all the cliches, right? Running is meditation... it clears my thoughts... it's my conversation with my soul... it's spiritual introspection... my time with myself...

Any non-runner who's heard that definitely thinks it's bullshit. We promise you...every cliche is dead on true.

There is definitely something that happens during nice, long runs that stick-shifts your brain into a different gear. You don't know it's happening, but believe me... it's happening.

On Friday mornings, I'm done with my midweek runs. Over the week, while I've been riding my rollercoaster, I've also been putting miles on my shoes, and somewhere deep inside my head random thoughts, like tetris blocks, are falling , being flipped and turned by the shock of footstrike as it travels up my legs and spine to my cerebrum. Patterns form. Shapes align.

Suddenly, I know exactly what gibberish to unload on you kind, unsuspecting folk...

I spend most of Friday on a Writers' High, as words appear magically across the monitor. Mr Block slinks away, decisively defeated.

But alas, not all of Friday. Because, once I'm done, just to be sure, I read what I've written... and invariably, that leads to Despair.

It's never good enough. I put on an Editor's cap and start working on making it better. This, as you can probably tell, never works. Sometimes sooner, sometimes later, I give up.

This is where I am right now, people.

Time to click that little orange 'Publish' button, and begin my weekly ride again...

Week five of eighteen. The tempo run yesterday was extraordinarily satisfying. I was able to keep up a 4:29 pace for 8k. It wasn't too long ago that this was my peak pace for 2k intervals. To be fair, a lot of credit goes to the exceptional weather we have in the mornings nowadays.

You may recall that in an earlier post, I had said that there's just about a week in October and March  when the weather is ideal for running. This may well have been that October week.

The Fable of the Lion and the Gazelle.

People! Have you ever read something so stream-of-consciousness absurd that it made you want to tear your hair out? No?

Well, today's your lucky day!

Let me begin by reciting my all time favorite inspirational running quote, The Fable of the Lion and the Gazelle.

Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed. 
Every morning a lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death. 
It doesn’t matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle: when the sun comes up...

...you’d better be running. 

Never fails to get my blood going.

But this week, I sort of thought a bit about how much sense this makes in terms of running, in pure biological terms.

If you've come across Darwin's Principle of Natural Selection during your school years, you'll be familiar with the colloquial phrase that is often used to summarize it - 'Survival of the Fittest'.

At the risk of repetition, let me tell you the story of the Lions and the Gazelle that is often used to illustrate the principle.

On a plain in the verdant African savannah, lives a herd of Gazelle and a pride of Lions.

The Lions, as is their temperament, often set off at a jolly bound across said savannah to pounce upon Gazelle for the purpose of snacking. The Gazelle, on the other hand, not particularly amused at the prospect of being pounced, and subsequently snacked, upon... set off, as a precautionary measure, away from the Lions.

Unfortunately, since all Gazelle aren't created equal, the slowest ones, to their own great irritation, end up enclosed in various Lions.

And these fast Gazelle that are now left? They tend to romance each other, one thing leads to another, and well, boys and girls, soon we have little Gazelle babies who have all the 'fast' genes of their fast mommies and daddies. And they grow up to be fast Gazelle.

So, in effect, the Lions might at first sight seem like the bad guys with all the pouncing on and the snacking of innocent Gazelle, but if you look at the big picture, they are doing the Gazelle population a favor, by making successive generations of Gazelle faster, and thus, better able to avoid being snacked on.

Now, as the Gazelle herd gets faster, the slower Lions who can't do the jolly bound fast enough, often find themselves without any Gazelle tidbits to wash down with their evening tea. Eventually, they are starving to death at best, or at worst, they aren't getting any (if you know what I mean...) and are starving to death, still bachelors. Either way, none of their slow-ass genes are getting perpetuated.

And the fast Lions? Like the fast Gazelles... romance...one thing...another thing...fast Lion babies... successively faster Lion generations. Savvy?

This becomes a happy cycle, with both species needing the other one to get faster, in order to become faster itself !

Now I'm no evolutionary biologist or physiologist, but I think that the above nonsense is a pretty close analogy of how workouts, um, work... 

