2010 Sunfeast 10k Debacle (***)

A shocking 63:47 (18secs slower than last year) at the Sunfeast 10k. During the run itself, I had been chasing sub-60 mins on my watch after the first two kilometers, which took a grand 16mins!! So, when I crossed the finish and my watched showed 59:45 I felt pretty good with the effort. But that lasted only a day or so before Marathon Photos uploaded the official times.

Any thoughts about the run time is depressing, let me turn my attention elsewhere regards the 10k.

(1) Out of the 6-7k crowd at the Open 10k, about .5k were girls and women. At the finish, with folks milling about, the absence of heckling, hooting, misbehaviour was pretty cool to observe. Guess that makes it only two cities in India where a crowd of men remain human around women - Bombay and Bangalore.

(2) Not only do we drive like idiots, we run like idiots too. Over the first two kilometers, on more than a few occasions, I came up to anything from 3 to 7 people walking abreast of each other, blocking the carriage way. This meant a lot of turning back to make up for the lack of a rearview mirror, sharp turns, hand signals, sideways sneaking past people, and speed changes.

(3) Venting helps. Somewhere running up to the first of the U-turns I asked a bunch of bums to keep left if they were going to walk. They said something in protest but I couldn't quite hear what they said.

(4) Port-a-loos?! Ended up waiting in a queue for two port-a-loos before the start. There was another queue for 3 port-a-loos a little up ahead. Sometime during the close to 1-hour in that queue, I calculated the expected wait time to be another 30mins. That was when there was only 15 to go for the start. We ran ahead and found one of the hundreds of spots within the Kanteerva complex where guys can take a leak. It was a big relief but by the time I got back into the holding area, it was obvious that my start would be behind4-5k of the partipating throng. If it is going to be port-a-loos next time, I better bring my own.

(5) Stretching rocks!!! One thing different from last year's run was that I spent about 15mins stretching post the run and woke up next morning without absolutely no ill effects.

(6) The Lucknow crowd rocks!!! Met Radhesh ('03) a little after the finish and he and a bunch of Lucknow folks had chosen the Basketball court inside the complex to meet up. Made a note that this is a good post-run meeting up zone and the benches there would also come handy with the stretching exercises.

(7) This headbanded Chennai Runner helped me with the pacing as well as the first 2km dodging strategy and if not for him my finish would have been worse that it was. Saw him at the finish and it appeared that he was one of the last Chennai Runners to finish. Running in the Chennai pressure cooker, perpetually on high or sim, helps these guys take us genteel Bangaloreans to the cleaners. Easily, from now on, they are the 'enemy'!!!!

So, a pretty interesting Sunday morning that was followed by a couple of weeks of driving (2,500km in total), and hoping off-and-on that I could forget the run time. I can see the entire running thing is catching on in this city - if it follows the same trajectory, then the organizers have their task cut out for next year.

***Turns out Marathon photos time is the gross time (gun to finish), and the net time (my start to finish) is close to the time on my stopwatch - 59:13 (4:16 improvement from last year). Thanks to Kishore for bringing this to my notice.