The Deadline

I had to post today - otherwise it would be all of March without a post! Me having a serious case of writers block here.

So what have I been up to in the 6 weeks since we last chatted. Here we go:

• My agenda got unexpectedly busy since I am teaching a class for a faculty member who had to go on leave.
  
• The running is going great and has picked up. I am getting to be very consistent specially over the last 3 weeks or so. This has also meant dropping five pounds in the last couple of weeks. I need to shed some more so that I can eat all I please in Italy!
• Today I am going to the airport to pick up one of my closest friends and former neighbors who is visiting from Norway. I am so looking forward to seeing her after five years!

• The reason she is coming is that we are both going for a wedding this weekend to New Orleans. My former roommate (and hence common friend and neighbor) is getting married! We are driving down there on Friday and spending the weekend there. We have a history of road trips since we drove most of the West Coast together a few years ago. So hopefully I will have another post soon with pictures.
• My blog reader is still full :( - Please don't hate me!
  
• I recently had a chance to try out Mizuno's new gait analysis and fitting system. It is way more fancy than anything I have ever seen. They make you do a number of things like standing in different positions, squatting, walking etc. Maybe I should post the results that the system printed out for me.
• That makes it two ideas for blog posts in just this post.
  
• No more writers block (maybe).
  

The shoe affair

Some of you may have noticed the link for New Balance Harrisburg on the side of my blog. Courtesy them, I received a new pair of New Balance 1123's a couple of weeks ago. My only obligation is to write a review (soon- after I put more miles on them).

Well, nothing like a new pair of shoes to get you running again. This winter has probably been the lowest mileage winter for me ever. But with temperatures climbing back into the 60's and a new pair of shoes strapped on, I am finally back to a 5-6 day a week training program.

The running has been hard. But today, somewhere in the middle of a 3 miler, I felt my stride fall into place and got back to that comfortable feeling of old. An extra few pounds that I seem to have accumulated over the winter do not help the running either. But a few solid weeks of building my base should easily knock that off. This week I should be back up to 20 miles/week. My goal is to maintain this as a minimum and get my long run numbers back up there. With training, as with most difficult things, a lot of it has more to do with inertia than anything else. Well, I am glad to have got the ball rolling!


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Not make anyone jealous or anything.. but I am planning my next conference trip to present a new paper that was recently accepted.

Its in the Summer.



And its in....

Roma!!!

Walk-about

So its time to break the longest blog silence in the history of this blog. I got back two weeks ago from a long trip to India that included a conference, a wedding (NOT mine!) and hopping between several cities. It was a great time to be home with family and December being a vacation month for most people, I also had the chance to meet up with some old friends who were in town.

The trip started in Delhi where most of my mom's family lives. Spent a couple of days there with my grandfather and the rest of the fam. Delhi being the capital, seems to be in the middle of a huge construction boom to modernize everything. But I guess somethings will always be there in Delhi, like ...

the auto rickshaw (seen here in front of India Gate).

I left Delhi to spend three days at home in Calcutta. I wanted to see my grandmother and spend some time with her. Going back and not seeing my grandfather at home felt strange. But I was glad that I saw everyone at home and they seemed to be doing ok.

I had to leave three days later for Bangalore, where I was presenting a couple of papers at a big conference. I was returning to Bangalore after 5 years and the city had changed so much that I barely recognized it. The conference went of well and my paper won an award for the best talk. The award also included about $250 and I was able to use this to set up a scholarship in memory of my grand dad. To begin with, it takes care of the entire schooling expenses of two children - a girl who is 12 and a boy who is 7 - for a year. I plan to try and support them until they graduate from high school. A few hundred dollars can go a long way in helping someone and I am sure it is something my granddad would approve of, given all he did.

From Bangalore, I flew to Delhi for the wedding. My parents and sister also arrived there from Calcutta and since we had a couple of days to spare, along with my aunt and her family, we caught the train to Amritsar. Amritsar is an old city (1500's) in the Punjab, very close to the border with Pakistan. It is considered a holy city for the Sikhs being the location of the Golden Temple.

The temple was built in the late 1500's and is absolutely stunning. Even more so is the atmosphere of the place. One walks in from a bustling, old city into complete peace and quite. I went to the temple several times over those two days, including once at 4am. Here are some pictures in the day and at night.





Amritsar is also of importance for its place in the freedom struggle of India and is the site of Jallianwala Bagh massacre, an incident where a British general ordered his troops to open fire on peaceful protesters who were trapped in a garden that had only one exit that had been blocked. The incident is widely considered as the spark that lit the country into its Independence struggle. Today the garden is a monument, but bullet marks can still be seen in the walls (in the white squares in the picture) surrounding it.


From Amritsar, an hours ride away is the Wagah border which marks the boundary with Pakistan. We travelled to the border to see the lowering of the flags. After the Mumbai terrorist attacks there has been a lot of tension at the borders of the two countries. But the ceremony of lowering the flags still happens every day. The border consists of two gates marking the two countries and every day at sunset the two armies conduct an elaborate parade with some showmanship thrown in for good measure. It all makes for very interesting viewing.

