Hyderabad Blues

     I don’t know if this has ever happened to you, but sometimes I find myself a bit lost while, say, driving somewhere. I'll be navigating by some vague instinct-based compass and turn into a strange street that I don’t remember, on a route I thought I knew well. And I’m all like, Hold up...wtf? This can’t be right...

     But that compass inside me is still working, and while I’m a bit tentative as I continue driving, I’m thinking, Okay, if I just take this right over here, and then a left somewhere up ahead, I should be getting somewhere near such-and-such.

     And so, while my wife is generally facepalming and rolling her eyes at my insistence that I know exactly where I am (I don’t) and I don’t need to stop and ask for directions (I do), I stubbornly take that right. 

     Stoic calm never leaves my face, but my heart soars as, sure enough, there is a left turn where I have prayed it should be. And when I take that left, I’m back, baby! There’s a familiar landmark right there, not quite where I thought it was, but close enough. I grin smugly at my wife. She, in her infinite wisdom, facepalms and rolls her eyes again.

 

     I may not be precisely where I want to be, but it's a relief at least I’m not lost anymore.

     That’s an accurate, if preposterously roundabout way of describing how I was feeling this last Sunday when I took that last left turn into the Gachibowli Stadium at Hyderabad and stepped over the finish line, an hour, thirty minutes and fifty nine seconds after I had stepped over the start line 21.1 kilometers away.

     If you have read my last blog post (which is, I assure you, even more dull than this one), you will know that I had been having a bit of a crisis of confidence, and had thus traveled across the country, third year in a row, to race at Hyderabad, looking for redemption. I hadn’t trained for the race, specifically, though I did manage to get some good mileage in during the past few weeks.

     Hyderabad was a test. And I am chuffed to be able to confirm that I passed with something like bunny-hopping, if not exactly flying colors.

     I would have loved to break the 90 minute barrier in a race where my previous best was 01:35:44, and indeed, there were times during the race when I thought I would finish in about 1:28-ish. But that turned out to be an illusion caused by the kilometer markers on the road not quite matching up with my Garmin by around half a click. The route as a whole, however, was accurately measured, and as a result the last kilometer just seemed to go on and on and on...

     Post race, I shoveled a ton and a half of sweet, sweet halwa into myself and I meditated on the race as I mingled with the great crowd of runners, friends and strangers, who had braved the undulations of the course.

     It had been warm, humid and hilly, as promised by the race tag-line ‘India’s toughest city marathon’. Thankfully, it had remained overcast, so that was something. 

     Also, probably unintentionally, I don’t think I raced at my absolute best effort. I don’t remember feeling the intense discomfort that a full-out race entails. Yes... in hindsight, I think I could have run this one a couple of minutes faster. Pfft.

     Still, I can take an extensive amount of comfort in the fact that I am, as of August 2016, faster by just a hair’s breadth short of five minutes over the half marathon distance, than I was in August 2015.

  

     I have definitely not (yet), as I have feared, hit a plateau.

     Yay.

     This makes an 80-minute half in mid-November Delhi conditions an achievable goal, in dogged pursuit of which I will throw myself with effect from next week. I will be periodizing my training expressly for ADHM, as opposed to last year, when I ran it as a tune-up for my BQ full at Dubai. I would be mighty thrilled just to get to Nell McAndrew's 1:21:51, but hey, in the words of Lois McMaster Bujold (by whom I have read nothing...)

              "Aim high. You may still miss the target, but at least you won't shoot your foot off."

     I will be running a couple of easy halfs in Delhi when I’m there in September. In the Dwarka Half Marathon, I’m looking forward, for the first time, to pacing. I’ll be driving the 1:45 bus. Let's see how that works out.

      

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 :)