The muscle cells are like the Gazelle here, and running is the Lions come a-huntin'. 

When you work out, you aren't directly making your muscles stronger... quite the opposite. You're breaking them down by inflicting stress.

Muscle cells can be thought of as independent organisms. They feed, grow and reproduce. And when we work out, the weakest of them die. Which leaves the stronger ones to divide and thus, multiply (simple Mitosis, no hanky-panky involved).

Thus, by killing off the weakest muscle cells, your workouts makes muscles as a whole stronger...which in turn increases their capacity for exercise.

Happy cycle!

I took away two additional things from this when my head stopped hurting from all the thinking...

One- You have to get enough rest... If the Lions are replaced by humans in turbocharged SUVs with guns in the above story, it becomes an analogy for too much exercise. The Gazelle population will be wiped out.

And Two- You have to keep increasing the intensity and volume of the workout as your body adapts to it... If the Lions decide that the Gazelle are too quick and start eating grass, the Gazelle population will soon start becoming slower, as speed will no longer be essential to their survival.

Week four of eighteen. This week is supposed to be recovery. Just four Easy runs. However, you may notice that after I made such a big deal out of an inflexible training sched, I'm still a wee bit flexible. I am planning on running long this weekend, and postponing recovery to the next one.

That "?" on the 9th... That was supposed to be an Easy run, but the weather was so incredibly pleasant that morning, that I ended up running faster. Although, not quite fast enough to call it a Tempo. A buddy coined the term 'Twilight Zone Pace'. Yep, that works.

The Battle of Mount Morning.

Okay, I have to say I admire this Anon guy a lot. He really seems to know what he's talking about, all the time. Here's a gem...

The most difficult part of any journey, is the first step.
                                                                                -Anon.

Runners, especially those just starting out, will immediately see the stark, bitter, undeniable truth in that.

You know how it goes, right? The alarm goes off, you reach over in your sleep-stupor and tap it off. And any one of the following few thoughts come vaguely alive in your addled mind...

"Okay, just five more minutes..."
"Ah, I'll start tomorrow..."
"It's too cold/hot/windy/rainy...maroon/spicy/sparkly/kinky/cardboard-y today to run..."
"Already? Already? Dammit, I just fell asleep! Screw this..."

And then, you drift back into oblivion. Maybe you feel a little guilt, but that is quickly overpowered by sweet, sweet spell of Morpheus (the greek dude, not L. Fishburne).

Familiar?

I've never been a morning person...but I've always been a morning runner.

Thankfully, I am now at a place where I don't really need to fight myself to get out of bed at unearthly hours for my training.

But yes, there was a time, not too long ago, when getting out of bed was nothing less than a battle. 'The Battle of Mount Morning', I called it. And in the words of Sun Tzu (who's a close second to Anon in terms of cool stuff said)...

Every battle is won, before it is ever fought.

If you want to defeat the sleep demon in the morning, people...you have to start fighting him the night before.

Here's the drill I followed...

Eat early. It helps.

Lay out your kit. Clothes, shoes, shades, music, Garmin. Money and whatever you eat or drink on a long run. The 5 kilo sandstone bust of Buddha that you like to carry on all your runs. Whatever. Because in the morning, not being able to find a sock will be enough to make you give in and go back to bed.

Set the alarm. It's a popular, and very effective trick to keep your alarm clock away from your bed, so that you have to leave the bed to turn it off.  I used to keep mine in the bathroom, near the sink, with the volume turned all the way up. You can even invest in one of these excellent thingummies...:D

Sleep Early. Yup. I'm not a crazy person who thinks that late night partying is a sin. I do indulge a bit myself, every so often. But if you run four days a week, that still leaves you with three nights to live it up. And frankly, if three nights aren't enough, maybe seven nights aren't either. If you're one of those extraordinary people who can get sloshed till two and still clock in a twenty-miler the next day at six, more power to you. If, however, like me, you aren't- make a choice.

This should give you a decided advantage against the tendency to sleep in. Cut to next morning...

It's time to go to war.

