Am off work for 10 days in the last fortnight of the year in order to deplete my vacation balance to within allowable limit. I have met runners who do little running during their vacations and come back from their holiday saying 'I need to catch up with my training as I hardly ran the last ten days'. While its a challenge to get up early and run during vacations, I usually ensure that I run at least once in 3 days. This is important not only to keep the training momentum but also to offset the increase in calorie intake that is inevitable during a vacation. In any case one key factor that motivated to take up running as a habit is so that I can eat and drink without too much care. Also, I enjoy running in new places and being an addict am unable to stay off it even while on vacation.
The first part of this vacation was spent at the ancestral home in my birthplace Tiruchi(Tiruchirapalli or Trichinapoly). I am not a very religous guy(though a believer)- but Tiruchi, with numerous well known temples around it, brings out the religous instinct in me. During the four days there, we visited several magnificent temples: Ranganathaswamy temple in Srirangam, Samayapuram Mariamman Temple , Thiruvanaikaval Shiva temple, Rockfort Ganesha temple, Vayalur Murugan temple and the Brihadishwara temple in Tanjavur. Despite some of these temples being very crowded I enjoyed their architecural and cultural ambience. We also visited Saraswati Mahal Library in Tanjavur - one among the few medieval libraries existing in the world. This library has palm leaf based manuscripts written by my forefathers.
At the same time I also managed two decent runs of 10.5Km and 9Km respectively starting around 630am. The roads in the Tennur area, Sivaprakasa road and Sastry road, were broad and traffic light. The weather was moderate - by Tiruchi standards it was winter with a morning low of around 20 Celsius. Surprisingly I saw very few walkers or joggers on the streets and there were hardly any stray dogs around. Did see lots of goats wandering around in the roads. I capped the week with a nice 24Km/2hrs 26 minutes run as part of the RFL run in EGL on 28th December clocking a total of 44Km for the week. Despite this, I have put on a couple of Kilos since the last marathon few weeks ago - I guess the calorie intake (specially in the form of fried stuff and desserts) has been greater than the expenditure.
Am looking forward to the last run of the year on 30th morning and then starting the New Year with a nice long (25Km+ ) run before gettting back to work.
