3rd and 4th days of running 2009
I’m being somewhat lazy in updating my runnings logs and thoughts, but here they are. I did 2 other runs in the week of 03/15 – 03/22. I did a loop of the Stanford dish, and a 7.5 mile run in SF. Wake up call. I need to start getting serious about my runs.
The 7.5 mile run in SF was with 2 other friends, and I was left panting at every half mile. They’d wait, let me pass by, and then overtake me and wait again. A gap of no runs has seriously reduced my endurance..
SF is awesome for running. I totally and completely love it. We ran on Embarcadero for a while, until it curves and meets Marina. The views are literally stunning. Running through the hordes of people on pier 39 is quite fun. On the way back though, we ran up a lot, and we were all really tired at the end of the day. Soon after, we went out partying 
.
Stanford dish remains one of my favoritest runs as well. My plan is actually to live for a month in SF, and see if I like it enough to move there. Its clearly a mecca for my running needs. Will I be able to put up with the moody weather there?
I tried to, but didn’t get into the Mount Washington Road Race. Now the big question is: should I register for the Pikes Peak Ascent and train like a madman? Pikes peak is much more gruesome and needs a really disciplined and tough training schedule. Should I pick up the gauntlet? Maybe I should register after I have shown by example that I deserve to register..
Day 2 of running, 2009
I did a short, but tiring run on Lake Anderson park yesterday. I had gone on a hike to big sur earlier in the week, so I wasn’t very high energy. The wind was particularly chilly.
I was thinking of 2 ideas/questions on this run:
1. How to do garbage collection in space. There is so much garbage(and growing) out there. How would one go about cleaning it up? Somehow pull them into the atmosphere and burn them up? Pack them in garbage bags and bring to Earth?
2. Maybe layoffs are a good thing in at least one sense, if you look at the bigger picture. The companies get to retain the best and most useful people, while the laidoff employees find jobs and work environments that are better suited for them? So Silicon valley would be like a soup, where companies and employees are each floating and they go and stick to one another, part, and then stick to someone else. Brownian motionish, with low frequency and high time lags..
When the economy picks up, good employment related websites should really pick speed!
Day 1 of running, 2009
Today I went running on the Anderson Lake Dam Park. I was almost dead and panting in the first quarter of a mile and began having serious doubts when I couldn’t even walk, much less run. But I kept up, and ended up doing 2 loops of the park . With many stops, but I ran as much as I could, and completed it. I’d call it a good start.
So today’s the first day of my running in 2009. Today’s also the last day before I begin my new job tomorrow. So its kind of symbolic, in a small way. Last year, after missing my pikes peak ascent due to illness, I was seriously unhappy. Add to that the unhappiness associated with a really nice girl dumping me, and you have 8 months of running-abstinence.
The amazing thing about the new company I’m joining is the people there. I interviewed there with about 10 people(yes!), and the thing that really struck me is the sheer intellectuality and coolness of the people. So even though I had about 7 other interviews in various stages(where’s the recession?), I had clearly fallen for this company.
Lake anderson is sheer beauty. It stretches for over 7 miles, I’m told. On a sunny weekend, its full of trucks and boats, but on a day like today, it was quiet. On the trail I saw only 1 family, thats it. Quiet, peaceful and serene.
The sun was setting as I finished my 2nd loop, and as I walked down the really steep trail to the picnic area and back home, the sky lit up red. Or the pale red, of sunset, that can make you peaceful. A fresh start is on the cards.
Enough is enough
For the past 2 days, I have been filled with outrage. Grief. Anger. People have been asking me if all is ok with my family. It’s not. It’s just a coincidence that none of my sisters or uncles or nephews was shot. What about the innocent Indians and foreigners who lost their sisters, fathers, kids? Why were they killed? Because they were at a railway station waiting for their trains? Or visiting India and staying at a hotel? Or because they were journalists waiting outside all night, trying to figure out what was going on inside a besieged, burning hotel with hundreds of people trapped inside?
