Things, as is their way, sometimes fall apart.
My much made-of training plan for the 10k race at Bangalore...my
‘Magic Wand’ (*rolls eyes)... started disintegrating around my powerless ears
almost as soon as it started, and as on date, lies around me in unrecognizable
ruins, along with the burning debris of my race goal.
I shall now proceed to cut open the corpse and muck about inside. Nurse? Scalpel...
Frankly, it was always a bit of an overreach. You guys knew
that, right? 36:54 coming straight off a recovery phase? I mean, come on...
For much of this sorry state of affairs, I shall hold the
weather liable.
For some reason, between the ides of March and April, the
mountain weather becomes, for want of a more appropriate adjective, shit.
I remember, a year ago, when I first moved there, it took me
no less than ten days to cover the two hundred odd kilometers between the
nearest airport and my designated digs, due to irritably frequent landslides
and persistent rain.
While the rest of the country saw a blink-and-you-miss-it
spring and transitioned to summer, we were still trying to stay warm by burning
things.
Now, I’m okay to train in the cold... and I can definitely
run when it’s wet... but when it’s cold and
wet... dude, I’d rather burn my calories by sulking indoors.
Then, a large chunk of my training was bitten off by my
annual medical examination... an exercise that involved being shipped off to a
faraway hospital or two, being poked and prodded with strange and shiny
objects, and filling out reams...reams
of redundant paperwork. And all that to tell me that I'm healthy. Hello? I knew that, goddammit!
When all that was done, I found myself with six weeks left
to go till race day, with nearly nine weeks of training to squeeze into them.
(Of course, I didn’t know then that of those six weeks,
three more would be interrupted by intermittent rains.)
If only the human body worked that way. We may be tempted to
‘make up’ for runs that we miss in training. But that may end up causing more
harm, as the additional runs impinge on recovery time and nudge us towards
injury and overuse.
However, I optimistically pushed my weekly mileage up just a
wee bit. Just to see how it goes.
The speedwork sessions proved to be disappointing (I did just
three out of the planned nine) and I couldn’t seem to hold the target pace of
3:40 as well as I needed to. Hamstring tendons started complaining at the end
of the last interval session that I did. This is associated more with
start-stop kind of activity than steady distance running, so I decided to cut
out the intervals altogether.
On the whole, I just got in about three weeks of
uninterrupted runs. I landed up in Bengaluru, hopelessly undertrained but
mildly optimistic... a fatal combination.
At 4 AM on race day, I woke up with the thought “Why the
heck is it so warm?”
The rest is history.
39:39 for a 10k isn’t bad. But, it’s not even a PR, let
alone being anywhere close to Nell’s time. I estimate I am another year from my goal, at least.
This race has reinforced in me, an important life lesson...
“When things go wrong, blame the weather.”
I will, of course, mope for a while and snarl at strangers on the street. Then I'm doing the Starry Night Half Marathon this Saturday before heading back to the hills.
Next up...I'm now registered for the Spice Coast Marathon in Kochi in November, for which I will start a training cycle sometime in July. Will go into that hoping for a time somewhere between 3:00 and 3:05, and then try to use that momentum to carry me through to something decent at the ADHM.
Weather permitting.
