The 1st week of Sunmart training

My Sunmart training started on the Wednesday, unlike the previous Saturday for most people in the group. I promptly missed the Thursday 5-mile run, of course missed the Friday cross-training and landed up at HOL on saturday morning looking forward to a fun run on the trail again.

Anurag was in town, that and a dentist appointment kept Ani away. Sanjeev and Gaurav were going to do 7mi. Ganesh was planning to do a 7 and 7. Santhosh and myself planned to do the 10 and 7. We started off nicely, quickly got down the HOL, crossed the dam, and made our way up the hill towards the Powerline. Soon there was a fork, and the larger wider road along the right fork was apparently to be avoided. Santhosh promptly went along the wider road, and soon we lost sight of all flags, and came to another fork. Here we again randomly took the right fork, and after some time, voila, there were the flags again. Turned out, although we did not immediately realise, we had done a loop (2 miles) and come back to the start of the hill, right at the dam. Eventually, we meandered and muddled our way through forks, came upon Jim, our saviour for the day, and got to the top of the Powerline after 6miles of running instead of 4. Around then my allergies started acting up. We continued down Hill of Death, across Sculpture Falls, and almost up to 360 and back we came up the Hill of Life. By then I was sneezing incessantly.

I've always breathed through my mouth during running. But today I discovered that breathing only through the mouth, with a fully blocked nose, and continuous sneezing, is not a breezy proposition. As we started our second loop of 7mi, I was fairly out of breath, and had to start walking. That was when I first noticed that Santhosh with his colorful Motive socks, looked like he was wearing Clif Bars on the back of his legs. After a long time, I finally made it to the top of the Powerline. Having by then discovered a pace which kept my breathing steady, although heavy, I decided to run the remaining 3 miles back. At one point Santhosh heard my breathing and likened it to an asthmatic bull dog. All good things of course come to an end, so did the run. The rest of the weekend was spent in bed fighting the damned allergies.