As a nation, India seems to have an incredibly short memory. We keep getting attacked, and we keep forgetting it. That is good, in a way – we don’t let terrorists change our daily way of life. It’s also good for the government, whose incompetence in protecting the state is quickly forgotten. But what of innocent Indians who die? We let, by our government’s very inaction or lack of sufficient action, gruesome murders happen month after month, year after year. What was the Indian intelligence doing all this time? How did they have no idea that such an attack was impending? What is India, the “IT Superpower”, doing in terms of electronic surveillance of terrorists?
It looks to me like attacking India presents no more than a simple logistical problem to terrorists. They have been striking at random, whenever they wanted, wherever they wanted. Be it the Taj Mahal hotel, or the Victoria Terminus, or even the Indian parliament. They have struck successfully at all these locations, and many more. They have struck at weddings and killed scores of people. They have struck at pilgrims. They have attacked every conceivable target one could think of. What next?
Last night I saw PM Manmohan Singh reading from a pre-written speech condemning the attack. There was no ferocity, no anger in him. Just a subdued reading off a page. Where is the strong leader in him? A PhD is not enough to lead a country. What concrete steps has the defense minister decided to take to protect India? I’d like to know.
Think of your cousin, or your newborn daughter, or your elderly father, slaughtered by a terrorist tomorrow. Think of a prime minister mumbling from a paper. Think of a government so clueless that 9 hours after the attacks, “security forces on ground are still awaiting the arrival of NSG commandos”. Does the Indian Air Force have any planes? How many hours does it take to fly in from Delhi? Think of Maharashtra politicians whose priority is not to protect the state, but to ethnically cleanse it of “northeners”. Think of the NYC of India, being attacked over and over, and the state not being able to do anything about it.
The Indian public needs to know, whats happening? Whats being done to protect the country now? What has been done after the 93 blasts? What is the defense ministry going to do this time? We need answers.
Enough is enough.
13 – new horror movie
Devil works, a bunch of amateurs from ISM who made spectre, are back with 13. Nice job. Click here to go to their webpage to download the movie.
Back to running
After a brief haitus, during which I mostly ate delicious, unhealthy food, worked late and forgot running, I’m back.
Last Sunday, I went hiking with the MIT Club of Northern California, which was fun. I met a bunch of people, from teens to septugenarians, as one member puts it. The hike was to the Castle Rock State Park, just off skyline boulevard. Gorgeous views, and interesting chatter.
I was a little surprised to find my feet sore at the end of the day, because we had hiked only 6 miles with maybe 1000 feet of elevation gain. But then I haven’t been active for a little while and I guess thats the price to pay.
So in the coming days, there’ll be more blogging. I’m also thinking I might start one more blog, specifically focussed on development and technology and how simple things can be made better in developing countries. I have been thinking about that for a while and I guess the time has come to start it off. But before I actually write down the first blog post, I’m probably going to flesh out the details(in writing) of what I expect to blog about.
DP’s top 5
My top 5 list of technical books, of all time:
1. The C Programming Language, by Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie
2. Introduction To Probability, by Dimitri P. Bertsekas and John N. Tsitsiklis
3. Signals and Systems, by Alan V. Oppenheim, Alan S. Willsky, with S. Hamid
4. Introduction to Algorithms, by Thomas H. Cormen, Charles E. Leiserson, Ronald L. Rivest and Clifford Stein
5. Computer Organization and Design: The Hardware/Software Interface, by David A. Patterson and John L. Hennessy
iPhone blah blah..
I have been asked about the merits of buying an iPhone. Lets look at what’s bad with the iPhone:
1. Unlike blackberry, it has no physical keyboard. A friend thinks he might get RSI if he used the touchpad.
2. No bluetooth. Yes, you could use wireless(EDGE/3G/WiFi) to send stuff, or even plug the phone into a computer. But you don’t have the convenience of transferring photos from the phone to a computer in an Internet-less, cable-less environment, like a desert, right? (Actually I did see cellphone coverage while driving through Mojave desert last weekend. I was also taking pictures and uploading them to my facebook on the fly.) UPDATE: It has Bluetooth.
