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.

The Long Run Anthem.

Yo DJ.

Drop that beat now.

Doomchickachickadoom

Doomchickadoom

Y’all ready to cringe?

Well, you clicked the right hyperlink!

THE LONG RUN ANTHEM. 

Christmas morning, I step out,

Wearing just my sexy pout,

(Also shoes, and shorts, and hat)

To put the Tiger in the Cat

The second mile is fun, and how!

In this mile I chase a cow.

At Mile 4, some dogs chase me,

There are many dogs (Well...three)

There ain’t much to see in 6,

Except this ugly pile of bricks.

8 Mile, I pause and think, “Ahem!

I’ll make like rapper Eminem,

As I run, to pass the time, 

I will make a horrid rhyme.”

Then, Mile 10, I turn around,

Out-and-back, so homeward bound.

12 and 13 really suck,

And I swear it’s cold as...um... a frozen duck.

When I reach Mile ten-plus-four,

Everybody walk the dinosaur,

16 went by, really slow,

By now, I was hungry, bro,

18, 19 come and go,

I’m like, “Gosh darn it! One mo’!”

20 miles in snow and slush,

All my muscles turned to mush,

Happily I stagger home,

To show for it, I have this...pome.

*Crowd goes wild.

Mirror, Mirror...

I read somewhere that speaking in obscure metaphors makes you sound smarter. So, well...

I think that the function of a race in the life of an amateur athlete is effectively that of a mirror.

When I say that, you may think I’m referring to a mirror's ability to reflect the truth. I’m actually being clever and referring to the exact opposite. A mirror will reflect one’s outlook, more than one’s look. Even the average cave troll sees good things when he stands in front of a mirror with optimism and hope in his malformed heart.  

Either way, I always see a greek god. Go figure.

Race results are reflections of training effort. They are what they are, but we can choose how we see them. In races, with exceptions, most of us step up to the start line knowing that we’re not going to actually win anything, in the generally accepted sense of the word ‘win’.

This puts us at an advantage, because it allows us to define our victories for ourselves. Hell, it allows us to pretty much take obvious, utter disappointment, shrug our shoulders, and shout “Success!”

I like to think that I have, after four years of relentlessly using the above method, become somewhat of an expert at self-delusion.

Yesterday, I ran the Airtel Delhi Half Marathon in a time of 01:23:55.

On the plus side, unless my math is wrong (as it often is), this is 01 minute and 44 seconds faster than my previous personal best of 01:25:39.

On the other hand...I am also aware that this is 03 minutes and 55 seconds slower than my preposterous primary goal of 1:20:00, besides being 02 minutes and 04 seconds slower than Ms Nell McAndrew’s time over the same distance. I am aware that I may be quite close to the last PR I will ever clock. Progressively faster race times have been coming to me with happy regularity so far, but this, too, shall pass. I am aware that I was unable to summon the resolve to train as well as I wanted to, this time.

Still, I call it a resounding win. It’s not, I know! It’s ambiguous at best. But good luck trying to sell me on that :P

What I choose to see, is that I ran my heart out.

That I ran among good people.

That I ran in a city that looked beautiful in the morning, on a road that felt like a friend. 

That I asked my body for more, and it gave me more than I asked for.

That there was flow and pain and joy and rage and doubt and euphoria.

And that, at the end, I felt like a goddamn prince.

If you choose, that is what victory will look like, no matter what the numbers on the clock say.

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 :)

Post Mortem.

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.

The Magic Wand.

After I wrote my last blog post, I took this A4 paper, drew a 7x4 grid on it and penciled in a months worth of runs and workouts, working up a gradual mileage progression , and peppering it with core-work and general strengthening.

Then I pinned it to a wall, and proceeded to cross it out, day by day, as I worked through it.  

This level of OCD, of course, is a choice. It’s by no means necessary to train as per a schedule... But if you do want to stick to a program and are having trouble, I highly recommend having it, in tangible form, stuck to a place where you can’t miss it.

