I anticipate having a knee problem in the future
I ran 18km this morning and it feels great. I wanted to do 20 but that would have been an excessive gain (60%) since the last run. At the end of it, I am not mentally or physically exhausted, but my right knee does feel fatigued.
Origin of the problem with my right knee can be traced back to 2003 when I biked 650km from Goa to Mumbai without adequate preparation for or knowledge of long distance cycling. So now whenever I bicycle for few hours or run more than 10km, my right knee starts hurting a little bit. The pain is not excruciating, but is significant and recurring enough to warrant a checkup. It’s obviously worse when running on asphalt or concrete v/s grass or dirt.
When I get health benefits at through my job, I will get this checked and treated. Because I do want to run the marathon next year and hopefully qualify for the Boston Marathon in next 3 years.
So now that the half-marathon is only 2 weeks away, I should accept 18km as my peak distance and slow down over the next 2 weeks. I am thinking of 4 more runs in next 15 days – 12km, 10km, 8km and 3km.
Now my thoughts are moving to race day nutrition, clothing, etc.
Distance running is quite solitary and its important to keep one from getting bored
I was supposed to run 15km today but I got bored after 10km and returned home after 12.5km (1.25 hours at a speed of 10kmph). I won’t to go into excuses (okay, it was the same old route, the weather was colder and there were no interesting sights on the way) but I realised that I have to find something to entertain myself on these runs.
I imagine that conditions on the marathon day would be quite different. I am picturing cheering crowds, lots of fellow runners, water stations, random entertainment and a completely new route to explore. That itself would give one enough drive. But what about practise sessions?
In the initial days, I used to listed to music, and it made it quite easy to focus one’s mind on something. But then I am not going to sport an ipod on the race day so I decided to practise without it.
But what the heck do I do when I am running? How to keep my brain engaged?
I try doing various things. For example:
- I pay attention to the Canada geese that have currently taken over the lake shore. I check out their grazing habits, their droppings, their calls and their flight. Today there were lots of other birds too, flying in V shaped formation. It was nice.
- I do lot of math games. For example multiplying three digit numbers (348×851), converting Celsius to Fahrenheit (don’t ask me why), calculating the numerical value of a word (e.g. “run” = 18+21+14=53) and
nerdystuff like that. - People are also my beloved objects of study. There are so many things once can observe – some of them can be quite amusing.
- I daydream about travel, imagine myself in random situations and think of what I would do, etc. I also spend time contemplating about life.
- Ofcourse, I am regularly paying attention to my running – spine posture, shoulders, angle of my hands, feet pronation, point and angle of contact with ground, stride, breathing, hydration, etc. These factors are enough to keep one busy for a while.
But it seems that all that is still not enough to sustain my attention. Math exercises can be so taxing that it sometimes makes me pause or slow down in order to finish a critical calculation… haha! I have discovered that the easiest part of my run is when I don’t have to focus on it.
So for now, I have decided that for the next run, I am going to choose a different route. Hopefully that will keep my mind busy and I wont get bored. Its just a matter of another 20 days, or 4-5 runs.
Slowly but surely getting there!
So its been a while since I updated the blog regarding my half-marathon training. I was pleasantly surprised that people were enquiring about it offline since they didn’t see any updates on the blog. How nice is that?
For the last 3 weeks I have been religiously following a training plan and that’s good news because the plan seems to have changed every other week in the past. I go to the gym five days a week at 7:30 for an hour, whether to run on the treadmill or do some yoga or ‘pump iron’ as they call it. As a result I am feeling much more confident about my preparation for the race day.
Last weekend I ran on a 10km route at 10kmph and was pleasantly surprised to note how fast my body recovered. Not only was I fully functional that day, but I felt that my muscles were back to usual within 36 hours. This is significant progress from where I started. In other words, I’m in the “normal” performance range now.
I had reached the 8km milestone on July 28. One might wonder what I had been doing for the past 8 weeks. Well, my training did slow down due to social commitment. However, I worked on improving stamina, recovery time and most importantly the speed.
This weekend I am going to run 15km in the morning at a speed of at 10kmph. I have to get used to outdoor conditions since my race is going to be at 8:00, and the season is changing quite a lot.
And for those of you who missed the previous update on shoes, I settled for Asics. They are a nice pair and, being brand new, I treat them quite delicately. 
Finally settled on a training regime that seems to work.
I’ve been struggling, for almost a month now, with the training schedules. It never seems to work because being summer, there is always something else (more fun) to do, viz camping, street festivals, cycling or family/friend visits. So after factoring all those unpredictable clauses, I think I was able to arrive at a training schedule that has a good potential to work.
Monday: Afternoon/Evening – 2 hours in gym. Right now I am at 8 km, but I plan to increase this to 15 km in 4 weeks.
Tuesday: Morning – Yoga, rest
Wednesday: Evening – 2 hours with the running group. Last time I barely did 6 km, it has to increase.
Thursday: Morning – Yoga, rest
Friday: Afternoon – 1 hour in gym for 8 km
Saturday and Sunday: Rest
The goal is to clock 25-30 km each week for the next 3 weeks, and then increase it to 35 km.
I already had my yoga class this morning. Its a new gym and a new 7am class, probably that may explain why I was the only one today.
I am away camping for the next four days. It is a long weekend here and I took another day off to go for a 4 day remote hike in the woods. It is a 35-km loop in Algonquin Provincial Park and we will be pitching our tents somewhere along the way. It should be fun… my backpack is quite heavy, with 4 days of supplies…
Here are some pictures from the park from my trip back in 2007.
Photo Gallery – Algonquin Provincial Park
…is not the same as running in a gym.. duh!
While gym training is useful to build endurance and train regardless of the weather conditions, it’s no match for training outdoors. Last night, I ran with a group of marathoners and one could easily tell the novice in the pack.
My score last night was 5.7km in 45 minutes. At the end of it, I was exhausted while others were acting as if they just got back from a casual stroll in the park. This just shows how much I have to do in next 80 days.
The weather was funny too. It was dry for the first 10 minutes. Then it started to drizzle a bit, followed by some thunder and lightning and the last 15 minutes were fully wet. My t-shirt which was initially wet from my sweat, was now drenched in the rain. Being in downtown, it was kinda funny to navigate between puddles, avoid getting poked in the eye by people’s umbrellas and stay alert of people running across the footpath trying to find cover.
Today is going to be a rest day, which means nothing more than a total of 11.5km bike ride to and from work.
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