3. No office productivity tools such as word, excel, powerpoint yet. You can use google docs though.
4. No stylus(not that you need it..but), so someone who wants to write a grocery list can’t write it. Of course you could use Jott and just speak the list into the phone, which would then be transcribed into text(very accurately), or you could use any other of the tons of apps to record the list, but you won’t get the personal touch of seeing your handwriting on the grocery list.
Now whats good:
1. A software development platform that has allowed developers to quickly create applications and get paid for it. (Yes, I remember the frustrations of trying to build an application for an “advanced” Nokia phone, the N80. The API was almost laughable.) Applications are also really easy to install and use and pay(if its not one of the free apps). A lot of the apps are available for 99 cents. Thats not a typo!
The apps are amazing. If you doubt me, go try some. And then talk..
2. A UI and user experience that has none to match. Remember Motorola Razr? That super sleek phone that everyone bought because it was so pretty, for 400$! It was beautiful, with a UI that made people feel like shooting themselves or killing someone in frustration. My adviser reportedly threw it against his wall, or that was his wish..
The iPhone’s UI is amazing. With a good screen and pleasant design, reading on this screen is a pleasure. Tapping on an item is much more intuitive to me than taking a needle like stylus and poking the screen.
3. Location based services: the stuff of legend in the US research community is finally there in a product. I remember researchers beating their heads about why cellphones here didn’t have location based apps when it was so possible with existing technology. Well, Apple has pushed the carriers to allow that, and make money too. Marking a milestone for everyone, for consumers who can use a variety of new services, for the carriers who can make money from it, and from apple who has a growing market to innovate for and reap the profits.
4. I think its redundant to mention the sleekness of the iPhone, or its quick response UI, or its GPS capabilities, or the iPod that’s sitting inside. In my opinion, finally a cellphone is beginning to realise its capabilities in making life better, beyond email, SMS and phone calls.
So if you think about it, the iPhone is more of a ‘quality of life enricher’ phone, than a ‘raise the company’s bottomline’ phone. And I hope it stays and grows that way.
So to the critics of iPhone, let me say this. Consistency is a very fundamental human trait, as Robert Cialdini has famously discussed in Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. What this means is, if you get convinced by a convict to help him, you are going to defend him in discussions afterwards. Why? Because human nature is by default to be consistent with their past. So if you bought a certain phone(Razr), you’d most likely praise it when someone says something that challenges the phone’s capability. Because otherwise, it’d seem like you made a wrong decision and probably reflect poorly on you.
Sometimes a person who has a different phone reacts negatively(remember Hillary’s attack on Obama!) on hearing appreciation of the iPhone. 
Cialdini’s ‘consistency’ in action! Perhaps they start feeling that the implication is that their phone is bad, and they made a poor decision in buying it. I think thats a mistake. If you have a blackberry and are happy with it, stay with it. But attributing the iPhone’s popularity just to “good looks” and “crazy marketing campaigns” and “16 year olds’ fad” shows a lack of understanding of the subject in my opinion.
Which reminds me of a movie I saw recently that had a hot blonde who is an ambitious journalist. So someone happens to say to her: ‘hey, you are so lucky to be so beautiful’. And she says: ‘I don’t really know. When people look at me, they’re like: blonde, she must be stupid. And when I do something well, they say: oh, its not her work but her looks which are carrying her forth. So I never ever get credit or recognition for the work I do just because I am pretty’. I have seen some people talk about the iPhone similarly.
I have personally used the iPhone, the Nokia N80, Motorola Razr, the humble nokia 1100, and a huge motorola bricklike phone. I have borrowed friends’ blackberrys and palms and used them. For me personally, the iPhone is the best phone so far. And having entered the market, and brought out such a good product in a short time is a testimony to Apple and Steve Jobs. If I met Steve Jobs personally, I am unsure if I’d like him, because of his well known difficult personality, but he drives his company to great innovation, and thats what matters.
