Thursday, January 19, 2017

SCMM 2017

This year's SCMM weather played a spoil sport for many. I was surprisingly unaffected by it. My training this year was not upto the mark. I did not run as many long runs as I wished at the beginning of the season.

Runs:
I started off the season with a 34K on 11-Sep. Then on I built mileage gradually. However my mileage suffered in October. Then I had to change plans and came up with a plan to run 40K every week. This is much lesser than my 100K in the initial plan. I managed to stick to this every week in November and December.

To overcome the laziness in running longer on Sunday, I registered for two half marathons, one in November and one in December. Did one in 2:45 and another one in 2:00. Then came an opportunity to do two long runs pretty late in December. One was a 33k in Kharghar with three weeks left for SCMM. Another one was a 21K which I ran from Vashi to Bandra in the tapering time. These runs helped me to stay fit in the lat weeks of running.

Nutrition:
This time around I did not pay much attention to what I ate during the day. How ever I stuck to eating a balance of carbohydrates and protein with dal and rice. I chose a vegetarian diet this entire year.

My runs were fueled by Fast and Up reload. There effervescent tablets are amazing. Now I feel how I lived without them all these years. On the race day, I started pretty early with a cup of filter coffee and a couple of slices of bread. I had one Unived Gel at the start and one GU Gel each at 10K, 20K and 30K mark.


Race day:
My race day start was not as smooth as I imagined. I had trouble after 4K mark. I felt very hungry and energy drained. May be not finding water at the star location had something to do with this. At the 7K mark I grabbed a slice of lemon with salt. Near 10K someone handed me chilled lime juice with rock salt. This worked well. I felt me energy coming back after this. By now I met Ashwin who ran with me till the end. It helped divert my mind away from the weather, and the tiredness in between.

Post race:
As usual my face was stiff after the run. I have been experiencing this in the past 3 races. I cannot speak and have difficulty concentrating for sometime. Once I lie down with my legs up in the air for 5 minutes normalcy is restored. Maybe this has something to do with all the blood being in my legs. Need to consult someone regarding this.

All in all an improvement of 4 minutes and 20 seconds in my completion time from last year on the same course. A dump of my race day pace, speed, route heart rate etc can be found here: https://mysports.tomtom.com/service/webapi/v2/activity/perm_3H0HerOfO51UAsBUur_7nvMnM-x6ZjQrdRs9RsYqmZaxsETGHYWEc1v4WY0S4RblipbptTsDKx_l0UitGwASBA?format=html