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Running

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May 22, 2009 6:51 pm

Personal highs, newbie mistakes and dealing with injury

2 comments
by    in Running

As I said in my previous posts, I am addicted to running. However, after enjoying the positive aspects of running, I am also going through the harsh realities of running.

The first two months, I ran with my cross training sneakers. The maximum distance I ran was 3 miles on those and they were ok. As a classic newbie mistake, I had gone out and picked out my running shoes by walking into SportMart and picking the shoe on sale with the aid of the ‘salesman’. The shoes obviously felt better than my cross trainer shoes for running, so I kept running on them and kept increasing mileage. I was doing 4 and 5 miles quite easily on them.

Last Wednesday, my left ankle and knee started to hurt. Visited the doctor who suggested rest and to check my shoes. By then I had read about pronation and how to pick running shoes. So I headed to Running Revolution, in Campbell CA, which was highly recommended by more experienced runners.

Of course, I was running with the wrong sized shoe and the wrong type of shoe. I am flat footed and I needed a shoe with good support. Even such a shoe, like the Asics Gel Fortitude wasn’t helping with my pronation, I had to be fitted with a orthotic device which corrected my run.

I must say I love the new shoes and orthotic device. I have always walked like a duck, all my life. With the new shoes and orthotic device, I was finally walking straight. I loved it so much that I actually woke up my wife and did a catwalk to her to show her I could walk straight.

I waited a couple of days and thanks to my eagerness, went out and ran my first 10k.

The run itself was a lot of fun. Absolutely no discomforts during the run. The first time I ran with my back upright, I had little back pain at the end of the run. My knees and ankle were acting up a bit again after the run, but I couldn’t tell the difference between pain and soreness.

I was (am) totally thrilled by this run. 10k. Imagine that. Who knew I could ‘run’ that distance? In jest, I went ahead and signed up for the San Jose Rock n Roll half marathon in October. The 13 mile distance did not appear daunting, particularly after having run 6.5m.

I iced my legs and ankles and after a days rest, ran another 3 miles.

I should listen more to my body. On the 3 mile run, my left knee was beginning to act up. Instead of stopping, I pushed ahead and completed the run.

The pain started almost immediately after the run. It was acute. Motrin, Ice and rest didn’t help. A doctor visit followed. Other than discouraging me to give up running and stick to elliptical trainer, even before he looked at my knee and ankle, the doctor put me on Ibuprofen and referred me to a physical therapist.

I am wearing a leg brace now, icing it like crazy and eating the Ibuprofen. I am beginning to realize that injury management and pain is the bigger challenge in running, particularly when running regularly and planning to run long distances.

I am learning about running form and correct ways of running, albeit late in the cycle. I am learning about shoe types and analyzing the difference between Chi Running and Pose Running (which apparently is the Nikon vs Canon for the running world).

I am also busy eating Manohar’s head, Sriks’ head, Durgi’s head and my wife’s head with my constant ramblings.

I hope to be fit and start running again, very soon. But that San Jose Half Marathon looks so far away.

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2 comments!
May 8, 2009 6:59 pm

Head Fake

11 comments
by    in Life,Running

In general, I am a cautious person. I am a bit worried about the unknown. And I do distrust common perceptions. This helps in certain areas, but that also leads a much blander life.

Given my general attitude towards life, it is indeed a great paradox that I firmly believe in startups. To put my money where my mouth is, I quit my full time job last year and joined people who I trust to start a startup. That should tell you how much I trust the people I work with and how much I liked my previous job :) .

Startups, they say, are all about perseverance. In Founders at work, each of the founders Jessica interviewed talked about perseverance. Each one. They talk that there is only thing that matters for a startup. Perseverance. Nothing more. Nothing less. You could have the greatest technology on earth, but you have to wait. Be patient. Let it happen. The inside story of Ev Williams’ sufferings when he ran Blogger are read to be believed.

So there I was, fully knowing that startups are full of uncertainty, still trying to start one. I was working happily churning out code without fighting the tools or processes, just focused on getting the job done, which is why I love startups. Months passed.

Paul Graham, in his How not to die essay says this:

“If so many startups get demoralized and fail when merely by hanging on they could get rich, you have to assume that running a startup can be demoralizing. That is certainly true. I’ve been there, and that’s why I’ve never done another startup. The low points in a startup are just unbelievably low. I bet even Google had moments where things seemed hopeless.”

So true. A few months into the startup, I was lying in the bed, waking up at 2 am and 1 am and staring at the ceiling. The stress was building up. Along with stress, comes Stress eating. I was bloating inch by inch.

At some point, I hit the fat wall and started running.

The unthinkable started to happen. The stress started to vanish. I was going back ‘doing the startup’ for the enjoyment part of it. It was clear that sweating over the startup was going to be pretty demoralizing and along with that comes, in PG’s words:

When startups die, the official cause of death is always either running out of money or a critical founder bailing. Often the two occur simultaneously. But I think the underlying cause is usually that they’ve become demoralized. You rarely hear of a startup that’s working around the clock doing deals and pumping out new features, and dies because they can’t pay their bills and their ISP unplugs their server.

Startups rarely die in mid keystroke. So keep typing!

Yes, I was back to typing in full glory.

While going through this, I had a sense of Deja vu. In many ways, it is a head fake that late Prof. Randy Pausch had talked about in his last lecture.

The primary reason of doing a startup is to experience a challenge that is so intense and compresses a life-time of work experiences into a very short period of time. It is the rush, the satisfaction of doing something difficult with so little resources and creating something. It is a sense of achievement.

Running, was providing me that sense of achievement. When I started, I barely could run 50 feet. Ten weeks into the program, I was running 3 miles at a stretch. Each day was better than the previous one. Each day a new accomplishment.

