Meeting Paul Tergat & Bangalore Sunfeast 10K run

With the RFL gang

Paul Tergat

hey hey, I got to meet Paul Tergat !!!!! For those of you who doesnt know about Paul Tergat, here is what wikipedia has to say:

Paul Kibii Tergat (born June 17, 1969) is a Kenyan professional athlete. He held the world record in the marathon from 2003 to 2007, with a time of 2:04:55, and is regarded as one of the most accomplished long-distance runners of all time.

Thanks to RFL and Nike, Paul was in town to run the sunfeast 10K , and a few RFLers got the chance of meeting him, I also got a personally autographed T-Shirt from him, which I am flaunting everywhere now! it was nice meeting the guru of running in person and getting some tips on how to increase the timing and the dos and donts of running!

Next day was the Sunfeast 10K run, Bangalore has been suffering from this 10K "marathon" syndrome since a long time, and so here I was running the Sunfeast 10K "marathon" :-) . It was fun meeting with so many RFLers, on an event which is not organised by RFL! the race started on time, i.e at 9:00 am

I did a mistake I started really fast, probably thinking that its just 10K, and then soon after start I realized that it was way too hot! My entire body was burning, lesson learnt: running at 6:00 am is totally different than running at 9:00 am. To make the matters worse, the same pain in my knee which came in the Bangalore Ultra, started again. But still I was able to finish it in 1:01 hrs. Not satisfied with the timing though, I was aiming at a sub 50 Min finish, but then seeing the heat and the tough conditions even a 55 min would have been fine.

So the lessons learnt and next steps:

- Running at 9:00 am is totally different, so would be training for running in the heat as well now
- I need to be more regular with running, so have started running 3-4 K on weekdays as well
- as Paul advised, increase the weekly Mileage in order to increase the timing, so I am exactly doing that

as Farah (a fellow runner) wrote in her mail to the group:

a little taste of the bitter never hurt, as long as you don't make drinking it a habit:) to everyone who met or exceeded their targets...raise the bar higher. to those of you who like me carry the learning of a distance run, but not conquered, we will be given as many chances as we take...and each time a little wiser, stronger and hungrier...


Song Today: Californication