Third Half Marathon - Auroville Half

(This is before the race and I promise I did not drink 10 beers before this)

I apologize for not posting more often for the last one week. I have been travelling and work is starting to get a little hectic (finally!!).

Auroville half-marathon happened last sunday. Excellent race, great people and some amazing food. Auroville itself is really gorgeous and the race course was similar to a jungle trail. I also happened to meet two extremely pretty women who work in the microfinance and are passionate about running. One of them shares my favorite dish too - thair satham or curd rice. It was such a relief to meet people outside of work finally. Personally, I was unhappy with my timing but I have a reason again. I lost my way on the course and had to do about 3 extra kilometers. The real reason is I did not train hard enough and ended up doing a 2 hour and 14 minute run. Aaah well, the Singapore marathon is far away and a marathon runner only peaks when he is 35.

Thinking about age, my happiest years will possibly be when I am 35 to 37 and ofcourse when I am 42 years and 195 days old. I really hope to do a full marathon in less than 4 hours by then.

The next target is the Bangalore midnight marathon slated for April 19, 2008.

I am off to Bangalore tonight for a concert called Fireflies 2008 which is dubbed as the Indian woodstock.

Local running events

The local marathon season is kicking off with Chennai marathon happening on Feb 10th and Auroville marathon happening on Feb 17th. I am running the half marathon event in both these races but have not decided where I will be competing. If you are in Chennai on Feb 10, please come out there and support.

Auroville Half Mary

The Auroville half mary is coming up on Feb 16 and 37 folks + from Chennai runners are planning to participate in the event.

I have not been training for this event exclusively. The main problem is I cannot motivate myself to wake up early in the morning just to run. Most nights are spent watching oscar nominations from a pirated cd hub that I discovered close to home.

However, I put in 1 hour runs in the evenings after work and spend 20 minutes stretching/strengthening after. So, despite not training exclusively for the event, I am putting in my speed work, lsd's and the required mileage everyday. I also maintain a healthy diet intake with some recessions once a week where I consume about 5 litres of beer in less than 2 and a half hours. I call this living a balanced lifestyle.

The plan this week is to get a two hour run this evening, a 40 minute run tomorrow morning and another 2 hour run on saturday. The boys are coming down on saturday night and i would not recover from that high intensity speed workout with a combination of LSD before sunday evening. Most sunday morning will be spent toggling between espn, star sports, ss music and discovery channel with spurts of passing out on my couch.