Vmware's Virtualzation Seminar Series - Bangalore 2009

Though I am not an IT guy, I attended Vmware's seminar series at Bangalore. Overall there were nothing new at the conference, and in fact reading the virtualization blogs would have been more productive use of the time at the conference.

It was at Leela Palace, one of the top hotels in town, but the conference room settings were a bit disorganized. Though there were many doors to the main hall, you need to enter through a door near the speakers. The rest of the place was packed with chairs. The breakout session was in a pretty small room which was cramped for space as well. It appears that VMware has been able to get good sponsorship from their partners in crime to offer this as a free one.

The morning sessions from Vmware India leaders were particularly dull. There was no passion in the top two people who talked about the market and features. In fact one of them almost said View from Oracle instead of Vmware, and it turns out that they hired her from Oracle recently. Not very impressive on stage at all - for such a hot product and company, they found it difficult to articulate the state of the product and vision, especially the director from Oracle who wasn't at ease with the products at all. Looks like Vmware have hired some typical boring mid-tier executives. Then the usual partner talk from the platinum sponsors followed, nothing really new - yes, we are lock step with VMware! But the HP guy did talk about non-x86 products and platforms to show their other offerings. But surely, VMware is the new king of infrasturcture software!

The talk from F5 on long distance V-motion and Vmware on View were interesting. Otherwise there were nothing new to call for a conference in my opinon.

Getting out of a Runners' Low

After nearly 2 years of consistent running, I have been laid low by an injury, pretty common among runners - ITB. I was in a training group, Runners High, to improve my running and ensure that I run properly without getting injured. It turned out that the training was a bit too much for me and I had to back off from the Bangalore Ultra-09 25K. Also there are other suspicious activity like cycling that I was doing during the training which could have worsened the situation. I thought I was taking it easy by not pushing for longer distances than last year by sticking to distances under 25K. Instead I was training for better timings, which was more injury prone I realize. The training programs were a bit more work than the Galloway programs that I was following. There were indicators that the training was a bit tough, I had a series of neck sprains and the knee started collapsing once the distances got more than 15K. But after the poorly paced half marathon at KTM, it was difficult to run even 10K when I decided to stop and take some action finally!

But it was a real low which was tough to endure. I couldn't do cycling or even skipping(jump) rope because everything hits the knee. Found it really difficult to get up and go swimming as well. Life in general was hit, hit badly with strong shades of blue for a while.

I turned to my trusted Orthopedician, Dr. Deepak Sharan who runs the Recoup clinics all over the city. The only sports med specialist I know of, Dr. Rajat(a runner himself), moved to Delhi with his clinic. The Anjanapura clinic, which was recently built, is pretty close to where I live. Dr. Deepak is a well known Repeitive Stress Injury(RSI) specialist and though he is not a sports specialist, most of the running injuries being RSI ones, he sure is a good doc to go to. He didn't need much time to diagnose the problem and the inflammation under the knee which was caused by the weak ITB was the problem, it was not just the ITB. It was very painful when he stuck his finger a bit below the knee. Treatment was manual therapy mostly, just massage out the tightness or inflammation. What I like about Dr. Deepak's treatment is the non-invasive nature of it - rarely does he prescribe any medicines except for some vitamins or other advanced therapy using some machines. While it takes a while to see some improvement, it works well! I have had some RSI problems earlier which was treated the same way. Needless to say, Dr. Deepak's diagnosis has always been spot on all the time. He is not that friendly with the patients, but what matters is the right diagnosis ultimately. And the approach to treating the problems have a holistic touch, not a short term quick fixes. He recommends yoga as a long term solution for many of the RSI problems.

After a little more than 2 weeks of trigger point manual therapy for a little more than 2 weeks, things look good. The main problem was the inflammation under the knee, which took some time to heal. ITB eased off within couple of days of therapy. Walking a bit was difficult during the first week of therapy, but things improved quickly and I am finally read to run again!

Lessons learned

• I don't need no training to run(that should have been straightforward!), I need to get back to the Galloway method of running which helped me run the distances. I just need to stick to that program and don't get distracted by time goals.
  
• Training to improve timing is wrought with danger, and the kind of fitness I am in, it is not worth it.
• My goals for running are to keep myself fit and enjoy the runs - the added pressure of time goals make the runs not so enjoyable, but more stressful. And to be fit, I need to be running for a long time
  
• Stop running if there is a problem - and fix it before you get back. It is really stupid to carry on with pain. Recoup is just round the corner!
  
• You don't really need the running "events" to enjoy your runs - that can be anywhere, choose the simplest thing that works! It also reduces the stress to prepare for an event.
• It is important to have another couple of other fitness activities to keep yourself occupied in case of an injury.
  

So I will carry on running, and see how much I can go and stop immediately when in trouble. Armed with the most natural running technique from Jeff Galloway, I sure want to keep running till I am 100 and enjoy it too !

Produce from the Garden

After more than 2 months of our foray into Gardening, we are harvesting vegetables - ladies' fingers are in regular supply, though the plants were lucky to survive the pest onslaught, picked up some carrots, which resembled like potatoes than carrots! The soil was a bit hard for it to go down easily and it got stuck there. Also the multiple plants in a single pot seems to have hurt the growth. From the top, it looked pretty healthy ones, but it was able to go down easily I guess. We are hoping that the next set of carrots would turn out good because the soil was prepared for carrots and the plant has enough space in a single pot.

The podland pink tomatoes are ripening, but with an orange shade though. There are couple of trusses with 3-4 tomatoes on most of the plants, but after that the next set of flowers didn't really produce anything.

Hopefully things will improve in the next round of cultivation and may be we need to seek help from some experts!