My first marathon

I have trained for my first marathon with my good friends Pavan Singh, Girish Ramesh and few other friends from Asha for Education, Anil Rao, Kiran Karadi and Arun Simha. The marathon was on April 25th, 2004 and we started training around end of December. The training had gone fine till I had almost 5 week break just 2 months before the race. I went to India on a long vacation and even though I planned on doing some running, it was impossible to run in India with my schedule there. So, my training was cut short and I was able to do one long run of 20 miles 3 weeks before the race at Rancho SanAntonio hills.

I was really excited and looking forward to the marathon, not only because it was my first one but also as it was supposed to really beautiful course on Hwy1 with rugged mountains on one side and pacific ocean on the other. Pavan and myself have decided to run together as long as we can and we were able to run together till almost 21miles. We were doing pretty consistently 11 min miles and a little slower on uphills. It was a beautiful but tough course with rolling hills through out the whole course. We did hear about the run/walk method from the race director Jeff Galloway, the day before and tried it out till mile 21. At that time, Pavan wanted to take it a little easy and I was by myself and the mind games have started. I just took it easy and was walking at every uphill and slowly counting down the miles. It was tough not only due to the miles but also the temperature was creeping above 80F. Finally, after 4hr43min, I could see the finish line and I somehow managed to race it to the line. I was ecstatic and was still in disbelief that I have indeed finished the marathon, all 26.2 miles of it. We all have celebrated the finish with some nice poses for pictures and some good food!