Runners Angst

I haven’t written here in a while. I like to sometimes stroke my ego and imagine legions of loyal readers biting their nails and sweating while obsessively refreshing their browsers, praying for my next post.

Riiiiiight...like I’m the George RR Martin of running blogs.

Heh.

For the past two months, I have been doing a moderate amount of running, combined with a fabulous amount of overthinking.

I seem to have descended into the runner’s version of the hell of existential angst.

Who am I? What am I doing here? Where am I going? What the living fuck does it all mean?

After a lot of brooding and despairing, I have come to the conclusion that I am in this unenviable state of mind because I may have accidentally given myself a subconscious impression that I am plateauing. Aging and plateauing.

"Oooooold! I’m so oooooold!" my id keeps wailing.

It’s probably not true, I guess, and it certainly isn’t based on any statistics other than the fact that I didn’t quite reach my race goal at Bangalore a couple of months ago. Given the conditions, I did have quite a nice race, however. 

Also most of the really fast runners I know of are actually upto ten years older than me! I’m just a kid in this game!

But I can’t bring myself to reconcile to these obvious facts.

If anything, my plan of raising my base (I’ve heard all the ‘Baby ko base pasand hai’ jokes, thank you very much) seems to be quite splendidly on track, with 50 to 60 km weeks coming easily to me. This, as opposed to the mostly lame 30 to 40 km weeks that I launched my previous marathon training cycle from.

Speed wise, too, I seem to be doing my moderate/tempo paced runs 15 to 30 seconds per km faster than I used to an year ago.

So why is my stupid head full of this self-doubt? Wish I knew.

I do know, however, how I can snap the hell out of it. The answer lies in Hyderabad.

The Hyderabad Marathon is also becoming a bit of an annual tradition for me, much like ADHM. It's hot and irritatingly hilly, but exceedingly well organized. Definitely worth the travel. I formally initiated my pursuit of a BQ there, two years ago. Last year, I mentioned it in my late blog as a sort of a benchmark race.

This year, again, I intend to go there, mostly untrained, run the half, and see where I stand.

I am optimistic that I should be able to better my last years showing of 1:35:14. Significantly, I am curious about exactly how much better I do. Last year, I was about 10 minutes faster at ADHM in November than I was at Hyderabad. And while I am well aware that running math doesn’t work that way, if I can break 1:30 for the half there, I think I can realistically reach for Nell’s 1:21:51 with another three months of training.

That should get me ‘up and running’ again, so to speak.  

I do have to amend my plans at Cochin, on 13th November, though. It doesn't make sense to run a warm 42.2 there just a couple of weeks before taking a shot at a PR in a cool and flat 21.1.

See you at Hyderabad, those who’re coming :)