Runners Low

After a couple of years of consistent running and getting a bit obsessive about it and falling into the trap of speed worship, I have hit a wall injuring my Iliotibial Band(ITB). After running a 25K at the last Bangalore Ultra 2008 and running 20Ks around 2:30, I felt I need to improve the timings and joined a training, a new initiative in Bangalore, Runners High. While the training looked good, I had many indicators that told me to slow down, but I didn't. The first signs were the chronic neck sprains and one of them was during one of the speed work. Speedwork is prone to push your body and the loose ends show up. But that didn't stop me from my drive towards an under 2:30 half marathon. Since I was doing the run-walk on my long runs, I was pretty confident that injuries can't catch up with me that easily. So everything was looking good till 15K runs, where I could finish pretty strongly with a 3:1 splits. In fact I was unhappy that they weren't doing long runs. One of those 16K runs, I missed the end turnaround point and ended up doing an 18K instead, but it turned out to be a troublesome one with the knee. I wasn't too worried because I hadn't run that distance for a long time. But the next week things turned a bit worrisome when I couldn't finish a 18K run. Started doing the stretches regularly and added some strength training. Things improved a bit before the KTM, but a poorly paced run at KTM seems to have aggravated the ITB. Since then I have been struggling to run a 10K, a slow 12K left me down with significant knee joint pain that persisted for couple of days. So it was time to listen to the body finally and take some rest and rejuvenate the body.

I also was cycling to work most of the days which added to the workload and the labor at the garden also added up.

Tyring to improve the timings was a bad idea instead of trying to run more distance gradually. The running time predictors told me that I could do a 2:20 half marathon and the fact that I could do a 2h30 20K in Jan 09 made me work towards a better time. The 10K training was going on well except for the neck sprains, I couldn't run the 10K being stuck with a flu. And the flus didn't trouble me for the half marathon training. But not slowing down for the hot climate and attempting a PB at KTM was a very stupid thing in retrospect. And being addicted to running, it was difficult to back off easily. And the problem with ITB is that it comes on only during running, which makes it tough to make a call not to run.

So I am going through a runners' low and going through a physiotherapy session to get things back to shape soon! The ITB looks better after couple of sessions, but it appears that the weak ITB has caused some swelling under the patella, which is kind of painful during therapy.

Composting with Dailydump Kambha

Seeing waste and reducing it or avoiding it at the source is an important step in leading a lean and sustainable lifestyle. And composting enables you to get the natural cycle back in motion. It would have been impossible to think of composting at home(at source) in an urban setting till we found DailyDump.

We started using the dailydump composting bin, the kambha, roughly a month ago and it has been some work and work in progress! Urban settings are designed for a non-sustainable living, a plastic living of you will. Things originate at one place sourcing materials from all over, leaving a trail of waste and pollution on the way and gets dumped elsewhere like this video from Story of Stuff illustrates. So any solution to compost in an urban setting is not going to be easy, it is designed to create waste. The kitchen waste attracts flies and urbanites scorn at flies and it is an indication of something not clean and it will bring diseases. Nobody thinks of it as a natural cycle of bio-degrading the natural waste!

So the flies are around the place at work in converting the waste into compost, but we are trying to get at an optimal number of flies by using a bit of neem cake, chilly powder and spraying the lemon grass oil as well as stirring the pile! You may not be used to the natural smell that emanates from the pile before it becomes compost, so it takes a bit of getting used to it as well. And the maggots are not a pretty scene either. It turns out that cokroaches are not interested in waste - hmm.. they need brand new stuff! But in couple of weeks you do get the smell of compost in the bottom vessel, though not yet ready for the plants!

While the natural open compost pits would let air and light onto the pile, the urban guerrilla compost pile needs to be covered to ward off the flies and maggots. This kind of slows down the natural cycle, but this is a descent compromise solution. So stirring the pile becomes really important to provide good ventilation to get the compost cycle going. Dry leaves may not be so common thing in the urban setting where trees tend to waste precious square feet, so you could substitute it with newspaper despite the ink to give the pile some variety and to suck the wetness out. But we got some help from the sweepers who would supply some dry leaves once in a while. Imagine if the apartment was doing it for the inhabitants - they could have made some money out of it. But the square feets of land are expensive and they find lawns more attractive wherever you find some space!

We also bought a leave-it-pot where you can leave the semi ready compost to degenerate into compost fully. Dailydump delivered it at home, a painted one, which looks odd among our terracotta pots and khamba. In fact they send a person(INR 200 for a visit) to help us sort out issues. Now we moved everything to a corner of our terrace which would give it more ventillation but needs some cover when it rains. It makes the kitchen and work area pretty clean and the flies are pretty much contained as well. And the first dump of compost is getting ready in the leave-it-pot and should be ready in couple of weeks I guess!