Competition
I don’t like competition. I have never been a big time competitor, and I have never enjoyed competing against others.
Inspiration is different. I was doing my usual hike on the Mission peak this morning and realized that I forgot to take my heart rate monitor or water. And I was thinking if I was overtaking enough people this morning. As I’ve said before, overtaking someone on an incline is a lot more fun than kissing a hot girl at a decline . But then I started stopping around and taking pictures with my new cool camera .
Well, I digress. The point is, when I’m inspired by something, which has happened a couple of times in my life, I have needed no competition or motivation. The inspiration itself is enough. Running well is an inspiration. Its enjoyable on the whole, though at times its painful. Thats what I should be focusing on, rather than worrying too much about how many old women I overtook.
Lemme flashback a bit. And forgive me for my overly academic obsessions. I used to be in a middle school where we usually had teachers come in for maybe 3 or 4 of the 7 periods everyday. They were not the best teachers in the country, but I realize now how utterly sincere they were and how hard they tried. Finishing the syllabus was never a priority. Making something understand was. But I was restless, seeking more. And so when I took the sainik school entrance, I cried on the bus on the way back. Crying is very unusual with me, because I usually just grit my teeth and decide to teach the difficulty a lesson. But this time I had worked really hard. Waking up at 4 am instead of 8 and studying before and after school. I had invested my life into it for a month, and I just couldn’t believe how badly I had done. I was passionate. I was obsessed. And I couldn’t accept I had failed.
Well it turned out differently. I was placed third, so I got in . Nice surprise. I cannot forget the feeling of accomplishment after I heard the news. I had tried really hard, thats why I loved it. I wouldn’t have enjoyed the success so much if I hadn’t been so inspired.
I took the JEE later in life. Actually getting into IIT wasn’t really so exciting, because I wanted to study astrophysics. Engineering held no charm for me. The exam did. The idea of clearing a really hard exam was just so inspiring. I had a lot of issues living in Delhi and getting sick almost every month from the unhygenic conditions, compared to the clean fresh environment I was used to. But in the last 4 months, I cranked up my gear and worked between 11-14 hours every single day. Essentially, I was studying throughout the day, like crazy. In the summer 45 celcius heat. I never regretted it. I never had second thoughts. I was inspired.
I had also concluded that 14 hours of work a day was my limit. I could somehow never push it to 15. And then I went to MIT, where I sometimes had 36 hours of nonstop work. Sitting on the same position on my bed programming and reprogramming over and over until it finally worked. I realized that the limits of humans are truly set only by their imagination. We’re far more capable than we ever think.
Coming back to the topic, I don’t think I needed motivation for any of these. Motivation is like saying: do this, so you can get that. Or, your life is wasted, if you don’t do this or that. I guess one needs motivation when one is trying to do something s/he isn’t really passionate about. Since it feels like a chore, you try to “motivate” yourself from time to time so that your productivity is acceptable and you feel ok. You’ll never feel the exhilaration of doing something awesome and exciting that way though. One has to follow the passionate path for that.
On pushing limits
As I was hiking up Mission peak this morning, an important realization came to me. After my marin headlands half marathon I had rested for a while before resuming running. My first run after that was on the Stanford dish. And it was a breeze. But after about a week the Stanford dish runs became as difficult as they used to be before the marin run. What happened?
My belief is that my body adjusted to the marin headlands run, which was tough for me. So the next time I went running, my body had kind of preparted itself for a “marin” run, so the stanford run was fairly easy. But when it only got the stanford level of exercise for a few days, my body realized that the “marin” run preparation was no longer needed and went back to its old ways.
The lesson is that one’s running cannot be the same every week. It has to vary(increase, unless you are post-run recovering). When you push yourself hard, your body’s ability elevates. You have to pick it up from there and take it higher. So every week one’s mileage must slowly increase, and so must the difficulty of the one “hard” run you do every week. Here’s what my current schedule looks like(just a typical example):
Sunday: long run
Monday: recovery
Tuesday: alternates
Wednesday: recovery
Thursday: tempo
Friday: recovery
Saturday: Rest and party!!
