Kavery Trail Marathon 2009

The next running event around Bangalore is the Kavery Trail Marathon(KTM) 2009, to be held in Srirangapatna along one of the canals' of Krishna Raja Sagar(KRS) in Mysore. It is near the river Kavery and might have been part of Kavery before KRS was built(BTW, Dams are yet another unnatural thing).

I am training for the event with Runners High, the only pro-training organization in Bangalore for all kinds of runners. Though they don't subscribe to the Galloway philosophy of running, they are not against it either. So I am sticking to the run-walk-run method as usual. The training plan that is being followed doesn't make you run the distance unfortunately - you have to wait for the race day on how your body would respond the race distance, which is a bit uncomfortable for me especially with a weak knee that seems to collapse at 16-17KM. So I am strengthening my knees and stretching the ITB and hoping to do a 2h30 half marathon though a 2h45m might be a realistic target. I am planning to shift to a pure Galloway training for the next run, Ultra-25K, with 3 days of running a week and slow long runs longer than the race distance during the weekend.

After last years' Ultra where I did 25K, I haven't run such distances since last January, which was a mistake and the knees became a bit rusty after that. So I will try to keep the 25K long runs going and potentially target a full marathon something in 2010. The sweet spot seems to be the knee at the moment, which would hold up hopefully for longer distances. I am a bit reluctant to get on to a strengthening program for the knees specifically, may be I need to get the knees used to the distance slowly. I would rather add more distance rather than train for better timings like I did this year. Also running should not come in the way of the daily routines(cycling to work, gardening, baby sitting) - so I need to slow down a bit and take it easy and get back to enjoying the runs instead of training for a target.