Phase Two.

I figured if I posted any more entries featuring pictures of scenic running routes in breathtaking mountain vistas, I would be giving a horde of city-bound runners reasonable cause to form a lynch mob and string me up from the nearest convenient electric pole the next time I set foot in urban municipal limits.

So, yeah. No more of that...

...for now ;)

Besides, it’s the anniversary of this blog, so I might as well write some shit up instead of filling the page with pretty pictures, yeah?

It was an year ago, almost to the day, when spurred by an unexpectedly satisfying race at the 2014 Airtel Hyderabad Marathon, I unleashed the horror that are my musings as a runner, on an unsuspecting internet.

Ah nostalgia!

That was the beginning of a ruinous quest for Boston Marathon qualification, which went up in flames after a catastrophic systems failure on the roads of Mumbai in January.

Now recently, I descended from my hilly perch and came back to Gurgaon for some ill-deserved leave, at the end of which, out of uncharacteristic sentimentality, I planned to race in Hyderabad again. A half, this time.

For the past four months, I have been doing a kind of slow-burn base-building... low-to-moderate mileages and efforts with no particular aim. Not having trained specifically for the race, I intended it to be a sort of fitness test, to maybe help me figure out training volume and intensity for the next five months.

I managed a fairly satisfactory 1:35:14 at Hyderabad yesterday, which is a tad more than four minutes slower than my best at ADHM last year. Still, given the vast contrast in conditions and topography of the two races, I would like to think that there is equivalence there.

In effect, I am now willy-nilly about as strong a runner as I was at the end of November last year, about three-fourths of the way through my last marathon training cycle.

This is good news. To me, it means that I now have a take-off point significantly higher than last time... a fitness base strong enough to bear the pressure of a more demanding new training schedule.

What next?

I'm registered for the Dubai Marathon on 22nd January 2016. It's time to train.

For the past two marathon training cycles, I have been following the online training schedules provided by Runner’s World SmartCoach. The first time, this training saw my marathon timings improve by a giant leap, from 4:14 to 3:38 at Hyderabad in 2014.

The second time, a similar investment saw me make a disappointingly modest hop to 3:35, in comparable (honestly, slightly better) racing conditions in SCMM 2015. While many factors are responsible for that, most of them attributable to my own lack of sense, I cannot help but think that there might have been  a 'Law of Diminishing Returns' at play. All I did was amp up my training intensity, while sticking to safe mileages and frequencies.

Since one popular definition of insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, expecting different results (and I'm not insane despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary), I am bidding adieu to SmartCoach.

There’s much to be said for shaking things up. The body adapts beautifully to repeated stimuli of the same kind. If I want to up my game, I know I will need to change my whole approach to the race instead of just turning things up a notch. 

This time, I intend to follow a plan laid out by Pete Pfitzinger and Scott Douglas in their book ‘Advanced Marathoning’ which I happened to read some time ago.You can also have a look at the plan here.

It’s an ambitious plan that starts at a mileage close to my peak mileage (about 90km per week)  in my last training cycle, and then goes higher. It calls for training six days a week, and includes runs as long as 24 kms mid-week :O It gives a priority to endurance vis-a-vis speed, switching out most of the speed intervals for tempo-effort runs, and calls for long runs with strong finishes... something that has always been my Achilles' heel.

And as I sit here and look at those distances, I kid you not, I'm terrified. 

A thousand 'what ifs' are floating in my mind. Am I asking for trouble? Injury and burnout?

I have admitted to myself that once I am on a plan, my obstinacy in following it knows no bounds. This time, that has to change.

I have resolved to be very mindful of what my body is telling me. And be flexible in execution. Bite off the plan in small, two-week chunks and carry out necessary modifications without any unwarranted regard for machismo and pride. Let's see how that works out.

The plan starts with effect from 21st September, three weeks from now, and I’m looking forward to running with a purpose again. 

I’m also registered for the Airtel Delhi Half in the end of November and the half at the Goa River Marathon in mid-December just to get medals for training runs.

But for now, it's back to the mountains with my sorry ass. As I had bravely promised myself earlier this year...

Time for Phase Two.