If you are unfamiliar with running lingo, alternate is running one minute sprints followed by 2-3 minutes of rest. Tempo is a fast run but not so fast that you have to stop. You try to run at a fast constant speed, for say 45 mins. Recovery are easy relaxed runs, maybe 30-40 mins. My Sunday long runs are usually about 10 miles, with a decent part of it on a steep hill. I also run my alternates and tempos on hills, but thats because I am preparing for a mountain marathon. There are many benefits of hill running, but you can follow the schedule above without running on hills.
As far as schedule is concerned, for me easing into a schedule works much better than jumping into one. If I decide that I’m going to follow a particular schedule(which I never do), and I don’t I feel guilty and discouraged and eventually do nothing. Instead of doing that, I just create a schedule and keep doing my running as usual. Over time I can see that I do some of the things in the schedule, though not in that order or that extent. So when I’m feeling energetic, I go ahead and push myself a bit to reach the schedule target. Eventually the number of things on the schedule that I’m doing increase and at one point I exceed the planned schedule.
I added 4 minutes to my Mission peak best round trip time of 1.30. Because I forgot to carry a powerbar and enough water. It was sweltering and I ran out of water towards the end. Lesson: if you plan to run for an hour, definitely carry a power bar. You need fuel.
Also friends, carb is not your enemy. People planning to lose weight often just forgo carb and try to work out like crazy. Well thats fine except that right after a workout your body needs carbs to quickly rebuild your muscles and bring you back from tiredness and hurt. A powerbar in the middle of a workout or right after(even 2 if your run is long) is just perfect. Just don’t eat the carb before you have done at least 30 mins of running. Make carb your ‘best fraaand”. Just don’t give your heart to it.
Speaking of giving one’s heart away, I fall in love with the sights everytime I am on mission peak. Its the kind where you keep falling more in love every single time you meet the person. Just an utterly blissful experience it is to look around and admire the curves and contours of the hills all around, with two sky blue lakes in the middle and Mount Diablo far away in the hazy distance.
I feel I tend to get shallow if I don’t run regularly. As I near the peak and the really steep incline starts, my mind becomes free and creative and I start getting high. All the worries and thoughts of life start floating clearly, as in a soup. From a cream soup, it becomes a minestrone and I get all my answers. Being close to nature restores me to my natural self and clears out the fake from the genuine in my life. Its something that has to be experienced to be understood.
With commencement coming up this Friday, I’ll probably do a run along the Charles that I once loved so much. It will be a nice pleasing ego boosting glory run in celebration..
Pikes Ascent
hmmm, I ^^really^^ don’t know what I was thinking.. In a moment of madness, I signed up for the Pikes Ascent. Frankly, I don’t recall doing anything as daunting since I took the JEE way back in ‘99.
But then something I find exciting yet superhard really gets me excited. I hope I am not going to DNF this race. So whats so hard about Pikes?
Well its a somewhat different half marathon. The elevation gain over 13 miles is almost 8000 feet. Very steep! Mission peak gains 2000 feet over 3 miles. So Pikes is like taking 4 trips up Mission peak consecutively. With a slight difference, however. Pikes peak is at an elevation of 14000 feet. So by the time you reach at the top, you’re breathing in an air that has about 43% less oxygen.
Pikes is actually an experiment for me. It an excuse to get into better shape by training much harder. If I train as hard enough as I should, I know I’m going to be able to do it. The key point is consistency then. And training in simulated conditions.
My aim is to scale the peak in about 4:30. I am going to try to maintain a constant pace throughout the race. Of course the last 2 miles are going to be crazy, and I can’t do much about it except maybe do a few high altitude hikes/runs before the event.
The SF half marathon, which is about 2 weeks before Pikes, should be an easy run then, since I am going to train superhard before that . I’ll run the SF at an easy pace, mostly for the views and the spirit than for any PR. And I’m expecting a bunch of friends to join me so we’ll all run together probably..
