The Last Post.

As I write this, I’m sitting in the depressing environs of Dubai airport, waiting for my flight home, which has, annoyingly, been delayed for three hours. The airline has provided me with the crappiest McDonalds meal possible. I have spent two hours in the immigration queue. My butt pain is at God Tier.

By all accounts, I probably shouldn't be feeling as bloody happy as I do...

...In the pocket of the bag propped up next to me is the medal from today’s race.

Despite the brave face I have tried to project to the world, the last two months of training have been pretty unpleasant, to say the least. I have been wandering on the edge of serious overtraining, stressing endlessly over missed runs. The extended taper I did always felt like an even mix of 'too damned much' and 'not nearly enough'.

I flew to Dubai on 19th January with a mind full of contradictory thoughts.

At times, I felt so strong that a sub-3 time seemed in my grasp (ha ha, right?), and then, mere minutes later, for no apparent reason whatsoever, I would be convinced that I would be finishing just a minute too late.

This muddled mindset was something I carried with me almost until I stepped over the final mat.

I collected my race pack that afternoon at the ultra-luxurious Meydan hotel in a smooth, hassle-free, uncrowded five minutes.

Dubai is pretty nice at this time of the year, and I did a peppy 5k training run around the gorgeous marina promenade on the 20th, spent the day carb-loading with small meals... pasta, bagels, dates and yogurt... as I wandered around the city. Visited the Burj Khalifa. Spent hours at the Dubai Mall and the Mall of the Emirates, buying nothing but wishing I had more money. 

On the 21st, the carb-loading continued, and I spent most of the day off my feet, as suggested by prevalent running lore. I anticipated that I would be getting little sleep at night, but surprisingly, I managed a good seven hours before the alarm went off at 4 AM on race day.

An unhurried textbook oatmeal/banana breakfast, and a readily available cab to the start were the pre-race highlights of that morning.

In terms of crowd and festivity, the mustering areas on Umm Suqeim road  were very similar to the ADHM. There were no starting corrals/sections. The atmosphere was thick with the familiar electricity and expectations of thousands of runners. I felt right at home.

At precisely 0615 hours, I downed a gel with a gulp of water.

At 0630, we were off.

I immediately started overthinking every single aspect of my race. I wasn't going to make the mistake of starting out too fast this time, I told myself, and tried to keep a sober pace.

Until, of course, the 3rd kilometer, when I was suddenly telling myself... okay, slow...but not this damned slow! 

My kilometer splits accurately reflect what was going on in my mind until the halfway point. Every kilometer I maintained a 4:10 to 4:20 pace was when I was dreaming of a sub-3 hour finish. Every 4:20 to 4:30 paced kilometer was when I was berating myself for being stupid and trying desperately to save myself for the last 10k.

When I crossed the halfway mark in 1:32, I still hadn't settled into any kind of rhythm.

I have given up the idea of ever being able to run a negative-split, so my pacing plan did cater for a fade in the last 8 to 10k. But it started at km 30. It may have been because I had run the first half faster than I should have, or it may have been due to the fact that the much vaunted 'pleasant' weather of Dubai chose that stretch to disappear.

Suddenly, it was warm.

It was still much better than anything Mumbai throws at you, but it was unexpected for me. I slowed down, and this time, not by choice.

At km 32, Ash Nath, the well-known marathoner, came up alongside me, looking decidedly chill. I chatted with him for a bit about trying for a BQ.

"You'll get it easily," he said as he cantered past, "Just don't do anything stupid."

Anything stupid? I thought back and tried to recall a time during the race where I wasn't doing anything stupid.

Nothing came to mind.

The fade hit me in earnest at km 35-36, but somehow, by this time, even though I was not running the way I hoped I would be, I somehow knew that I would get my time.

I ran the Standard Chartered Dubai Marathon in 3:09:56. A bit close, but I'd be an idiot to complain. Physically, the run was comfortable, and I didn't feel dead and buried at the end... that's the way it should be. Most of the agony I suffered was in my indecisive, chaotic mind.

This, besides giving me a moderately comfortable BQ, has made the url of this blog redundant. 

I don't seem to have much left to say in the context, so it's time to bring 'Running It Down' to a close. I thank everyone who has endured through my flabbergasting prose over the past two years.

This is the last post.

Cue cheers and sighs of relief...

A Tale of Two Shoes.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...

