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.

A Slippery Slope.

It has been, I’m sad to say, a fortnight-and-a-half of unbridled debauchery.

The demon on my left shoulder has been telling me that I deserve it, after a good race.

The demon isn’t entirely wrong, I suppose. That’s why the cherub on my right shoulder has been watching silently, with an amused, tolerant air, as I have tumbled into hedonistic hell...

Mighty rivers of alcoholic beverages have been consumed. Things have been eaten by the bushel... fried, oily things...smooth, buttery things, and, so help me God, sweet, syrupy, sugary things. Naps have been taken instead of trips to the gym. Runs have been cut short, slowed down... even cancelled, guiltlessly, in the name of recovery and reward.

The weather here in the mountains makes it easy, when you’re snugly ensconced next to a blazing heater, in a warm, soft quilt while the snow floats down outside...

This is a slippery slope. 

It’s tempting to start down it, and so easy to just keep going. And there comes a point on this slope when you’re so far down, you just don’t want to climb back up.

What I need, to arrest my descent, is a race.

My three-year quest to catch up with Ms Nell McAndrew in a marathon is, in my mind, less of a target right now, and more of a guiding principle. I think I will find it easier, psychologically speaking, to return to a regular running routine if I have something impending.

However, I don’t want to amp up my training volume just yet. You see, I have been retro/introspecting. I clearly made a boo-boo in the last training cycle, and as a result nearly burned out a month before my marathon. It all worked out, sure, but I would be remiss to not learn from it.

What was the boo-boo? An inadequate base for heavy mileage. To avoid that, I want to take a whole year to build back up to regular 80-90 kilometer weeks...very, very slowly...before I get into a 12/14-week training program for Boston 2017 and try to break the 3-hour mark there.

That’s pretty far in the future, of course, so what can I do with low mileages right now?

Obviously, a shorter race.

Luckily, there’s one on 15^th May. The TCS 10k in Bengaluru. It’s a good event, I’ve heard. AIMS ratified and everything. The weather, though warm on the whole, is okay-ish in the morning.

And it’ll give me a chance to take a first stab at Nell’s 10k time.

I’ve only ever raced the 10k distance twice before, and my best 10k time of 39:14 is part of a half-marathon. I need to slash 2 minutes and 18 seconds off that time to get to her 36:54. The pace needed is about 3:41 per kilometer (that is scary!)

On the face of it, hey, I just ran more than 25 minutes off my previous best marathon time, so 2 minutes off a 10k should be cake, right?

Wrong. The 10k is a different animal.

The shorter the race, the more the importance of speed vis-à-vis endurance. I’ve just spent a good six months with speed as a lower priority while I built up endurance. Now, the shoe needs to be on the badly-mixed-metaphorical tables which are turned on the other foot... (Let's just pretend I never tried to be funny here, okay?)

I know I’ll have to fight like hell for every second I want to cut.

Le internets seems to be chock-full of 10k training plans. 8 weeks seems to be the norm, so I need to start on one by mid-March.

That gives me a little more than a month to back my wretched butt up the slippery slope that I’m on. Enough is enough. I will lace up and go run... today!

...ah, screw it. I’ll start on Monday...

Chasing Nell.

That is Brit glamour model Nell McAndrew.

She's been on the pages of Playboy, Maxim and FHM ...all publications that I have ever only read for...you know, the articles. Honest.

We'll get back to her in a bit...

Apparently there is an actual thing called ‘post-race depression’.

I’ve raced prolifically over the past few years and have never experienced this mind-numbing gloom that seems to follow the immediate euphoria after a successful race, and it may have something to do with the fact that I’ve never had a truly successful race.

Though I have slowly managed to get faster, my method seems to mostly involve missing my time goals.

Until I qualified for the Boston Marathon, a week ago...

Now, I had been explicitly chasing that goal for two years. As a runner, that was the beacon that clearly determined the direction of my efforts. The first time that I failed, I barely broke stride as I prepared for my next shot at it.

‘At least I don’t have to bother figuring out new goals...’, I remember thinking, in my charming, wry fashion.

For all the bad things that you may say about failure, one positive that comes out of it is that it leaves your target intact.