The Garden of the Gods 10 Mile Run and Summer Roundup Trail Run shuld both provide some high altitude training. They are held, like the Pikes, in Manitou Springs, Colorado. I need to start booking my plane tickets I guess 
.
So my 2008 races are going to be:
Golden Gate Headlands Half Marathon – Apr 5 – DONE
Garden of the Gods 10 Mile Run – June 8
Summer Roundup Trail Run 12K – July 6
SF Half Marathon – Aug 3
Pikes Ascent – Aug 16
Tentative:
Boston Half Marathon – Oct 12
Honolulu Marathon – Dec 10
Meanwhile, Matt Carpenter, the record holder for the Pikes Ascent as well as marathon, is a really inspiring guy. He’s also written a couple of really good articles on running.
Now some nice Dean Karnazes quotes.
Running Diary – 4 : a crazy marathon
So yesterday, I ran the Golden Gate half marathon in 2 hours 50 minutes. This run took about 46 minutes more than the Boston half marathon. Compared to the Boston run, yesterday’s run was brutal. You gain an elevation of about 1500 feet in the first 2 miles, the trail keeps going up non-stop. The total elevation gain over the entire run is 2200 feet.
Having done this run, I feel confident and humble. Humble because you see specks of humans crawling away on the hills. And it hits you that humans like us have been doing this for millions of years. We test ourselves against nature, and then we perish in less than a hundred years each. New offsprings do that over and over again for eternity. Yet the hills and the earth remain. The hills erode away too, but its much slower compared to our own erosion.
Another thought that occurred to me (and I’m sure this is no novel thought as such) was that each of us alive is at the end of a long line of survival starting right from the first man or men(if you believe in evolution). When you die without an offspring, you cut one of those lines of succession that had survived these millions of years. Hardly does this occur to me when someone passes away who had no children. But it is true. But then does it really matter that this happens? I mean, there is mating within the human population between pretty random points(though traditionally the randomness has sometimes been confined to sub-populations such as Americans, Brahmins, Hindus, Catholics, Norwegians etc..). So is there really a true identity one might have of oneself? How long can one go back in time and trace one’s identity?
Now for very long, I’d argue. You go back a few thousand years and all these notions of nationality and religion and community that we have today would be nonsense then. Go back a few million years and even the distinctions of race vanish. So does the line of survival idea make much sense? Yes and no. Yes, its true that you who are reading this blog post over the Internet are a member of the survived community. You are at an end of a one-way succession over time and you have maybe already produced or will produce the next generation. But if I go back many million years, I can’t really tell the distinction between my ancestor and yours, even whether they were different at all. A lot of our present day notions just vanish.
Think of civilizations like the Incas, highly developed civilizations of which there is not a trace today. When we feel like we are the ever powerful humans, the most developed species, do we ever stop and think if we’ll disappear like the Incas, and our technology that is all so cool and advanced(or so we think!) will just go away? This is not such an impossible scenario. I am sure an Inca guy developing a smart invention or technique had never imagined his civilization just doing a disappearing act.
Well, coming back to the run, it was much fun. I met two girls, Katie and Rebecca on the way and we ran together most of the route till they sped away to the finish while I followed close behind. Katie is from Berkeley, so my Stanford shorts were unhappy and sulking later over my letting a Cal girl beat me at marathon timing .
But then I have an excuse. I was running with a foot I had sprained last weekend, and I had to stop and rest several times, or hop with my weight on the right foot whenever the left foot started hurting. It was kinda challenging, but I enjoyed it. And I really enjoyed the beautiful views all over the race route. What a sight!
I am wondering if there is a marathon(other than crazies like in the desert or on the south pole) which has a more challenging course than the golden gate marathon. I’d really like to know..
Coming back to my original point, doing this run has definitely been a confidence booster. I only had a month to train, with work schedule forever screaming for attention, and a sprained foot. But it wasn’t as hard as I felt the night before the run. I did not feel like I was going to die. And now I feel I could run a full marathon sometime later this year. Maybe the NY in Nov! After all, Louis Armstrong, the biker I reallyyyy admire, also runs it!