In August 2012, when I first stepped out onto the roads to begin my tryst with distance running, I wore a pair of two-year-old Reeboks.

They weren’t even running shoes. They were, horror of horrors, tennis shoes...

Since then, I have owned six different pairs of shoes from five different brands.

This is their story.

That first pair...it was as generic as shoes can possibly get. I barely remember what they looked like. I had bought them because they were ‘predominantly white’, which was a requirement at morning PT in the Army, much like at Wimbledon. Plus they kinda-sorta went with jeans.

Did I care? Not a dram. I held the unforgivably sexist view that obsessing over shoes was something that women did.

Did it matter? Not a grain. I was slow and irregular with my runs and frankly, I thought I would get over the whole running fad in a few months, at most. Once I had lost the last few kgs of extra weight I had been carrying around, what would be the point of continuing?

A few months later, a significant syzygy fell into place.

At around the time I was starting to enjoy running for its own sake, almost seriously thinking of doing a half-marathon someday, I ran through a puddle one rainy morning and felt the water seep through and wet my sock. The sole had split apart to the liner, and I hadn’t even noticed it.

While ordinarily I would have driven down to the nearest mall and picked up a random pair from the shelf, this time I made a life-altering decision and googled ‘running shoes’...

That rabbit-hole just sucked me right in...

Saucony? Mizuno? Brooks? Newton? Wtf were all these brands? Heel-toe drop? Pronation? Torsion? Stability? Support? Dude...

After more than an hour of reading random articles about running shoes, I had lost all clarity in the matter. But I knew I wanted a nice, interesting pair of shoes. No more inky-pinky-ponky at the local shoe-store for me.

I ordered a pair of ASICS Cumulus 14s online.

I know that it was probably psychosomatic, but I ran about two minutes off my 54-minute 10k time the next day, without even trying. And just like that, I became obsessed with shoes.

The Cumulus 14s saw me through my first two halfs (halves?) and my first two marathons. I was a fan. I bought my next pair, ASICS Cumulus 15s this time, without thinking much about it, while the 14s were still doing perfectly all right.

By the beginning of 2014, I realized that I was gradually getting faster than I ever thought I would get. I began my first actual marathon training program with a time goal in mind. I alternated my two pairs through it, and finally raced in the newer (and heavier, I later realized) pair.

That was the Hyderabad Marathon in August 2014, a watershed race for me. There was no denying it anymore. Running was now an inextricable part of my life.

In September 2014, I retired my Cumulus 14s as they had become significantly down-at-heel. The 15s were still going pretty strong, and I continued to run in them.

27^th September 2014. Dennis Kimetto breaks the World Record for the marathon at Berlin. A few days later, I come to know of the adidas Adizero Adios Boost 2 racing flats... I read up on this particular species of shoe, and decide, for reasons I cannot rationally explain, that I have to have it! Until I see that the damned things retail for more than fifteen thousand bucks a pair...

Sanity prevailed. I came across the adidas Supernova Glide 6s just in time for ADHM 2014. An ounce lighter than my Cumulus 15s, so better to race in (does an ounce or three even matter?), but still, cushioned enough for regular training.

I let the Cumulus 15s take on most of the training load through the end of 2014 and the beginning of 2015, using the Glide 6s mainly for races.

In April, when I moved to the mountains, I anticipated doing a lot of hill trails, and invested in a pair of Salomon Fellraisers. Strangely, I still haven’t run in them! They are lying untouched on my shoe-rack, waiting for their day in the dirt...

A few more months of running saw my Cumulus 15s wear out, and I upgraded the Glide 6s to the status of a regular trainer. I was, once again, in the market for a fresh pair. As before, I was looking for something lightweight, yet cushioned. The next iteration of the adidas Supernova Glide was only marginally heavier, and I had almost decided to get those  until I remembered Skechers.

Meb Keflezighi won the 2014 Boston marathon in a pair of Skechers GOmeb Speed 3s, and the brand saw a lot of positive publicity in the wake of that win. I decided to give it a try, picking up the Skechers GOrun 4s which were closer to my idea of a racer/trainer hybrid than the racing GOmebs. Surprisingly, these shoes are even lighter than the Adios Boost 2 racers.

