Bermuda-Triangled

The Bermuda Triangle, as many of you will be aware, is one of the most fascinating unsolved mysteries in the world.

A fairly large patch of the North Atlantic Ocean, this region has earned notoriety in popular culture as a sort of magnet for aircraft and ships headed for a less-than-ideal fate. Explanations ranging from alien spacecraft to lost continents to wormholes to freak geo-magnetic anomalies have been proffered on various occasions. It makes for very captivating entertainment tropes.

However, the most sensible explanation seems to be, simply a matter of statistics. The area is just a very, very busy place, with a large number of shipping lanes and air routes passing through it, and misfortunes within it are bound to happen every once in a while.

Shit happens... what can you do?

When put that way, the whole thing just becomes, well... ordinary. The glamour of the unsolved mystery vanishes with its solution.

After much contemplation of my inability to finish the Mumbai Marathon this past Sunday, I am thinking that I have been, to coin a phrase, ‘Bermuda-Triangled’.

Here’s what happened.

Since August 2015, I have been fortunate to have had a series of satisfying races... two good half-marathons at Hyderabad, one at Goa, another two at Delhi and a great marathon at Dubai.

In spite of a few minor molehill-sized bumps in the training progression (which I never fail to make mountains of) I have had little to whine about in the scheme of things.

The more things went well, the more the chances of things not going well crept up through the ranks, from possibility to probability to certainty. Buoyed up by a good-ish ADHM in November and blissfully ignorant of odds stacking up against me, I continued through some fairly haphazard and inconsistent training as race day approached.

In all honesty, I don’t recall what possessed me to even register for this one in the first place. With Boston looming in April, a January marathon leaves no window for a proper cycle of recovery, build-up, training and taper...

But register I did, and that figuratively placed the RMS Titanic at Southampton, on course for a jolly rendezvous with a certain innocent-looking iceberg.

I landed up in Mumbai with the usual concerns... training, nutrition, conditions, the Trump presidency, real estate prices, the depletion of the ozone layer... all credible excuses for a bad race were rehearsed to perfection.

But there are no excuses that can cater for what seemed to be a ton of wet bricks to the head, three-fourths of the way into the race.

Pain and fatigue aren’t strangers to distance runners. Running with and through them... that’s what we do...

This time, however, I couldn’t even take fifteen minutes of it.

I started conservatively, took my gels, stayed hydrated... did pretty much everything right. In spite of being spot on target pace for a 3:10 finish until just before the thirtieth kilometer, I sank without a struggle by the thirty-third. In that short duration, not once did it occur to me to man the fuck up and dig in.

Off came the bib. I thumbed a scooter ride from a good Samaritan and reached the finish in a fantastic time of 2:58.

It took many beers at multiple locations around the city over the course of the rest of the day to stop agonizing over the whys and the wherefores.

Much can be said after a DNF...

From a dismissive “Some days you just don’t feel it” to a long tirade of real and imagined reasons. The truth will lie somewhere between the extremes. To find it will, much like in the case of the Bermuda Triangle, remove the charm of the unsolved mystery. Sometimes it’s more fun not knowing.

All said, the experience taught me some profound technical, spiritual and moral lessons...

Haha. Just kidding. No it didn’t. I already know everything.