But it is worth a shot if you are worried about urban waste(watch that video again), especially if you realize that it will be dumped elsewhere, not recycled or composted elsewhere.You immediately see a drastic reduction in the waste that was dumped outside earlier. You don't really need the plastic bag everyday to prevent the leechate from the degradable waste anymore and it doesn't need to go out every morning! It is no more messy as earlier which makes it easier to find reusable stuff in it. And think about the compost for the plants in a couple of months from now - it sounds definitely worth the trouble.

Organic Guerilla Garden

As someone who scorned at people learning botany - what the hell, plants will grow anyway, what's there to learn about it - it was a bit of an unusual thing to get into gardening. But it turns out that you don't really need to know botany to be a gardener, especially the guerrilla type. It is the sustainable living philosophy that got me into it. Growing ornamental plants was another thing I laughed at - coconut trees or cashew lined all over the place was more attractive to me. So it has to be vegetable plants that would give something back, not the ones with beautiful(to the beholders' eyes) flowers or leaves!

But the organic way of gardening is a bit different beast I figured out on the way. It is a holistic thing - it is about creating an ecosystem that thrives on each other, not a targeted breeding of some particular plants. That made perfect sense, but that meant flowers and herbs are also needed. Our first vegetable plant, Ladies' Fingers, were attacked by some pests(leaf miners) and we tried a bit asking around to save them, but nothing worked. So I did a bit of reading about organic pesticides - specifically, this particular article at GoOrganicGardeing.com was a superb one that explains the fundamentals of the organic way!

And the conclusion was that if you are serious about natural organic way of doing things, you need to build an ecosystem, an ecosystem of vegetable plants, herbs, flowers, ornamental plants, bees, butterflies, birds, bugs and pests! You really don't have to intervene, you just enable the ecosystem with the right balance that will take care of itself - that was an wonderful revelation! You don't worry about isolated events in the garden, but they are symptoms of something wrong in the ecosystem. And most of the time, the problems get cured by itself. Everything has a place of its own in the organic ecosystem - isn't that a life lesson that we sorely miss most of the times ? And surely, a garden with just vegetable plants cannot thrive organically!

It makes Gardening a whole lot more meaningful and worthwhile to do! So we are building the ecosystem now, it is no more a organic vegetable garden - it better be an organic garden. Flowers look beautiful now - so we have a thulsi, shoe flower, marigold and a dahlia plants in the mix. I would have loved to setup a honey beehive as well, but this being an urban guerrilla garden, that might expose us a bit! We need a bit of watery area as well for the plants and the butterflies - so the water urn which is a typical ornamental thing, looks pretty attractive as well! And composting is indeed part of the game to complete the cycle - and thanks to DailyDump, the guerrilla composting is not that troublesome indeed.

And it is guerrilla style because it is fairly impossible to sustain a natural garden in an urban environment which is not designed for sustainable living, but for industry scale living that encourages suboptimal innovations that doesn't consider the complete picture. BTW, I still think that people should not learn too much about plants and their DNA - that creates the genetically modified seeds, people do micro-optimizations and loose the overall big picture in the bargain. It is such a shame that they have to invent Bt seeds!

So we are on the lookout for the birds, bees and the butterflies - attracting them into the garden would be the ultimate test of being organic! And the rest should follow!

First produce from the Garden

That's the first set of Ladies Finger from the garden which went into the sambar the other day. We should've harvested it a bit earlier, it was a bit over ripe. We are planning to remove the plants once we have harvested all of the remaining ones because of the bad condition of the plants.

Tomatoes and Chilly

Tomatoes have finally arrived in our garden on couple of plants. Rest of them have flowers on them and more should arrive soon. It is the Podland Pink variety from the Department of Horticulture. We had no idea what the stuff was till we saw some pictures at another blog.

The Ladies' Finger plants are fighting back and the new ones look very healthy and reminding us on what should have been if the pests hadn't attacked the plants. The new leaves also look very good. We kind of hurried in planting multiple plants in a single pot which seems pretty cramped and a very bad idea as well.

The chillies are out as well and in good condition as well. Not sure what's going on inside the carrot and onion plants. Onion plant seems pretty healthy and the carrots are catching up as well.

We also bought some flowering plants with flowers in it from Lalbagh to provide some variety and I guess it also helps keep the pests away from the vegetable plants. There is also the traditional thulsi plant in the lot, with its medicinal value. But you miss the excitement of seed starting and the discovery of the buds in the plants. But flowers are flowers nevertheless!

All of a sudden there are lots of things happening and hopefully we should be able to keep them pest free and have a good harvest soon!