I started alternating between the Glide 6s and the GOrun 4s as I dove into my current training cycle. Over time, I realized that while the GOrun 4s were lighter and more comfortable over longer distances and on high impact downhills, they were also less responsive. They had a kind of super-soft midsole that made them seem sluggish if I tried to speed up. The Glide 6s were stiffer, and hence, despite being much heavier, felt more conducive to faster runs at toe-off.

Come November, the Glide 6s had done more mileage than any other shoe I had run in, and were at end-of-life. I decided to race one last time in them before retiring them. They carried me to a great finish at ADHM 2015.

I had agonized over my next purchase for quite a while, anticipating the need for a good pair of shoes to race Dubai in. What I wanted was something that combined the best of the GOrun 4s and the Glide 6s, which, in my opinion, was a low weight and a stiff, responsive sole respectively. And it still had to be reasonably well-cushioned... a racer/trainer hybrid. I considered staying with adidas and getting the Adizero Boston Boost 5, which was getting a lot of good buzz around here. I also thought about the Nike Free Flyknit 4 (lighter but softer) and the Mizuno Wave Sayonara 3 (stiff but heavier).

I finally settled on a striking pair of electric blue New Balance Vazee Pace running shoes, imported through a cousin returning from the US. So far, I’m ecstatic about these. They are only very slightly heavier than the GOrun 4s, and lighter than both the Adios and the Boston Boost. The ‘REV-lite’ foam midsole feels slightly firmer underfoot than the ‘Boost’ foam on the Glide 6s. I had no complaints with the narrow fit of the Glide 6s, but the Vazee Pace is definitely much roomier in the toebox. While I’m still in the process of breaking them in and getting used to the new ride, I have a good feeling about them.

Phew! That was a long-ass post.

In summary, maybe I've been lucky that I've never actually bought a pair of bad shoes, ones that have led to injury. Maybe there are no bad shoes.

Or maybe, the shoes one wears don't matter so much as one thinks they do...

2015 is almost done. And so is my training cycle. The high volume has definitely made me faster, stronger and lighter. I have successfully managed to rein myself in from overtraining. My vacation in Gurgaon is at an end, and I will head to the pure, cold air of the mountains again in a couple of days, returning in mid-January of the New Year to go and race in Dubai.

If I don’t metamorphose into a complete imbecile on race day like I usually do, I should be able to BQ this time. Either way, I’m looking forward to an off-season till about April after this.

...It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.

Getting There...

Something happened about a month ago.

A fourth of the way into the second 'mesocycle' of my training plan... something that was supposed to add a shit-ton of tempo-pace running to my training... I ran into foul weather.

Literally.

Temperature in the hills suddenly dipped, for one, and while I could have dealt with that alone, it started raining every other day. I missed a run on account of a particularly nasty thundershower, so I googled 'Weather Gods' that afternoon, got a quick-and-dirty list from this page, and proceeded to spend a goodly amount of time hurling clever insults at them. It was all a lot of fun.

The next day, I saw a window of opportunity (when it was merely drizzling) and set out for a 23k. That turned out to be an ambush of epic proportions by the previously abused weather gods. I was at the 11.5k turning point, right in the middle of the killing ground, when those guys opened up on me with every bucket they had.

Picture a wet cat. Now picture that wet cat shivering in a freezer. Yes...I was that wet cat.

I staggered back to my room, dried myself up and then proceeded to pray spiritedly to this rather more comprehensive list of deities . Thankfully, at least on Wikipedia, there are more Health Gods than Weather Gods and I did not, in fact, fall overtly sick from that horrific run.

The next day, I knew that something was off. The rains had ceased. But, for the first time in forever, I didn't feel like going for a run.

I didn't have to think long to know what this was. Impending burnout. To be frank, I had been expecting it. I had been sticking to the mileages, but was doing some killing elevations. Effort-wise, every run felt as if it was 25 to 30 % longer than what it actually was...

It was time to make good on the promise I had made myself when I started out on this schedule.

Swallow your pride. Forget your machismo.

Rest.

I would love to tell you that it was difficult to take days off, because that would be in tune with this image of a badass runner that I keep trying to cultivate about myself, but honestly... I was relieved. It was true that I was missing some mileage in a high-stakes training cycle. But those late mornings and those afternoon naps felt just so good...

I did a cautious run in the middle of the next week, and found that the weariness had faded. Just to be safe, I gave it the rest of the week.

Sure enough, by the following Monday, I was champing at the bit.

