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.