Once this thought process happened at a macro level with respect to two potentially life style changing events, I started applying it micro level activities.

Suddenly, it was clear that the object of doing the startup was not to raise funding from VCs, become a successful company and get rich quick. The real object was to have fun, explore ones own limits and create something new, create value for customers and solve problems. At the next level it meant typing more code, getting into the zone a lot more and enjoying coding. Everything else follows suit.

Likewise, even though the primary objective of running was to lose weight and feel fit, instead of sweating over the weight machine and swearing at it, I started setting enjoyable, tangible goals. “I am going to run for 30 mins tomorrow”. “I am going to run 4 miles this weekend”. Weight loss followed. The head fake works.

It seems like such a powerful tool. For any difficult problem you face, find out tangible, enjoyable short-term goals. They become your ‘head fake’. The bigger problem eventually will get solved by solving these short-term goals.

Thanks Prof. Pausch. I am glad I didn’t miss your last lecture.

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11 comments!
April 9, 2009 7:12 am

Run Forrest Run

12 comments
by    in Running

One of the interesting things I notice as a Indian immigrant in the bay area is, how many of us within this small community take to running. As in running marathons and such. It is nuts. I used to wonder what possesses these people to run. I am sure a small percentage start running after their total cholesterol crosses 280 and their doctors instill the fear of Yama in them. But the general majority of them seem to run just for fun. In a very Forrest Gumpy way. Put your shoes, put one leg in front of the other and off you go. 26.2 miles, one step at a time.

I have three very good friends in my close circle who are runners. Given that they are perfectly sensible people otherwise :) , I used to wonder what drives these guys to run. I don’t know the real answer yet, but I think I am treading down the path of enlightenment.

I am the perfect example for Newton’s first law, only that I never move and no external force can make me move. [Ask my wife, she tried for nearly 8 years to get me off the couch]. I have been fat and overweight for nearly the past two decades, so shame is out of the question. I think sub-consciously even when I chose my doctor, I went with a fat one :) . Every year when we discuss my health, the doctor would go ‘Yeah, I know it is SO difficult to even lose a pound’ :) , and there goes that.

I was one of those perfect cases who wouldn’t move out of the couch until my cholesterol crossed 280. But then some thing happened. I had a pre-fixed number in my mind which I thought was the heaviest I could weigh. That was in my mind, my ‘fat-wall’. And of course I hit it.

I tried every fat-boy stunt first, I was in total denial. I first tried a different weigh machine, then tried a different set of clothes, moved the weigh machine to the hard floor, tried the wii-fit’s weighing machine (which of course shows 5 lbs less when on a carpet). And then it hit me like a tonne of bricks. I AM FAT. I AM GOING TO DIE SOON IF I DON’T CHANGE.

Now, in the past, I have tried various types of exercise routines. Gyms worked for me two decades ago, but in the US, every time I went to the 24 hour fitness gym, half my time was spent to avoid the hard-selling trainers who were trying to sell me their services. And the gym was of course so far away, you don’t have the motivation to drive. I have tried playing every game out there, so my garage has every type of racket there is :) . Tried Bikram Yoga and got half cooked to death.

NOTHING worked. I had given up. And then I started to think what my friends do, of course they all ran. They ran like there is no marathon left untouched.

I started running the next day. This left my wife quite nonplussed. After all, she has tried to move me for the past 8 years and here I am, cursing at the weigh machine one evening and next morning at 6:30 am at 40 deg F, I was trying to run.

Google found me this excellent beginners running program. As a self respecting geek, I had to get my software and work-flow in place before I start to do any activity, so I experimented with various running software on the iPhone and settled on RunKeeper.

The first few days were hilarious and extremely painful.

picture-21

I was barely trying to make the 60 seconds of running at a stretch. It is amazing how your lungs and heart adapt. Every run you feel it, you feel the difference. Every run was better, every step felt better.

Now, motivation and obsession come natural to me. I used to wake up at 5 am each Saturday, drive 50 miles so I can take photos of San Francisco at sunrise. These days even though I don’t take photos on Saturday mornings anymore, I barely can sleep beyond 5:30 am :) . Go figure.

So from the day I started, I have run every other day for the last six weeks. I have run in rain, I have run when it was 36 degrees outside. I was dressed like the Russians trying to save Stalingrad and looked like a complete fool, but still I ran.

And the results began to show. From the day I started, I have lost 5 6 lbs, dress fits very well, I almost cried when I had to move my belt hole to one inside :D . Very soon I was doing this:

picture-11

If someone told me 6 weeks ago that I was going to run 2 miles without a break, I would have laughed me head off. Now, 5k run is all but certain within the next two weeks. My mind is thinking about a 10k run soon after that.

Using a tool like Runkeeper is incredible. It gives you instant feedback, allows you to share your runs – and that in way is incredibly motivating for your next run. Even better, using twitter search, I can see who else is using Runkeeper to run and watch them as well. A very narrow vertical search, but lots of fun.

The one completely unexpected benefit of running is how it alters your mood. I have been upbeat and energetic since the day I started running. Yes, the economy is still in the dumps, but somehow it doesn’t creep me out as much any more :) . Scott Adams thinks it is Biceps Femoris, others think it is endorphins. [I don't think it is endorphins for a 2 mile run :D ]. Whatever it is, it works.

I now understand why my friends run. It is incredibly freeing. It raises your spirits. It sets you free. It pushes your limits and each time you cross it, you feel better about yourself. And best of all, as Manohar puts it, ‘all you have to do is to put your shorts and shoes and put one foot in front of the other’. I don’t have to hide from the gym trainer any more. I put my shoes and off I go.

I finally get it. My friends aren’t crazy after all.

I probably will never run a marathon or half-marathon in my life, but a 10k run seems very possible before summer is out.

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