However, now, ADHM 2015 was around the corner. Training plan mileage in this, or the next week, would probably have seen me arrive fatigued at the start line. A lot of meditation on the issue, and I decided to taper.

It turned out to be a good decision.

Those 39 seconds will haunt me until next year, I'm sure :D, but I have kept alive this personal tradition of missing ADHM goals by fractions of a minute, and I am quite proud of that. A good race, all in all, despite the rag-cloth of a t-shirt, and the unimaginative medals that were basically leftovers from the last running with the year scraped off.

That's done.

I now have four weeks in Gurgaon. After months in the mountains, I am sanguine that the planned mileages here will not be as daunting as they would have been with the madness of the inclines. While the temperatures continue to drop here too, It's nice to be on leave, which enables me to run late mornings or afternoons. And while I have unreservedly loved the solitude of my runs so far, It'll be great to run with other human beings for a change.

The few runs I have done so far this week have convinced me that despite my break, as regards Dubai 2016... I'm getting there.

Here's what the last month looked like...

Cheesy Running Poetry.

Holy shi... I think I wrote something that looks like... a poem ! (...from a distance, in dim light...)

It even rhymes and stuff ! So there's only one thing to do...panic, and publish before I come to my senses.

Bring your own pizza, people. I'm supplying the cheese. Inspired by morning runs in the hills...

An Ode to the Mountain Run

The birth of day's still locked away,

In clean, unbounded darkness.

The world is open, empty, free,

Unclaimed, uncrowded starkness.

                                                              You're in that magic space and time,

                                                              That great things will get done in,

                                                              If you can just step out of doors,

                                                              In footwear made to run in.

Stride long and fast, on hillside paths,

From valley floor to summit,

And one day you'll be mountain-strong.

Want it. Work it. Become it. 

                                                              These fells are not an easy win.

                                                              Embrace each hard-won mile.

                                                              For, in your head, what feels like three,

                                                              Is really, still one mile.

Forge your brain to train through pain,

Refuse to stop or settle.

Outside, believe your feet have wings,

Inside, believe you're metal.

                                                              You will not find it easy, no,

                                                              You won't be safe from failing,

                                                              But each step will knock something down,

                                                              That keeps you from prevailing. 

The highs and lows along the roads,

Are brutal, heartless forces.

They'll break you, just to build you up,

So you can race your courses.

                                                               Today, you're done. Retreat, regroup,

                                                               Wait for a day...and then,

                                                               Tomorrow, when the mountain calls,

                                                               You run it once again.

Bridging the GAP.

The 7^th of April, 2015 AD.

Late evening.

My first run in the mountains where I now live.

I remember standing outside my room, in a gracefully contemplative pose, waiting for my Garmin to lock on. The goal was to run an out-and-back, tempo-effort 10k. This was undoubtedly the hilliest terrain I had ever run on. I was not really sure what was about to happen, and there was only one way to find out...

Long story short... an hour later, I was in a different pose... on my knees at the exact same spot, gasping for breath, leg muscles aflame, whimpering like a Grade-A wuss.

Over those 10 kilometers, I had climbed almost 500 meters.

Hills do strange things to runners....things that are almost impossible to accurately calculate, and therefore, compensate for.

Consider this...

An ‘out-and-back’ run is one on which you run to a point and then return along the same route. On such a route, you invariably climb exactly as much as you descend, irrespective of the elevation profile. Since you run slower than average on uphills and faster than average on downhills, intuitively, the effects of the two should cancel out and one should be able to run, on average, as fast as one would run the same distance on flat ground.

But, as any moderately experienced runner will tell you, that doesn’t happen...

You never gain on downhills, the time you lose on uphills. The factor here is approximately 0.5, i.e. while running downhill, one tends to make up only half the time one has lost running up the hill.

Since I am about as mathematically skilled as the average kitten, I saw that this was really going to be a problem when I started training in earnest for Dubai 2016. Training by pace (which, on flat ground, is proportional to effort) is all I knew.

The obvious alternative was to train directly by effort, or heart-rate zones, something that almost all wise runners and coaches advocate anyway.

I don’t have a heart-rate monitor. So much for that, then.

Another step up the wisdom ladder, people swear upon training by feel.

Somehow, even that didn’t seem to work (at least for me) on the kind of ups and downs I was facing.  Going by feel, I realized that running up or down a slope at a variety of paces felt equally hard/easy.