But what do you do after you have done what you set out to do?

In the movies, end-credits roll, and an imaginary universe ceases to exist. In fairy tales, the narrator uses the cursory ‘happily ever after’ device.

But as we all know, the thing about real life is that it goes on. ‘What next’ is an ever-present question, looming over our endeavors. Hence, I think it's sensible to have subsequent goals lined up beyond the immediate ones, failing which efforts tend to become uninspired, lost...

...purposeless.

Allow me to quote the Agent Smith clones (those guys are seriously cool,no?) from The Matrix Reloaded (2003)...

“It is purpose that created us, purpose that connects us, purpose that pulls us, that guides us, that drives us. It is purpose that defines us...”

So if I call myself a runner, what, after this, is my purpose?

Luckily, until the inevitability of age starts eroding my running capabilities, that can always be answered in the form of xx:yy:zz. The quest for the next PR.

But while a PR, in itself, is a nice thing to aim for, it is a bit vague to hold my interest. Will it be worth it to train for an year, just to improve my time by maybe a few minutes? Nah.

The first thing that I thought of was a sub-3 hour marathon. Yes, definitely a worthy goal, but still... indistinct and arbitrary, since there is no real significance appended to the time... It's just a neat-looking round figure. Also, with a truckload of luck, I feel this is something I just might be able to run in April 2017, in Boston. That's more than an year away, but it's not 'long-term' enough for me.

What I need, in order to escape the aforementioned blues, therefore, is something more engaging, outrageous... glamorous...

And that, obviously, brings us back to Nell McAndrew.

Let me explain...

Have you seen this Wikipedia list of non-professional Marathon runners ?

That, right there, is a treasure of interesting goals to aim for.I see a lot of familiar names who have run some really good times.

Among the sub-3 crowd...

Lance Armstrong, the cyclist, with 2:46:43
Jenson Button from Formula 1 with 2:52:30
Erich Segal, the author, with 2:56:30
David Petraeus, controversial CIA Director with  2:50:53...
and Alan Turing, the pioneer of computer science, with 2:46:03...

Nell McAndrew’s name leaped out at me. The only woman on that list with a sub-3 PR. Where did I remember her from?

Flashback to the last century...In late 1999, when I was a snot-nosed young lieutenant, I once sat at a computer somewhere and out of curiosity, clicked an icon labelled ‘Tomb Raider III’. Over the next few hours, I confess that I became hopelessly infatuated with the voluptuous video-game archeologist-adventurer, Lady Lara Croft.

Still am, a bit.

That was my introduction to computer games, and before I took up running, gaming was among my primary leisure activities.

Now over the years, many real-life models/actresses have actually donned the gunbelt and backpack of the character to promote the game franchise. In 1998, when Tomb Raider III was released, Nell McAndrew was the official Lara Croft. This little bit of inane information was something I came across in the chaotic ocean of the www. My brain, for whatever reason, stowed it away deep within my subconscious as I faithfully bought and played the subsequent Tomb Raider games.

Apparently, Ms McAndrew isn’t just another pretty face. The erstwhile Lady Croft is a consummate amateur athlete. She has run a 10k in 36:54 and a half-marathon in 1:21:51. In 2012, she ran London Marathon in an outstanding time of 2:54:39!

One would think that I had learnt my lesson about running after blonde women after being snubbed so mercilessly by one of them during SCMM 2015. But we runners are gluttons for punishment, I guess. So here goes...

In AD 2018 (or before...)

I shall equal (or better...)

Nell McAndrew's Marathon PR of 2:54:39.

Enroute to this goal, I also intend to take a shot at that half-marathon time, perchance, at ADHM 2016. It'll be interesting to see how I fare at a half after training specifically for it. So far all my half-marathons have been training runs or tune-up races on the way to goal marathons.

Other than that, I have very foggy plans for casual races this year. The Mukteshwar Half may happen for a second time. Cherrapunjee and/or Cochin seem likely. Plus whatever races I can run in Delhi/NCR when I'm here.

In the intervening period, Nell, please don’t run faster times...

This blog shall document my efforts.

I do promise, that as before, my writing shall be quite ghastly.