Works like a magic wand for me.

Today, it’s nine weeks to race-day at the Bangalore TCS 10k and I’m feeling primed to train. To make sure I take this seriously, I have already planned my leave from work, booked my flights and arranged my accommodation. Registrations open in a couple of days.

I’m committed. Time to choose my wand. 

Those of you who have run marathons or more will agree with me... the 10k isn’t exactly an intimidating distance. It’s a weekday run, something you do when you must go to the office afterwards. For people getting into distance running, the 10k is just the first step, when you cross over into a two-digits and just about start considering a half-marathon as ‘do-able’.

There’s not much of an aura surrounding 10k races, despite it being an awfully accessible distance.

A ‘10k’ refers to the road race, btw... when you call it ‘10,000m’ it refers to the same distance on a stadium track.

Did you know that Paula Radcliffe, the 16-year standing women’s world record holder for the marathon, is also the 16-year standing women’s world record holder for the 10k (30:21)?

By contrast, the men seem to be specialists, with the 10k world record  holder (26:44), Kenya’s Leonard Komon being a relatively slow (2:14:25) marathoner, and Dennis Kimetto, the 2:02:57 world record marathoner, being a relatively slow (28:30) 10,000m racer. Kimetto has run faster 10k splits as a part of his best half, actually, but he just hasn’t raced that specific distance since 2011.

What does it all mean? Meh...nothing, I’m sure. Just some hogwash I dug up while fretfully researching 10k training.

As someone who has only ever focused on marathons, and suddenly decides to go all out for a 10k, I’m sure my disquiet is understandable.

But I digress...

This coach fellow called Greg McMillan has come up with THIS voodoo...

For those of you who are too damn cool to be clicking hyperlinks, the crux is, I quote...

“If you can perform three 2-mile repeats at your goal 10K pace in the last one to two weeks before your race, you will achieve your goal time. Period.”

Notice the patent finality in that. Period, he says, quite unnecessarily. It doesn’t seem that far-fetched an assumption.

Well, he charges a 100 dollars for an eight-week customized training plan. If you’re on Strava Premium (you rich person, you...) and choose to follow a training plan there, you’ll get one by him.

So, I’ll presume he knows his shit.

I’ve built my schedule out of modest mileages around a core of McMillan speedwork. That makes it sound so much like a wand from the Harry Potter books (rosewood with dragon heartstring core, anyone?)... which is appropriate, considering that I’ll probably need some sorcery (there’s a citius spell, maybe?) to be able to get to my stated target in the first attempt.

Mondays and Fridays will be moderate effort/ tempo days. Unlike marathons, where the goal pace is the tempo pace, loosely speaking, here it’s about 50 seconds per km faster. Nevertheless, even in a 10k, roughly 80 percent of the effort remains aerobic, so it’s prudent to have these runs in the mix.

Tuesdays and Thursdays will be short recovery runs, where I will make like a snail and recover for/from...

...Wednesdays, which have been designated as McMillan days. This is where I build up over nine weeks to the 3x2-mile repeats.

Ideally, I should be doing Wednesdays on a Quidditch pitch, or maybe a track... neither of which I have access to.

Here, I have just one, very small flat space near where I live, and I’ll have to run in 200-meter circles every Wednesday for the next 9 weeks.

Not my favorite type of run.

There is some overdistance, but not much. No ‘long’ runs. Nothing over 10 miles, that is. Saturdays will see me get in the longest run of the week at varying efforts, but I want to keep the big picture in mind. This may be a target race, but the training is still a part of a year long build-up in mileage. There’s no hurry. This plan will peak at a 60k week.

The sched is here, if you want to take a look. It goes up on the wall today. 

TCS 10k Training Plan 

Postscript:- Opinions are welcome, especially if you’re a magical coach-like creature who’s feeling generous enough not to charge me an arm and a leg for advice...

I don’t bloody own Gringotts.