Intro

This blog as might be apparent from the title has to do with running, biking and basically other outdoor individualistic sports, sometimes extreme, such as rock climbing . But don't be surprised if you find articles on work, personal life, music and even philosophy, this blog is an exception in this aspect in the blogosphere of running blogs and I am trying to revamp the blog to make it more runner friendly. You might want to look at the sidebar titled 'categorised', which as is obvious, categorizes my posts into different areas of interest.
The other thing that might interest many people is a section on 'running videos' and 'general videos' on the side bar, which I keep updating now and then.
I plan to bring in more posts on running and biking, with some added colour, so as to make them 'complete'. That's about it for now.
As a post-note, I have run a half-marathon, but I am yet to attempt a marathon, which through some concerted effort and time should happen in the future, but that ofcourse is not the culmination of this blog, it would on the contrary be something to jumpstart this blog onto new vistas.




Saturday, December 16, 2006

Marathon - A misnomer

A: "I ran the marathon yesterday"
Me: Oh really? ( I wonder when this guy started running, leave alone running marathons)
A: Yeah
Me: How much time did you take?
A: Oh, around 30 minutes
Me: Huh? (A new world record) Oh, you mean you ran a 5km race
A: Yeah, they called the race a marathon

Ofcourse, they would call it a marathon if you ran the full distance of 42kms 195 metres. Anything less than that is called a fraction of the marathon or not-a-marathon. For example, a seattle marathon event will hold a marathon(42kms), a half marathon (21kms) and probably a "corporate" run of 5kms or 10kms. Many people run the 5km or 10km event and get an artificial sense of accomplishment. Do you know that training for a marathon can take as much as 4 months if you start from scratch? And how much time did you train for the 5km run? 3 days? Cut out that marathon crap. You either ran a full marathon or you didn't. Simple. Got to respect the distance man.

PS: This is not to say I disrespect a 5km run. I infact think 5kms is one of the toughest middle distance runs to compete in, but then I would call it a 5km race and not a marathon plus I would train for it, not just land up on the race day and run 5kms for the first time in my life and say "Oh I somehow managed to finish it". Yep, that's a wonder indeed, given you didn't train for it.
Some of my best moments in my running career have been running a 5km in 20 minutes. I have run a half-marathon, but finishing the half-marathon didn't give me even a fraction of the euphoria which running that 5km in 20 minutes gave me. Why? Because I ran the half marathon on a half-baked training of 11 days and well, for the 5km, I had been training for quite sometime.

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