Mumbai welcomes SCMM runners with some great weather

Hi SCMM 2013 runners,

i Woke up early to check how Mumbai feels at 5:40am - surprised by the chill in the air, seemed much cooler than Bangalore. Felt like sub 20 deg-C. Later at about 7:30am did 3k on a grass 400m track to loosen up. Felt very good.

Hope the weather holds and look forward to the great “Amchi Mumbai” support on the roads.

All the best to all SCMM runners.

Lessons from training for Mumbai Maraton 2013

Three weeks to go for the Mumbai Marathon, as always, I go back to my 2012 Mumbai marathon race report to refresh my memory - and as I was reading the first two sentences:

"Preparation for the 9th edition of the Mumbai marathon 2012 was hard as any other marathon training."

2012 training seemed hard then - 2012 training volume, if i recall right was a sum total of 600 km. This year my running volume is 3600+ km - 6 times 2012 volume and it did not seem 6 times harder! I think the difference was the ratio of training intensity - hard v/s easy.

Tinman's training has been one of high volume (relatively speaking), with lots of slow running (almost 80%) with two hard/long workouts,well spaced out, every week. The training was hard initially and took me about 12 to 15 weeks to adapt to the high volume. It was never easy, there was once a situation where cumulative fatigue caught me and i had to lay off for three days. On one occasion my soleus hurt badly and more recently (Nov'12) I had some severe shin ache. I had almost given up on my training and that is when Prakash pointed me to Dr Gladson Jackson. Dr Gladson, some of you may already know him as a barefoot runner, soon got to root of the problem - muscle tightness, helped release the tightness and taught me some great stretches. What i like was he did not stop me from running and soon i was back to my normal weekly volumes.

So, what did I learn from the training - couple of things:

•  the discipline of running slow and for long
•  the fact that it is not necessary to run fast all the time to be able run fast
•  Never ignore stretching - irrespective of your injury status
•  know when to stop running
•  running multiple 30+k's teaches you a lot

I often get questions like - so what is your target for Mumbai and I say I don't have a target time, but I do know for sure that it will be better than 2012. Of course there could be unforeseen factors that could come in the way but I am hoping for the best!

Good luck to all the runners planning to go for SCMM 2013.

I want to thank a number of people who helped me in this long journey - Runner's High coaches, Dr Gladson, Dharam, V Srini and my coach Tinman!

Also a special thanks to Veda my better half for tolerating my running, in fact, she took to running along with me!

And lastly, please visit my page on Asha to see how you can support my run.