Don't Think. You know those first thoughts I mentioned earlier? They are sleep's most effective weapons against you. It takes some practice, but if you let your mind go completely blank as you leap out of bed for that irksome alarm, you'll be more likely to reach the bathroom sink for the next step...the coup-de-grace, so to speak...
 
Wash your face. This is your first and most effective weapon against sleep. Dip your entire head in a bucket, if you need to. For most of us, this one single act is enough to completely demolish any thought of going back to bed, so you need to do it pronto. Definitely do it before you ascend the porcelain throne (I actually fell asleep on there once because I didn't).

Don't dawdle. This is not the time to pick up a little something to read. This is not the time to step out on the balcony for a contemplative interlude. This is not the time for checking your emails or Facebook notifications. The sleep monster may have been slayed, but like Sauron (geek link alert), he doesn't really die...Every passing minute increases the chance of it's remanifestation. You need to get the hell out!

At one point, I actually made it a thing to time myself from alarm to road. 11:04, if you're curious, is my PR for that.

Run! You're out of the house. Congratulations. There's only this one little thing left to do...but it's the easiest thing you'll do this morning.

Bloody hell I can't believe I just wrote a whole lot of words on, basically, 'How to wake up.'

Week three of eighteen. Did the Dwarka Half-Marathon at all out effort last Sunday, despite promising myself I wouldn't. Broke 1:40 for the first time, with a 1:39:07. The course was about 300 meters short, though, so technically, I'm still not a Sub-1:40 half-marathoner. But not by much.

Capital Punishment.

I hate Cricket.

At the risk of being lynched by a mob consisting of almost the entire male population of India, let me repeat those three little words...

I hate Cricket.

I don't play it. I don't watch it. I don't read about it. To me, being confined to a room with cricket on the telly is equivalent to, if not crueler than, capital punishment.

It's not so much the game itself, actually.

What I hate is that how the mindless devotion of the Cricket fanatic is single-handedly responsible for the demise of sporting culture as a whole in the country.

How, nowadays, we don't give a shit about our athletes in Incheon, but every barbershop where I live is full of Champions League T20 chairwarriors going on and on and on...

How the money inflating this one game leaves no breathing room for any other to grow.

In particular, I lament how it effects my sport of choice... distance running.

This sunday, a quarter of the way around the world, forty thousand people will run the 41st BMW Berlin Marathon. I will run the 2nd Dwarka Half Marathon & Charity Run along with maybe a few hundred people. It will seriously be as much fun, if not more, as any more opulent race would have been. We will have great  volunteers and ardent runners, all decidedly friendly people. No frills but adequate support. 

It's cool that there is no shortage of such small, happy events in India, and I try to run as many of them as I can.

But it's strange that we are really far behind in world -class, certified races.

It's especially meh that Delhi, the national capital, doesn't have a big ticket full marathon. We have an exceptional running community, beautiful running spaces, great weather (okay, that was reaching, but the few short weeks we do have great weather, it's really great weather)...and we already have a pretty decent annual half marathon.

Today, we have just three active AIMS ratified races in India besides the Delhi Half... the Mumbai and Pune Marathons and the Bangalore 10k. The Kochi Half is touted as one on the Procam website, but doesn't feature on the AIMS website. The Vadodara Marathon website is a mess. It's not even a full marathon anymore, apparently.

Not a single race anywhere is IAAF Gold/Silver/Bronze labeled. (I believe Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore were all Gold label in 2009-10 according to this article. But not anymore.)

For some reason, the Pune Marathon creates very little buzz. So for marathoners, Mumbai remains the 'go-to' event. Obvious question- what does Mumbai have that Delhi doesn't?

Any one who has run both Delhi and Mumbai will immediately hit upon the answer.

Mumbai has good people.

They throng the roadsides, cheering the fast and the slow alike. They hand out biscuits and chocolates and bananas and water and juices and hi-fives (I bet I could do the whole race without touching an official aid station) They beat drums and clap and dance and wave.

They smile.

In Delhi, the only crowds we runners see are those sullenly waiting at crossings for the traffic cops to re-open the roads. They sneer. They curse. They shout snide, sarcastic remarks. If you're a woman, some of them get creatively obnoxious.

