My Half Marathon

I can finally say. Been there done that. That's because I ran the 21.01 kms, the Hyderabad Half Marathon on 22nd November 2009. It was a long uphill journey all the way.

It all started with the cycling conditioning camp on campus. I ran a couple of 5 km runs and cried and cribbed out of pain for a week. I felt ashamed as a lot of other guys had timed better than me and I was finally kicked out. It was a wakeup call for my tobacco stained lungs.

My chull to be never left behind motivated me to get my act together. I began running with the uber cool bihari and bangaali- sam and soham. We cut down on the sticks and made a pact . All of us cheated our rule, sometimes together sometimes in secrecy. Nights like these were more common than ever before. After all those were our last months together.

We struggled through the next 2 months with our routine evening runs. The idea of looking like Brad Pitt on the convocation day motivated us as well.

By the time I left Kanpur we could run 6 kms like a breeze. It seems like such a small milestone in hindsight but believe me it wasn't. With all the shit we did in the four years 6 kms was more like 60.

At home a month later, I was jobless in the true sense of the word. Out of boredom I started running again. Upon finding the cool group of people at Hyderabad Runners and running with them I decided that I was going to do the next marathon.

I got up at 5 in the morning and went for 10 km runs. It was boring as I'd run alone and the people on the roads would stare at me like I was from another planet. The group usually ran on weekends and I could never get up because of the late night hangouts. With just my ipod, running was a boring task (just like this post) and I just managed to do it about 4 times.

So all in all I had made a complete mess of my training schedule which ideally should have looked like this. I did not do even 5% of this.

The maximum I ran upto the marathon week was 11 kms. But I told myself and that come what may I am going to run and I am going to finish the marathon.

I told my co runners and other friends in Hyd who knew about my running habit that I was going to run the marathon. I did this just to build pressure on myself so that I would not back out. I was leaving for US on the 25th and really wanted to do this one thing before leaving.

I'd also promised myself to cut on the sticks till I ran through and then get back to old ways. Fortunately I haven't done that. So all these wonderfully stupid things served as the motivation and finally I put myself through the inhuman experience of running on this course:

The worst part of the run was that I was running all alone throughout which cut down my pace and the best part was going around the beautiful charminar at the half way mark:

At the end of it all:

Take that bitches:

It was one of the biggest achievements of my life. It was eventful all the way and left me with huge blisters on my little fingers. But it was all worth it.

Next stop: the Half Iron Man