Paneer Masala
Yesterday I made paneer masala and it turned out to be really yummy. So here’s the recipe:
1. Cut paneer into cubes and deep fry in butter until it becomes spongy. Remove the paneer from the pan.
2. Chop 1 large onion, few green chillies, ginger and garlic. Chop 2 small tomatoes or use marinara sauce. Fry them in the butter left over from frying the paneer.
3. Add haldi, salt, meat masala and some sabji masala and fry until the onion turns golden brown.
4. Add half a cup of water.
5. Add the paneer cubes and cook on low/medium low for 15-20 mins. Towards the last 5 mins, squeeze half a lemon and add mint leaves.
6. Remove and serve.
Running Diary – 4
Yesterday I ran on the Stanford campus. I had actually intended to run on the dish area, but I made the BIG mistake of taking central expressway. I arrived well after the dish area had closed, so I just decided to run on the campus. It has anyways been quite a while since I used to run there.
I had a discussion with my good friend Helen(self-proclaimed ex-athlete) about my getting tired during runs. She suggested it might be a dehydration problem. But I drink a lot of water all day and make N trips to the loo at work. So dehydration it can’t be. Perhaps, she suggested, it is an endurance problem. After all, running on hills is brutal compared to plains.
Well I ran about halfway on the campus drive loop and got tired again. So I got an idea. After resting for a minute, I started a 240 step sprint. I didn’t really feel any lack of energy in sprinting. I jogged for 240 steps after the sprint and repeated this 5 times. By the end of which I was thoroughly tired with my energy well spent. So my body was just lying to me about being tired?
I suspect that is the case here. Sometimes you just need to put your foot on the gas I think. Alternate sprints and jogs are anyways a good exercising technique that I saw on some marathon training website. I think doing that on a hill might be even more fun..
Meanwhile I have gotten serious about getting myself a heart rate monitor. It looks like a really useful device to optimally train for a long run. But the difficult question is, which one to buy? Choice always makes life tough, doesn’t it?
Running Diary – 3
So yesterday I went running to the Marin headlands itself, the site of the actual half marathon 2 weeks from now. Now I didn’t have a map, and as usual I don’t like to carry anything on a run, including my iphone(which had the map). So I headed off just with my car keys. It was a nice warm sunny day, with a beautiful breeze blowing across the face. The breeze was actually strong enough to make you feel some resistance against the running. And man, the climb was quie steep! Unlike the Stanford hill where the steepness ends after a while, the Marin climb goes on and on. The total ascent over the full run is 2200 feet.
Now being without a map, I naturally lost my way. I couldn’t find the wolf-ridge trail, even though when I came back later and checked the map, I realized I must have been on it. I did take the head trail which takes you to a peak(hill 88) where there are a few abandoned one-room buildings with graffiti all over. I did a couple of sprints on the last leg of the climb.
At one point the main road suddenly stops and you have to take a dirt path. And when you have walked a bit on that path, you get the old road again. Now that part of the road in between has landslided, and it looks kinda scary to see the steep and sharp fall along what was once the road.
So overall I ended up doing the path usually taken by 7-milers, not half-marathoners. But it was a good run and I felt somewhat energyless at the end. Maybe because of the repeated hill climbs. Or perhaps not enough energy nutrition. I lay on the beach as the sun was coming down and the sunset was very pretty. A hispanic couple to my left were acting silly and taking photos while 3 guys sat on a log, and brooded. Then they quietly walked away.
I drove back while the sun was still setting and gave a ride to 2 girls from SF who had lost their way on the hills and had gotten late. They really didn’t have much idea of how long their walk was going to be to SF (that was their plan until they flagged me down). I don’t remember much, except that one of the girls’ name was Dora(n), and the other was…..hmm that was an easy name but I just can’t remember. They are environmentalists in the city.
Tiring and somewhat satisfying run overall. I’m lying in the bath trying to warm my sore legs as I type this. If the headlands wasn’t so far, I’d go there every single day..