And these are those people who care enough to show up. Most of the city is sleeping in, not giving half a hoot. Away from the crossings, the roads are empty, with a few friends and relatives bravely hugging themselves against the cold.

I'm pretty sure these are the same crowds who would snap awake at 3 AM for getting in line at ticket windows, before going on to display unabashed orgasmic frenzy at Ferozshah Kotla.

I know I'm generalizing here, and that's never fair, but that doesn't mean it's not justified.

The people who actually run Delhi will testify that it isn't a bad race by any standards. The large number of people who are running are mostly awesome. The stadium is pretty festive. The volunteers are effective, if not enthusiastic. It's a flat, fast course. Despite all the ranting above, it is still a race I am looking forward to.

I guess I should be thankful we even have a big half-marathon here, shut up and enjoy the smaller, mellower  races, and stop fantasizing that one day, we'll have a Delhi Marathon in the Majors...

...though we are sure to continue to have those pesky Cricket matches.

Week two of eighteen. That mid-week run was speedwork... intense and satisfying, with me running a couple of sub-6:50 miles... my fastest yet. Also, I'm switching my long run tomorrow for the race in Dwarka on Sunday.

The Goldilocks Effect.

Once there was a little girl.
She sort of strolled into a house which belonged to three bears.
Yadayadayada.
She ate the porridge which was just right.
Right fussy little twerp, she was.

Which brings me to the point... in the words of the Holy Bible (Ecclesiastes 11:4, to be precise...)

"He who watches the wind will not sow and he who looks at the clouds will not reap."

In other terms, if you wait for perfect conditions, you'll never get anything done.

How often are running conditions perfect anyway? A week in March, and another in October, maybe? For the rest of the year where I live, it's either too hot, or too cold. That alone is enough for most people to never run. 

Ah well...to each his own. Me? I'll run all year.

I've read some stuff on the interwebs which says that training through summer will see you through to a good race in the fall. Makes sense to me. I get to test that theory out in the November chill during the ADHM.

But now I'm starting out on something which is quite the opposite. 

For the training cycle that started this week, the weather in the sauna that we affectionately call North India has started taking a slow but sure turn for the better. It feels good to do almost a quarter of my run in pre-dawn darkness, and finish well before the sun shows over the horizon.

And it'll just keep getting better for a while... before it starts getting worse. By the time I get to my last long run in the end of December, the temperature will be an uncomfortably chilly tennish.

Then, we taper and run a marathon in the sharply contrasting warmth of Mumbai.

I suppose whatever advantage the summer training has given me will pretty much have worn off by then. So to compensate for the inevitable slowdown in a race that is going to be in much warmer climes than the training leading up to it, I intend to run my easies about 25 to 30 seconds per km faster than what my plan designates, and my long runs and tempos about 10 seconds or so faster. 

Now I'm not sure if  the body works that way, but I'm pretty certain that the mind does. If I am convinced that I have done something to cater for it, psychologically at least, it should help me meet my goal. 

The way I see it, if Goldilocks hadn't been so damn finicky, she coulda had three times the porridge. Yeah, don't be her. Run whenever.
 
Week one of eighteen is done. I cheated on my recovery from my last marathon a bit. Ran an 8k tempo in the middle of the second week and a full out 10k race. In spite of those travesties, I'm glad to report I was feeling distinctly rested and strong as I began this new training cycle.

Here are my runs...

The Best Laid Plans...

But Mousie, thou art no thy lane,

In proving foresight may be vain…

- Robert Burns, To a Mouse.

So this Scots old-timer who I pretentiously quote above... first he ploughs over a field  mouse’s nest, pretty much ruining its life… and then gets all profound and writes a poem about the futility of planning.

I bet that poor mouse was thrilled to bits…

I used to train almost completely by instinct last year, getting by with anything from two to five runs in a week, never overthinking it.

“Yay! Weekend!" Go Long.

“Bloody hell, It’s chilly today…” Speedwork.

“Ouch. DOMS on my butt…” Crosstrain.

