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.