Dud Week

An excellent mileage week was followed by a completely dud week - as with life, running is full of its ups and downs. Had travelled out of Bangalore for a couple of days and returned with an upset stomach due to which I was unable to run the whole week - that is - 7 days in which zero run mileage was logged. While I was down with the bad stomach for a couple of days I also realised that the motivation to get up in the morning and get out of the door has reduced considerably after the loss of my Garmin 305. Having got used to one for nearly 3 years , running is not the same without one. I did a 90 minutes run this morning after a break of 7 days and without a Garmin did not enjoy it much. Will be ordering a new unit from Amazon soon. Meanwhile, here is a picture of the dead and broken unit.

The one good achievement of this week is the purchase of Schwinn Searcher Sport - a hybrid cycle. Will be writing about my research on buying a cycle in Bangalore and also experience with this cycle in the enxt few weeks.

Momentum week with a bad ending

After a long while I managed a 55Km +  week with a 20Km  run with BHUKMP and Red Dragon runners on Saturday followed by a 18Km solo in  EGL. Add to this 12Kms of cycling and two strengthening sessions at Manipal hospital department of sports and excercise medicine. This is the highest mileage in a non marathon week in a long time. While the next event is the Sunfeast world 10K 2010 it was important for me do a high mileage week after a break of nearly two months after the Strides of hope. I also decided to resume strenght training again after a break of 2 months. While I have found it quite comfortable to do a 2 hour 20K run (have even managed a few 50 minutes 10Km solo runs recently) I found strength training to be much more challenging. Even though I re-started the excercises with weights of less than 15-20 pounds it has been a struggle to do sets of 2 minutes on most machines. Hopefully next week should be better from strength training perspective. Of course, next week will be a low mileage week running-wise as I am travelling to Chennai for a couple fo days for a wedding and I do not plan to run there.

A decent week was ruined with my Garmin 305 dying this morning. I have been having trouble with the buttons that change the display pages for the last few weeks. One of the buttons stopped working and the other has gradually worn out completely. As a result I have been unable to change the display to the page with the average pace which is my favourite parameter when I am targeting specific finish times. So I tinkered a bit with it this morning after the run and the power went off on the device and now I am unable to power it on again. Am extremely sad about this as for the last three years I have been so used to running with the Garmin that I felt quite lost whenever I had to run without one. I am going to try and get the device fixed in a local watch repair shop. However, if that does not work out then I will have to order a new device soon. I am not sure what the average life of the Garmin 305 is or should be. I have used my device for over 5400Km of running and 1600Km since July 2007.

2nd Science and Technology Run

Due to work related travel  I could not participate in the 1st edition of the Science and Technology run(http://www.sntrun.org/)  at IISc in 2009 though I had registered for it. So I was eagerly looking forward to this year's edition on 11th April - to go back and run a 10Km in the beautiful campus of my alma mater. To relive my early days of running for it is in this campus 30 years ago that I first started jogging. This year my son Rahul also decided to run this. He was prepared to run the fun 5K in this event. However, when we reached the venue around 7am we realised that I had registered him for a 10K instead of 5K. The longest he had run before was 5.7K as part of the Majja run in Sunfeast World 10K 2009. Recently he had done 4Km as start of  his training for the Sunfeast World 10K 2010.  He decided to run/walk and do as much as possible.

I left home around 620am with Rahul and Adam. Space for four wheeler parking was provided in the gymkhana grounds. Met Athreya and Reena at the parking lot. We took the overbridge to cross the main road and enter the main campus and walked over to the main building area with the statue of JRD Tata to collect our bibs. There were quite a few familiar runners from RFL there. The bib collection process was quite smooth and all runners were also given a cap and a T-shirt. Adam and I decided to warm up by running back to the parking lot to put the T-shirts in the car.

All runners moved to the starting line around 7:35 am and after a wait of nearly 10 minutes there the race was flagged off. There were probably around 500 runners for the 10K. I decided to try and keep a steady pace and target a below 50 minutes run. Ran the first 3 Kms or so with Nari at about 4:45 minutes per Km pace. The route was wonderful with fair amount of green cover. However it was quite a warm morning and soon the pace started to drop. However, I managed to keep the pace just around an average of 5 mins per Km. There were'nt any Km markers along the way. The route seemed to take a criss-cross path and if it were'nt for volunteers at vantage points the chances of taking a wrong turn was quite high.

Most of the route was on the road ; however there was a good trail section as well. There were water points every few Kms. While my intent was not to stop at the water points in the first half of the race the ehat got to me and I had to stop at least at every alternate water station.

When my Garmin showed just about 8Kms and I was looking to sprint after about 1.5Km I suddenly realised that the finish point was a few hundred meters away. Therefore I accelerated and finished in about 43 and a half minutes with my Garmin showing a little over 8.5Km. Athreya and Adam had finished a few minutes earlier. It was quite disappointing that the route fell short by nearly 1.5Km. When I spoke to the organiser he said that the route was marked for 10Kms and I must have missed a turn somewhere. That seemed unlikely as all runners I spoke to concurred that the route was well short of 10Km. See here for a discussion on this.

After cooling off a bit I walked to the T-intersection in order to join Rahul for his finish. After a few minutes he came by and I did a run/walk with him for a little over a Km to help him finish his longest distance ever.

Considering that he was mentally prepared to run only 5Km in this event this was a great achievement. As we were leaving the 5Km run was starting. We returned home by about 10am quite satisfied with the event despite the route being shorter than 10Km.