“Weekend, but its cold out and DOMS on my butt…” Sleep in.

It was a nice, laid back, safe way of doing things. If you don't plan and plot too much, you are insulated from disappointment when things don't go as expected. This approach saw me through my first marathon in Gurgaon, and just two months later, my second in Mumbai... both in well over four hours.

Early this year, however, after running a couple of strong half-marathons, I was suddenly overcome with BQ fever. After much agonizing, I set up a realistic long term goal of getting to Boston over a period of two years.

And I knew I wasn't getting there without a plan.

To my mind, a good plan had to have three essential components...

What to do.

When to do it.

How to do it.

I knew for sure that I was neither competent nor capable of designing one for myself. Not enough experience, expertise or insight. The last thing I wanted was to end up investing months of effort into something that, ultimately, didn't work...

So, like all seekers of truth, I dove headfirst into the sea of Google, mucked about thoroughly confused for a goodly bit and finally, at random, almost... fished one out. It had everything I needed. What type of runs to do, what pace to do them at, what distance to cover and when to rest. The best part, it predicted a finishing time for my race.Peachy keen!

I printed it out, and pasted it on the inside of my closet and set about it with the stubbornness of a particularly ornery mule. 71 runs over 18 weeks in peak summers. A total of 950 odd kilometers to be run.

I was determined to not miss a single one. And I didn't. Not one. I actually went for a run at 3 AM once because I had a 6 AM flight to catch. I made a ritual out of coming in and striking through the run on the schedule in my closet with a pen.

I'm aware I'm blowing my own trumpet here, but it's necessary to illustrate that for me, an inflexible, uncompromising training plan worked like a charm (plus I really enjoy blowing my own trumpet...) .I crossed the finish line of my last marathon with effort to spare, more than a minute under my goal time. And if it worked once, what's to say it won't work again?

Now, post-race, I'm almost done with three weeks of low mileages and rest. And it's almost time to kick off the next phase in my BQ journey... break 3:20. Eighteen weeks to go till the Standard Chartered Mumbai Marathon, and my training plan is printed out and pasted on the inside of my closet.

Here it is, if you're curious... 

SCMM 2015 Training Plan (pdf)

And so, despite the cautionary tale of  the homeless mouse, despite the possibility of the metaphorical plough devastating my best efforts, I will be following that schedule with all the OCD that I can muster. 

Stay tuned.

In Pursuit of a PR.

Who doesn't love a new PR?

Come on, all you 'I'm-so-zen-I-don't-care-about-race-times' people...admit it...you know you love your PRs, right?

I went out for a 10k race today, organized by the good people of the Run With Me Foundation (www.runwithme.in).

When I registered, I intended this to be a 'shake-out' run, something to test the progress of my recovery after the exhilarating Airtel Hyderabad Marathon that I ran a couple of weeks ago. I wanted to run this one at somewhere near my current average tempo pace of 4:45 to 4:50, and see if the mild piriformis twinge that I had been feeling until a few days ago was gone for good.

Nothing ambitious...

Until yesterday, when someone casually asked me, "Aiming for a PR?"

I replied with a cautious "Maybe..." But honestly? "Hell, yeah!" would've been more apt. My fastest 10k so far was 46:50, and I told myself I would break 45.

I confess, I'm kinda just writing this to brag about the PR I got. Yay!

But also, in all humility, I'm writing to place on record two things I did today because of which I almost didn't.

First, and most important, is that like a complete moron, I started out too fast. 

I must have read reams of good things about negative splits, about the importance of conserving your best effort for the second half of the race, about starting out at a controlled pace just slightly slower than your goal pace and finishing strong, about how for every minute you bank in the first half of a distance run, you may lose two in the second half... but somehow this is something I just cannot seem to get a grip on.

After an exceptional race in Hyderabad, where I controlled my pace every step of the way, and as a result, crushed my previous best by about 35 minutes, meeting my goal time almost exactly, one would think I had learnt my lesson.

But no. I flew off the start line like a bat out of hell at a sub-4 minute pace... By the km 8, I was paying the price, my pace now dipping to slower than tempo every so often...