With no reliable numbers to help me, I was doomed to train by faith... something that, as on date, I continue to do.

Not entirely, though.

A couple of weeks and a few more disastrous runs after that first disastrous run, I ported my runs to Strava.

And there, under the pace/elevation graph, I saw this little thing...

...and I was like, “Whoa!”

Quoting Straight from Strava’s knowledge-base... “Grade Adjusted Pace estimates an equivalent pace when running on flat land.”

It sounded exactly like what I needed, right? Yet, I remained wary...

Firstly, GAP is an estimate. It’s a re-evaluation of my actual data by some mysterious algorithm living in Strava’s servers. It's not real.

Secondly, the algorithm is based on a study. Quoting again, “...work done by C.T.M Davies and Alberto Minetti studying the effects of grade on the energy cost of running.” Statistical studies are like tequila. A pinch of salt is essential. They work well for populations, not individuals.

While Strava's coders seem to have done their best to improve the accuracy of GAP, I just couldn't rely on it.

I looked back at that first run...

Feel- All-out best effort (~4 minutes/km)

Actual Pace (~6 minutes/km)

GAP ( ~5 minutes/km)

Well, that didn’t help at all.

Epilogue: Now.

After about seven months of running on the same terrain, I ran an 18k yesterday (climbing 1100 meters), and the picture was somewhat different.

Feel- Twilight Zone, harder than Tempo/ easier than best effort (~ 4:30 minutes/km)

Actual Pace (4:42 minutes/km)

GAP (3:36 minutes/km)

Three-bloody-thirty-six!

Four weeks to the incline-less ADHM, I see that I’m touching GAPs that, if accurate, should see me crossing the finish line in about 75-77 minutes! 

Is that even possible? Dare I be that ambitious with my goal? Let me meditate on that.

One way or another, ADHM is sure to give me some sort of indication about how seriously I should take the whole GAP business. Right now, surrounded by hills, I have no way of knowing.

In any case, before I taper into that race, there are three monstrous weeks to go with my weekly mileage slated to peak at 112 km. Here’s a picture of the last month, if you’re interested...

Love at First Bite!

Overused, corny, vaguely vampire-themed wordplay to kick off my blog this time. It’s sad, I know. I can almost hear you groaning.

So, the Pfitzinger 18/55-70 is well underway as I write this. I’m two weeks in and outrageously, still not dead.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, this plan is something I intend to consume in two-week ‘bites’, mainly due to the seriously intimidating mileages involved. That means a total of nine bites till race day.

Nine bites is like...two king-size burgers. You do not want to watch me eat two king-size burgers. I’m disgusting.

Just to test the waters, I ran a few high mileage weeks at the beginning of September. A 5-run 83k week to set me up for an intense 6-run 96k week.

To say that the 96k week felt ‘difficult’ would be like saying that I felt ‘a bit nippy’ after someone planted me neck-deep in an iceberg, butt-naked.

But that week did something very beneficial for me... It triggered a sea-change in my whole perception of what is ‘easy’ and what is ‘difficult’ in terms of training volume... something I really need if I am to follow this training plan with any amount of success.

I followed it up with an 80k recovery week. Did I just use the terms ‘80k’ and ‘recovery week’ in one expression? I did indeed.

That’s the change in perception I meant.

When I finally started on the plan proper, I wasn’t half as worried as I had been a month ago when I had decided on it. Don’t get me wrong...It’s still pretty daunting. But the chimera of insurmountably that seemed to surround it has melted away like butter on a hot bun. Butter...hot buns...now I’m thinking about king-size burgers again.

Back on topic, I’ve swallowed the first bite, and I love it. 

Bite One

In related news, I’m putting in a crapload of effort into strengthening, without which I’m sure to get injured at these volumes. The hammies, apparently need a lot of attention when one is running as much hills as I am, since the quads take most of the punishment during the runs themselves, the asymmetrical load can result in knee problems.

Some yoga every so often may be helping with recovery, though I don’t feel the difference. But I'll just take the word of the people who recommend it.

I don’t have much say over the quality of my nutrition up here, but in terms of quantity... let’s just say I’m starting to get funny looks at the table.

Despite that, I have lost about 5 kgs since mid-August, my scale tells me. Since this loss is not accompanied by any slump in energy levels, I’m not worried.

The bottom-line is - No unusual discomfort or pain so far. I'm feeling good.

Full steam ahead!

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.