The two day trip was followed by a week in Delhi for my cousins wedding. Yes, our weddings are a week long and a lot of fun! I am still waiting on pictures from there as I refused to make my bulky camera along. Will post some if/when I get them. After that, I spent about 10 days at home in Calcutta before heading back to Atlanta. All in all, it was a trip filled with memories.

Since getting back, I have been following up on my academic job applications. Things don't look so good in this economy, with university budgets being slashed and endowments halved. But still I am hopeful. We'll see.

Well its been a long post - and I promise the next one will be sooner/shorter. Have a great weekend everyone!

Happy Turkey Day!

Wish you all a very Happy Thanksgiving! And good luck to anyone racing in a turkey trot.

Many of you wrote/commented to ask me - Where did I go? Well.. its good to be missed :)

Here's a quick update of whats been up:

1. I did not sign up for the Thanksgiving Half since it was a little to pricey ($55.. ouch). I did however volunteer for it. They had plenty of different volunteer options, but I signed up for the 4:45 am slot (which means I need to wake up in 4 hours) since a. Very few others wanted to do that, b. It gives me enough time to come back home and cook. Any local runners doing this race - I'll be at the first drinks station, camera in hand. And no I do not charge $75 for pictures!

2. Which brings me to the more interesting albeit non-running related story. Somehow I got talked into cooking up a Thanksgiving dinner for a bunch of friends. That basically means that I have 20lb bird taking up half of my fridge and one clueless human using google as a recipe book. I will let y'all know how this one goes.. any last minute tips are most welcome!

3. I did sign up for the ING Ga Full Marathon in March next year. Gives me something to train for. I have actually been really good about it since I signed up. I started a base training program averaging about 20-25 miles/week for the next month before I actually start my plan. I did this race last year and even though it was a blast, I feel like I can do much better. This time I am just going to train smarter/harder. Training will be a challenge given that I am travelling a lot over the next month. But I have good reason to keep up with it.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! May you all enjoy the best of health, family and many more miles under your shoes.

Where did Fall go?

Ah Fall.. my favorite time of the year. Except that it seems to have been squeezed into a week. Seriously, with our temperatures going from the high 70's to the 30's in a week, the mercury seems to be mimicking the Dow Jones. I mean c'mon this is Georgia and its still October. Monday and Tuesday felt more like December (yes.. now all you northern folks can complain about the whining!).

Not a whole lot to report. Things are still crazy with work - and yet again I promise to catch up on the blog reading soon :) The workouts have been good but brief. I am just not finding a lot of time yet. On Sunday I had a nice 5 miler in the afternoon. My routine has mostly 3-4 short runs a week with a couple of days on the trainer.

I originally has some travel plans for the Thanksgiving break, but it seems like that trip may not pan out. This gives me the opportunity of doing the Thanksgiving Day Half Marathon here in Atlanta. I loved this race last year so I am thinking about it now. Also, that gives me some incentive to step up the mileage over the next few weeks. It is kind of at a short notice, but might as well make the most of it. Even if it does not happen, at least it will jump start my training.

Have a great week everyone!

Saying goodbye

It has taken me a few days to write this. Even though there is an inevitability to some things happening, it does not ever make it easy to say goodbye to someone you are very close to. I grew up living together with my grandparents and maybe that's what makes it so hard to lose my dadu (grandfather). But then I realize that because of that, I have so much to be grateful for. I am so glad for all the time we had together, for how an unexpected trip home this summer meant that I could spend time with him, and for how I just happened to call him a few hours before he passed away, never realizing that this would be the last time.

One of his favorite stories he loved telling me, was about when he would pick me up and drop me from school. I had just learned how to read and I would spell every advertisement board I saw on the way home and ask him what it meant. There are so many little things like that I remember. Like how he took me and my cousin to buy us our first bicycles, how he stood in line with me so that I could get autographs of my favorite cricket players, how he never complained, always saying that he is ok, how he always found humor in the smallest of things - so many memories that will always be mine to keep.

My grandfather grew up in what is now Pakistan. During the partition of India, they had to leave everything behind and move the entire family into a single room. He got a job selling tires for Goodyear and he would cycle for many miles every day to make all his calls. Starting from there he went on to retire as the head for the entire region. But the thing I remember the most about him is his passion for service. He worked tirelessly to help anyone. One of the things he enjoyed the most was serving his Rotary club. As a child I accompanied him on various projects. My best memory is about a project he was working on with Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity. I was going to go with him to a Hunger camp, but I actually got to ride with Mother Teresa all the way there. She gave him a little card with a blessing she wrote and he always kept that with him.

As I think about so much that I remember and learned from him, I realize that nothing less than a celebration would be a deserving way to say good bye. After all it is what he would want.

Wiped out

It feels like a long week. Last Sat I came down with a sore throat, nasal congestion and a fever (103.. yikes!). A weekend of feeling lousy and having OTC stuff do nothing for me meant that I went in to see the doc on Monday. She was sure I was down with a strep throat but the tests kept coming back negative. Anyways... a few strong doses of a generic antibiotic seems to be the cure to anything! So by Thu I felt decent enough to work the whole day.

But I tried going out for a run yesterday and just could not make it through it. I was exhausted. Will give it another try tomorrow.

The only upside - I lost 8 lbs in 6 days.

Moral of the story.. forget those long miles, just fall sick!