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.

The Jai Ghati Run.

Sometimes, a run deserves it's own blog post, like this one.

Almost exactly 21.1 kilometers away from where I stay is a place called Jai Ghati (translation: Victory Valley).

It is a beautiful, isolated basin, surrounded by lush green, forested slopes and carpeted with rolling emerald meadows. A sparkling, crystal-clear stream divides it, spanned in a couple of places by quaint wooden foot-bridges. The water is ice-cold snowmelt, good enough to drink.

Picture perfect and true to the words of the poet...

Gar Firdaus bar ruh-e zamin ast

Hami asto, hamin asto, hamin ast …

Yep, it’s heaven.

Did I mention that it’s on the other side of a 8 thousand foot pass… that’s 17 and a half kilometers away from where the route starts, at an altitude of about 5 and a half thousand feet? Yep, that’s nearly a 6 percent incline… more than three quarters of a kilometer of ascent in that distance. Here’s the elevation profile…

Phew!

I’d been looking forward to doing this run all last week, but as I turned in last night, thundershowers started raising merry hell on my tin roof, and chances of execution looked mighty bleak. But come morning… Hallelujah!

Hallelujah for clear skies!

I poured a couple of bottles of Gatorade into my new CamelBak , kitted up and stepped out instanter.

I'm a lot of things..."Color-coordinated" is not one of them

While most of the country is reeling under loathsome heatwave conditions, I set off in pleasant low twenties on my weekend Long Slow Distance.

This run was intended to be a spiritual experience. Timing was not a consideration, but I set myself an easy goal pace of 6:30 per km for this. The route, as you can see, is too amazingly beautiful to not stop and stare at the scenery every so often.

Nice work here, Mother Nature.

I ran through a couple of small villages and hamlets as the road climbed, enjoying the incredulous stares of farmers, housewives and shopkeepers, to say nothing of cattle, mules, dogs and sheep...

You'll all be sweaters soon, guys...

When I waved to a bunch of curious children on the roadside, I was rewarded with raucous peals of laughter. I can imagine what a strange sight I must have been to them. Crazy man in shorts and shades sucking on a tube and running up a hill… Ridiculous!

Halfway through my run, I had left whatever little habitation there is in this place, behind. Just me, the unforgiving slope of the road, the wind in the trees and the valley laid out beside me. My legs were killing me from the climb, but the sheer splendor of the environs kept me in the zone.

What goes up, must come down, as the common aphorism goes. I crossed the pass and praised the lord for the downhill, and finally, after about two and a half hours of running, at a pace a mite slower than planned, I landed up here…

Coming...

...and Going.

Worth every single aching muscle fiber.

As I sat around resting my aching feet, some of my friends (all of whom think I’m insane, of course) joined me for a picnic by driving up. I dipped them in the water of the stream until they were numb. My feet, I mean...not my friends!

Yes, some cold water did creep up my buttcrack. Not pleasant.

Having breakfasted on a gigantic omelette, I set out to explore a bit. And do other stuff.

"Other stuff"

To my acute delight, I discovered that there is a prominent, very runnable pony trail that runs right through the valley...

Shahrukh ain't got nuthin' on me, yo.

...and another that leads from the pass back along a continuous ridge to a place very close to where I live.

Finally, I have somewhere to do something about the irksome virginity of my Salomon Fellraisers!

...not for long, my beauties. Heh heh heh.

I was almost on the verge of selling them on OLX...

Location, Location, Location.

A military man soon comes to terms with the inevitable orders that come every few years to pack up and move out.

I must admit that when I got my most recent marching orders, what was uppermost in my mind was whether I will be able to train where I was going.

Well, I've been here a few weeks now. My fears have been laid to rest as I have been running on some of the most beautiful routes imaginable.

Since pictures are worth a thousand words (...and since I'm too lazy to actually write stuff...), here is a ten thousand word essay on my current running spaces...

Room with a View

Cloud Nine

Up the creek without a paddle

Event Horizon

Right up my Valley

Road to Nowhere

The Wild Blue Yonder

Turning Point

Be Mine, Incline

Don't miss the Forest for the Trees

Honestly, I do miss the company of the running crowd in NCR. Distance running is definitely a social sport.

But nowadays, when I step out all alone in the mornings on empty hill roads, and the cold air fills my lungs like sweet iced champagne, and my ears fill with the music of the birds and the winds through the trees instead of engine growls and horns, I can't help but feel truly blessed to be here.