Surprise, surprise!

Not many would have put their money on a non-African winning a marathon major, especially not in New York, with all the focus on a possible repeat of the thrilling finish between last year's winner (Tergat) and runner-up (Ramaala). However, it was the unheralded Brazilian, Marilson Gomez dos Santos, who made a decisive move in the latter stages and held off a late challenge by Kiogora ("Baba") and Tergat, the latter finishing a few steps behind Kiogora to take third place. Kiogora's podium place was some consolation for the failure of several KIMbia athletes in Chicago two weeks ago, and they are no doubt celebrating tonight. Last year's runner up, Ramaala, faded bady to finish ninth.

Lance Armstrong, who had garnered a disproportionate amount of media coverage leading up to the event, was paced to a sub-3 effort (2:59:36) by an all-star crew composed of Salazar, Samuelson, and none other than the great Hicham El Guerrouj, who reportedly handed him water and gels along the way (El G must've gone crazy running 7 minute miles, though I suppose Nike made it well worth his while.)

Boston update: I'm two weeks into the program, still in the base phase; I ran 52 miles this week, most of it at an easy 7:30 min/mile pace. This is the highest mileage I've hit since September 2005 (56 miles at the peak of my training for Chicago). This time, I intend to max out at 75 miles/week with some workouts and see where that gets me. Hopefully into the 2:40s.

Update: Steve Cram, former mile world record holder (3:46), was also part of today's race and finished in a somewhat sedate 3:27:26. Read his column here.

Bittersweet victory

Robert Cheruiyot ran a perfect race in inclement weather to win the 2006 Chicago Marathon earlier today in a time of 2:07:35, but was denied his chance to fully celebrate it when he slipped at the finish line, slamming his head on the road and suffering a severe head injury in the process - reports point to a brain haemorrhage, but he is supposedly in a stable condition. Luckily for him, his momentum carried him across the finish line - imagine the agony of a DNF if he'd slipped a couple of feet before the line.

Cheruiyot, also winner of the Boston Marathon earlier this year, slipped on the textureless sponsor logo just before the finishing mat, which had been made more slick by the rain. Click on the image to see the video of his fall. CNN has another good angle where you can even see the officials removing the offending sponsor logo before more runners could succumb to the same fate. The incident generated quite a buzz on the Letsrun message boards, which you can read about here, here and here.

Boston bound

I'm back! And hitting Boston this coming April. I've maintained a decent level of fitness through this period of silence, running about 30-35 mile weeks for the most part, but motivating myself to get out there without a race goal was quite difficult. Now I have a race pinned, and with almost exactly 6 months to train, I'm shooting for something in the range of 2:45. Along the way, I plan to run a 10K and a half-marathon and improve on those times as well. Ambitious, perhaps, but dreams are often the precursor to reality!

Travelogue: Amsterdam

As all good things must come to an end, so too must my memorable trip to Europe. Two weeks seemed like a really short time to visit four cities steeped in history and culture, but in the end it turned out to be a very good balance between expense and enjoyment (I'm just a grad student on a slightly-better-than-shoestring budget!). I managed just 19 miles of running on the entire trip, but compensated a bit by walking more than 50 miles in the same period. Since many have asked about my trip, I thought it might be a good idea to post my itinerary in some detail on this blog. I intended for it to be just one entry, but it started ballooning up a bit, so I decided to split it in four sections, one for each city I visited. Move your mouse over each photo for a one-line description. Enjoy!

Friday, 28 July

Having woken up at the unearthly hour of 2am in order to make a 6am flight, I was pretty bleary-eyed when I landed in Amsterdam Schiphol 16 hours later at 7 a.m. local time. I nonetheless took a train to Amsterdam Centraal, where I dropped my bags off in a locker and met N. Amsterdam is a very pretty city with narrow streets and is crisscrossed by a number of canals. We first visited the Anne Frank house, which is a few minutes walk from Centraal Station in the historic district known as the Centrum. This is the building in which Anne Frank hid from the Nazis during WWII from 1942 up until her discovery and deportation to Auschwitz in 1944. We then proceeded to aimlessly wander the city, discovering street after street teeming with bicyclists and trams, nearly getting run over more than once. There are plenty of tourists in Amsterdam, and we saw many on numerous boats cruising the vast network of canals that cuts across the city. We met P in the afternoon and visited the Van Gogh museum, which houses many of his paintings. At this point, I was a little woozy from having slept just 3 of the past 48 hours and decided it was time to call it a day. We took a train to Utrecht (a half hour south of Amsterdam), where we were to stay with E and P. I think I went to bed at 7pm and woke up at 11am the next morning.

