Decision to run

Evening of 12th March 2012, I decided to run Corbett Half Marathon:
Yeah I know this is not any special decision as thousands of people run marathons across the world.  So what's the big deal that I am writing about it.  It's the fact that the half marathon is on 7th April i.e. 25 days away and I hardly run at all.  I have never ran more than 8 Km and that too only thrice in my lifetime (twice in 2009 and once earlier this year) and my last jogging was more than a month ago.  The only solace was that overall I was fit and fine.  So, I had to start my training and I started with running 5 Km on 13th March which led to cramps all over.  Then next day I pushed myself to do some squats and Romanian dead lifts because I needed strong legs.  The result was that I couldn't walk for next two days.  I was wondering if I have been too insane to accept this challenge.  Let me tell you why I accepted this challenge at first place. Megha (my wife) is the inspiration and the one who pushed me to do this.


I always thought that running was the most boring thing to do and if I want to be physically fit then I can always play other sports.  When Megha decided to run Chicago Half Marathon in 2009, I joked that it doesn't make sense to pay and run. I meant that if one has to do this boring activity then just do it but why to pay for it :).  That too when it's not about winning the race but just participating for the sake of it.  Of course she ran and also raised $1000 plus for charity while doing so.  Megha actually had never run in her life till Mid 2008 and started jogging on treadmill once in a while for 2-3 miles sometime in second half of 2008.  Then 4 months before marathon in 2009 she started training for half marathon however due to her travel to India she couldn't run or exercise at all for a month and restarted her training only 3-4 weeks before the Chicago Half Marathon.  Megha told me that when she can do it then I am in much better shape to do it and she had full confidence that I would do it.

So here I was trying to train for Half Marathon in 3 weeks. Sounds crazy, I agree. I went for another 5 km run on 17th and that day the pain was not that bad.  Next day was for little cycling to cross train.  Then I raised the bar and did 8km on 19th March, 14 Km on 22nd March and 18.5 Km on 25th March.  Every time at the end of the race it felt as if that was the last mile and I couldn't have gone any further.  The day after the run used to be bad with pain all over and in every part of the body.  While I tried to cross train rest of the days but I know the training has not been very effective because I had too many rest days in between with no physical activity at all.

Some runner during the week told me that we should not increase more than 10% distance every week. Of course I didn't have a choice.  The last run gave me confidence that I will be able to manage 21 Km but the biggest fear is the unknown - what if I had cramps in middle of the run?

The half marathon is in another 4 days and I am looking forward to see what happens on the day.  Hope to write again with some positive news.