The road to Mumbai

As I am penning this blog, I am about to go to bed. Tomorrow morning, I'll be doing my last training run for the Standard Chartered Mumbai Marathon (SCMM).

I got to know about the first edition of Mumbai Marathon in 2003 from Bhasker Sharma, a fellow runner in Bangalore. Bhasker has went on to complete 40+ marathons in the next ten years, including an amazing twelve-in-twelve.

While Bhasker had been at Mumbai for almost every year since then, I had to wait almost a decade to get on the road to Mumbai. I was never a fan to traveling to different cities and running races. For me, after running two marathons in 2001 and 2002, the marathon journey pretty much fizzled out, till I revived my running passion about a year ago.

In the interim, I had finished one marathon (KTM 2008) and a 50K (Ultra 2009) run, mostly crawled to the finish by anybody's standards. There was always a fear for the 42km distance or the four and a half hour running ordeal.

The last year has been exciting with two marathon distance runs, one 50K and one 100K. All in the span of last four months. For the last four months, not only have I trained for SCMM, but also have run two half-marathons in my personal best times, and a 100K distance (obviously my longest run in best time as well).

Having trained for and run the 100K, the fear for the (marathon) distance has disappeared. While my average pace of the 100K run was slightly over 8km/hour, the marathon pace will be a near twelve kilometres per hour. The challenge will be to sustain this pace for more than three and a half-hours on the road.

Not to mention that this is the first time I have participated in a structured training program, and have trained with people at similar capacity. During this training, I have learnt to overcome several critical limitations, which would have come in my way of running a longer distance. These range from muscle cramps to fear of running solo for long distances.

Three days from now, I'll be at the starting line of India's largest marathon, with atleast a couple of thousand more people. With the hope of bettering my ten year old marathon record. Shattering, not just breaking.

I wish good luck to all of those who'll take the start line this Sunday!