Saturday, 29 July

We started pretty late the next day thanks to my marathon sleeping session and reached Amsterdam around 2pm. We swung by the shipping museum, which details the maritime history of the Netherlands, followed by some more street roaming, a DIY backpacker-style lunch on the street beside a canal, and explored the Dam Square. At this point, I decided to go for my first run in the Vondelpark, which is in the southwestern corner of the city. Running with a map in hand, I proceeded to lose myself a few times before finally finding the park. The day's walking had taken its toll on my feet, but I still managed a good 55 minutes - a bit over 7 miles. I returned to Centraal Station, ate "dinner" on the platform and off we went to - ahem - the famed Red Light District. Although I didn't actually "do" anything here, just the sights and sounds of the place were completely different from anything I've ever seen or heard. Stay away from this place if you're orthodox and conservative. I think we returned to Utrecht at about 2am that night.

Sunday, 30 July

The next day, E was kind enough to take us out in his car to some very picturesque towns north of Amsterdam. These included Markem, which used to be a fishing village and still has a harbour for small boats and yachts, and Edam, famous for its Dutch cheeses. We spent most of the day walking around these towns and tasted some excellent cheeses. E and P treated us to a very nice dinner that night, as we were to leave for Paris the following morning.

Stay tuned for the next part - Travelogue: Paris

Wanderlust

It has become something of a standing joke in my circles that I rarely venture past the half-mile radius of my school campus. However, I will be setting that score right in two weeks' time, when I leave on a fifteen-day backpacking trip across four European countries. I will be visiting the areas in and around Amsterdam, Paris, Berlin, and Krakow in Poland. Since this is an independent trip not attached to any tour group, it has involved a fair amount of paperwork and planning, most of which has been done. I'm currently working out the finer details, such as the exact places to see within each area, the best way to carry money, and so on. Obviously, I'm also concerned about how this trip is going to affect my training schedule - I hope to get atleast about 6-7 days of running done so I don't land up too far back at the end of the trip. So people who've been to these places, hit me with your suggestions - local attractions as well as good spots to run!

Living without limits

Living in the comfort of 24-hour hot and cold water, high-speed Internet access and plush, air-conditioned offices, it is easy to conjure up what we perceive to be limits on human ability, toughness, endurance and determination. Those who are able to break out of this mould often achieve great things. One such man was the Swedish adventurer/climber, Göran Kropp, whose ascent of Everest without the aid of bottled oxygen made him one of only two men to have achieved the incredible feat (the other is Reinhold Messner).

Quoting this entry from the Wikipedia, "... Kropp left Jönköping on October 16, 1995, on a specially-designed bicycle with 108 kg (240 lb) of gear. He traveled 8,000 miles on the bicycle and arrived at Everest Base Camp in April 1996. In a big powwow, all of the Everest expeditions currently on the mountain agreed that Kropp would attempt to summit first. On May 3, Kropp blazed a trail through thigh-deep snow and reached 300 feet of the summit. However, Kropp decided to turn around, believing that he would be too tired to descend safely if he went up further. Three weeks later, on May 23, Kropp again tackled the mountain, this time successfully summitting. He then triumphantly cycled home."

People like Kropp have shown that humans are capable of feats many would consider unimaginable. All we have to do is break the shackles that hold us back.

Setbacks

Just when everything seemed, if you will excuse the term, hunky-dory, with the mileage getting into the mid-forties, bam! I strained my foot through some very indiscreet bounding exercises without warming up. As a result, I ran a grand total of 10 miles last week, setting my training back about 10 days. To add insult to injury, my computer's hard disk is beginning to fail as well, prompting frantic backup and reinstallation efforts that have kept me busy for the past few days. It looks like I'm going to have to replace the drive, but thanks to Knoppix, I've been able to stay online throughout this mess. This time, I'm getting rid of Windows once and for all - gotta love Debian GNU/Linux running KDE! And I should be back running this week.