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.

Alu-gobi-mutter

Alu-gobi-mutter (potato-cauliflower(broccoli) and peas) is one of my favourite curries. I haven't really had it in a long time...probably years. I am right now transitioning from eating crappy food to 'decent' food. A week back my stomach took a lot of beating with all the noodles I was having for my main course and it refused to accept it any further. So I was forced to start cooking rice, curry, etc..something I have feared since I landed here. I mean I haven't tried cooking food ever before, all I had was my mom's recipies for it. But wonders of wonders, alu curry (dry) turned out just ok on the first day of cooking and alu-gobi (dry), yesterday, along with curd rice was just short of being lip-smacking. Now, all I need to complete the circle is either of rasam or sambar. The past 5 years, I have hardly hard any proper south indian meal, relying heavily on chappatis and dal. Why? Because the mess food sucked big time. And even the restaurants outside the campus, only a few of them knew how to make good sambar or rasam or a good meal for that matter.

What I am arriving at here is, the north indian food that's served at the restaurants in india are state-of-the-art in terms of making the dishes(naan, rumali roti, paneer makhani, etc) as they should be, but the same is not the case with the south indian meal. To make a good south indian meal, every single disaggregate component of the meal (rasam, curry(dry), rice, koot,koyambu, etc) should be up to the mark. Even if one of them is done badly(its easy to mess them up), the overall taste goes for a toss. If you want to have a good south indian meal, it invariably has to be a home made one. And if restaurants do prepare them well, there are very few of them(saravana bhavan, etc) and pretty costly(2-2.5 times) relative to most south indian restaurants. This only means that the south indian restaurants have pandered to attract more customers by underpricing the meals and consequently 'averaging out' the quality of the meals or maybe that just is the attitude adopted by these restaurants and no one's looked to change the same. Well, this is ofcourse just my opinion based on my experiences and should be taken in with a pinch of salt and pepper ;)

End of quarter

Yep. Good times.
Came here, got thulped first few weeks with all the things going on in life - searching for apartment, searching for roomate, searching for a bike, searching for buildings and locations..you get the picture.
And then when all seemed well, came the onslaught of assignments. One of the courses I took had 7 assignments, 4 labs, two quizzes, one end term and one term report - Can you beat that? The other two courses weren't that bad.
Adjustment and adaptation to the system took me one month. I learnt that the best thing to do with courses bombarding you with assignments is to just print on a piece of paper the due dates for the assignments from all the courses and atleast know when what is due..eh.
Once, I did that, things were back where they should have been, the familiar nightout/intense workout before due date fundaes..And now the quarter has come to an end. Got to plan some biking trips to exotic locales around here and if possible get some mountaineering in, though it might be dangerous with possible landslides. But I will definitely accept some variations like rock climbing and bouldering though buildering might be a long shot here (I have climbed my house bottom up back in hyd).

On flat screens and plain water

Take a piece of white cotton cloth, dip in water, wring it till no water drips off..i.e. it is just about moist. Switch off your laptop or LCD monitor. Start at the top left corner or any convenient point and in a slow circular motion very very very gently caress the screen. Repeat till you have whole of the screen covered. Now we have all the smudges and marks off the screen. Run time for the whole process - (15 - 45) mins.
Pros - Can save you the frustration caused when you log onto your computer and look at the modern art for a brief while, while the computer loads.
Cons - Time consuming and doesn't work for oily smudges.
Conclusion - To be attempted when frustration reaches its peak and/or when there r lots of free time.

Of snow, slippery roads and the cliched runs

Two weeks back was the first time I saw snow in my life..in reality. I was sleeping longer than usual and as I pulled the blanket closer and looked out the window, I wondered why the rain out the window was so thick and precipitating at a slow rate.
3 hrs later, wide awake, I couldn't stop looking out the window.

Black smoke
In the background
Buildings
all around
And pure white snow
gathering on the ground

My mounting fear abound
Could I run on the slushy ground
When the time came near
Could I withstand the cold weather

For I have missed runs in the past
With disastrous impacts
Not that I wished that happen again
I went out onto the terrain
Painful at first it was
Mangaeable when I avoided the white extras
And fun
When I realised I was indeed doing my regular run


Cliched ending:(Calling some thing cliched and mentioning it anyway, sounds cliched to me now[add loop for the cliched calling the cliched][infinite])

Before I knew
I had a bad flu
I summoned up my might
And took the last right
For the end was near
I had no reason to fear
A run of a kind
To be stowed away
In my mind
To be remembered
When I unwind
From a race of a stressful kind

Abstract/philosophical or 'plain shady' ending:
Consistency they say
Paves the way
For that sought after progressive state
Follow the path
Before its too late

Ah, but its never too late
The choice you make
Only delays the date
For as long as there is intent
Its manifestation is imminent
A time machine would make it easier I know
For I could look into the so called future you know
All said and done
A routine can sometimes be fun
As long as you can maintain one
In the markovian process called 'the run'


I dabble in poetry. That's about it.
Now to mention something about real running eh..

Briefly, I have managed 10 runs in the past 25 days..Not bad I say, but again I can invoke the last but one para of the shady ending to the above poem and say consistency.............

Basically been running 4-5 kms @ 8 min/mile (I must say I am adjusting well to living in america, for I can use kms and miles in the same breath). But as Henry Rono, who's competing in the masters segment, would say in the lets run forums....I am starting to feel less fires in my legs and more lightness...Meaning, my runs are getting better.
But the roads are not good. I repeat, they are not good at all. The gilman trail has some muddy paths, but that's beyond what I run. So I got to long, so that I run comfortable. So long.