Move 2 Dallas & Trail Running

I changed jobs and moved to Dallas from San Diego in Sept'06. It was a tough decision to move out of california as all my friends were there and as I would be missing all the outdoor activities I was doing. In the end, I made the choice to move as I believe it is better for my career, hopefully. On a positive note, I was excited to move to Dallas as my sister lives here and I would get to spend lot of time with my cute lil 2yr old niece. I have started to stay at my sister's place and so I get to spend some quality time with my niece on a daily basis. That is the best part of the day, by far.

A month after my move, I started to think about my fitness and decieded to run again. Initially, I was thinking that I should try to run faster and train for a sub-4 or even a 3:45 marathon. I did The Half in Dallas in first week of November along with my bro-n-law. I did 2:03 in time and I felt that I was totally out of shape as I was able to do 1:53 in 2004 without much training. Ofcourse, I was atleast 10 pounds heavier now than 2004 :) I came across the blogs of Rajeev Patel, Anil Rao and Padma who have been doing ultra-marathons for a while and boy, I was inpsired. I started spending some time on web reading about ultras and I felt like I should try it out for mainly 2 reasons. First, it would be a nice challenge to see if you can do it and secondly, from what I understood, it would improve ones' endurance and make you get faster with time, over time. Also, it should be easy on your knees and would potentially prolong your athletic life. By end of Nov I was pretty sure I wanted to try ultras and started my traning. I joined the local running club NTTR which focusses mainly on trails and most of the people are seasoned ultrarunners. I met couple of people from the club and started running with them now and then. I have enrolled in a tough 50K, Bandera as my first try at ultra in Jan'07