...at which point I went and made the second foul-up - a bad mid-race reassessment of goal.

Seriously...with 80% of the race done, I was actually still on track for that goal, but because I was running on empty at this point, this is what was going on in my cranium...

"Screw this, man! No way I'm getting that PR... a time of 50 is what I'll get. That's respectable, right? It's good enough. Can't get a PR in every race...is that a hill? Who put that there? I swear it wasn't there on the way out! Well, whatever...that puts paid to the PR for sure. No way I can run up Mount DLF Golf Course at a pace faster than 5. I'll get a time of 55... if I don't die before km 9, that is...ha ha. 55 is respectable, right?"

It's difficult for me to keep negativity out of my head when I know I'm running a bad pace plan. And that just makes a bad situation worse. I never for a moment had such thoughts over my last Marathon distance, but here they were now, messing up the last two kilometers of a distance that I consider easy-peasy. Since I couldn't generate any positive thoughts, I did the next best thing... stop thinking.

It worked, I suppose, albeit partially. I still missed a sub-45 10k, but managed to get that PR. By less than a minute... but got it all the same.

Well... I have a few races lined up over the next few months before my next Marathon. I resolve to not be greedy for a PR every time I stand at the start line. In the one race that I will be going all out, the Airtel Delhi Half in November, I'm going to unwaveringly implement a pacing plan, and for once in my life, nail that negative-split down.

The Perils of Advice.

As you can probably tell after reading my ramblings, I am a loquacious fella.

If there is anything I enjoy as much as I enjoy running, it's talking about running.

And the field is rich with scope. Races, PRs, training paces, routes, injuries and rehab, nutrition and hydration, gear, psychology, foot anatomy...and shoes. God help me, I love talking about shoes.

And when I'm talking, very often, I end up giving advice.


Runners love giving advice.

Someone I know asked me for a training plan once. I'm not any kind of an expert, but I was stupid enough to consider myself one, just because I had run a couple of marathons and she was just starting out.

She wanted to start from scratch and run a 10k race in ten weeks flat, followed by a half marathon in another fourteen weeks. To be fair to myself, I tried to tell her that her goals were unrealistic. That seemed to discourage her. So I went and made out a plan for her. It wasn't a very good plan, unfortunately. She fell behind after a couple of weeks, tried heroically to stick with it for another couple of weeks before giving up almost completely.

I am now riddled with guilt at having lost a recruit for this sport that I love. I'm not sure I handled this correctly, or what I should have done instead. So, since then, I have become extremely guarded in dishing out advice.

New runners assume that someone who runs faster or farther than them, must obviously know more than them about running. And runners with experience sometimes (as in my deplorable case) end up assuming that they are in a position to give stone-tablet commandments to those who are just beginning. Blindly following what others do on the road, or what you read on a website, is playing Russian Roulette with your running goals.



Quite contrarily, I wouldn't tell you not to seek advice either. Learning from failures and successes of others is essential. But the truth is, no one...no one knows your body or your mind like you do. Every runner is unique. What works for one, may or may not work for another. Even the most universally accepted maxims in running are not guaranteed to benefit the next runner who implements them.

So here's some advice about giving advice... Say "Here's what I would do...", and make sure that the advisee understands that it doesn't mean "Here's what you should do..."

And here's some about taking advice...All advice needs to go through the filters of common sense and self-awareness.

Yeah... I write pompous stuff like this when I don't run in the morning...

It Can't Be Done...

"It can't be done..."

There are a few people in the world who are so intensely positive, motivated and inspired, that the above thought never crosses their minds.

I am not one of those people.

Two years ago, I started out in the singularly illogical (on the face of it...) pursuit of long distance running. At the time "long distance" meant ten torturous, never-ending kilometers. I remember getting in touch with a small bunch of people who ran as a group and joining them for a 10k. It was August 2012. We started at a half-past-five in the morning on a route over undulating terrain, with the sun well up. The temperature must have been in the high twenties, humidity in the sixties.

By kilometer 6, I was dead on the inside, half so on the outside, and fairly certain...

"It can't be done..."

Of course, I was wrong. I pushed myself not because of any lofty spiritual ideal, but because I didn't want to embarrass myself in front of the people I was running with. Somehow, I survived that run, taking just over an hour for the distance. My lungs ached, my legs hurt and I was soaked in sweat and ready to collapse. It wasn't pretty.

I would love to be all awesome and write that I learned my lesson that day...that I showed the requisite resolve and tapped into the mysterious 'power of positive thinking' that life-coaches go on and on about.

Nah. That didn't happen. I almost gave up. Almost...

Over the next few weeks, I started running regularly (more or less). Every so often, I would run a 10k. It was never a pleasant experience in those days. I stayed away from running groups. A lot of people in the running groups in Gurgaon were experienced runners with multiple races already under their belts. Too much pressure.

I stuck with it out of sheer stubbornness, with a vague, vain idea pushing me forward that running would give me six-pack abs. That hasn't happened yet, by the way...though I still remain hopeful.

Two months of stubbornness and misplaced vanity was what it took. I was running four 10k runs a week. They were growing less and less unpleasant. I would do one in less than an hour, now and then, and feel so ridiculously great about it!

Of course, by then, I had shifted my bar of impossibility to half-marathons.

I had started reading about running on the internet, and the idea that I would one day run long distance races was slowly contaminating my mind. Physically, I was far from it. Mentally... even farther.

"It can't be done...", I told myself, predictably, at the end of every 10k.

Twenty one kilometers! More than twice what I'm running now! Are you kidding me? That's the distance buses are made for!

It took me more than a year of running to get to my first half-marathon. I approached it with what, in retrospect, I consider extraordinarily rare wisdom. I crept up on it. There's something in running called the '10% rule', which essentially states that you shouldn't increase your weekly mileage in training by more than 10% of what it was in the preceding week. I followed that religiously.

I also struggled with loss of motivation and injury. IT Band Syndrome kept me off the road for almost four months. I lost almost all the gains I had made. Winters kept me in, with me succumbing to the temptation of a warm bed more often than I care to admit.

It was the spring of 2013 before I was recovered from injury and had accumulated sufficient guilt to get back on the road to train again. I registered for the Running and Living Gurgaon Town & Country Half-Marathon, to be held on the 11th August 2013. At the time, the longest I had run was 14 kilometers.

A month before the race, with the north Indian summer well on it's way, I went out to run with a group again, people who said they would be running an easy 16k. At the start point, someone decided to run a half-marathon. I was like... what? I wasn't ready! I hadn't trained! It can't be done!

That run was agony. I was running on unfamiliar roads and had no mental picture of how much distance I had covered and how much more I needed to go. I stopped and walked several times and got left behind. When I finally staggered back to the start point, some of the others were waiting patiently.

"How much did we do?" I groaned.

"Oh, about eighteen kilometers...", someone said.

I was never more convinced, in my mind, than I was at that point, that a half-marathon? It can't be done...

For me, when I crossed the finish line of the race a month later in 2:08, the Half-Marathon distance was a watershed. Suddenly, I was addicted. My glutes and hamstrings were killing me for a week after the race, but I couldn't wait to get back to running!

I had bought a pair of ASICS (had never heard of the brand before) and some other running stuff. A fuel-belt. An mp3 player. A Garmin watch. I started writing a cutesy training journal with a fountain pen. I started putting my runs on mapmyrun.com .

I had now shifted my bar of impossibility to marathons. Forty two kilometers? Pheidippides died...died, when he ran that much to start the whole madness off in the first place. Who was I kidding? Marathons?

Can't be done.

Today, it's another year later. I've done three marathons, eight half-marathons and a 28k race. I no longer struggle to get out of bed to train.

And I've started dreaming of qualifying for the Boston Marathon.

That requires me to run the 42.2 kilometers in 3 hours and 10 minutes or less. Seriously? Do you know what pace that is? It's 4:30 per kilometer...I can barely do two kilometers of speedwork at that pace nowadays. You have to be genetically gifted to run at that speed. You know what? It has to be said...

Can't.

Be.

Done.