First Trail Run

I signed up for a trail run in Coorg called The Coffee Trails 3.0. This is the Instagram Account; please check them out.

I have never participated in a trial run before and I felt that I needed some benchmark just to understand how the entire experience is.
This benchmark is from every perspective; the energy of the overall event to the difficulty of actually running 32k with elevation.

Moreover I wanted to see the hills of Coorg. (They are very very pretty).

Here is the link to my Strava

A very tight knit community

My very first impression of this event was that all the participants seem to know each other.
The total number of participants for this entire event was about 120-ish people which is very very less.

We were all added to a whatsapp group which was used to co-ordinate stay and other logistics.

The bib-expo was a day early and it felt like a very small party among friends.

I had some local coffee and it was delicious.

I met another person who was staying in the same lodge as I was. We teamed up for dinner. It was lovely. The owner of the lodge also ran a tempo service. He agreed to drive us to the starting of the race the following morning.

With all the logistics sorted, I could finally sleep peacefully.

The race!!

Initially the race was supposed to start in phases, but on the race day all the different event categories started at the same time.
The crowd was less so it was okay.

I started to feel the terrain within the initial 5 kilometers itself. Knowing that I needed sometime to warm-up, I decided to pull back my pace and just focus on moving. It was more difficult than what I was equipped to handle. By the first 5 kilometers itself I was running at the end of the entire pack. It was surely a humbling experience.

I will admit that I thought of giving up and returning to the city. It was quite brutal.

I do not know when I decided to not quit. I remember being very tired, but I also remember thinking to myself that winning or losing was not the point of me participating in this race. This race was supposed to be a datum for all of my future activities. I need to have a benchmark for my training as well.

Running is hard. Trail running is harder. I have made significant progress; from not being able to run 5k in March (Basic Mountaineering Course); to running a 31k trail-run (spoiler alert: I did finish this race).

I decided to treat the race as a really fast hike. I spoke to myself; I took lots of photos; I stopped at all the water-bodies and either touched them or dipped my feet it. I also drank from 2 separate streams. It was BEAUTIFUL. I almost choked on water I was gulping them down so FAST!!

I was also carrying 5 Mysorepak sweets. I told myself that I would eat them at every 5km mark. For the last 5km I had a bottle of CocaCola (caffeine + sugar). I think apart from everything else, this is what got me through the race.

At the 15km mark there was a aid-station after which we had a 2.5km climb to the top of a hill. I was here after 4 hours, most of the runners had finished the course by this time. I was lapped by the fastest 62k runner at this point (his name is Ganesh Kumar and he is an amazing runner). The following climb was quite brutal, but the beautiful landscape made up for it. I crossed two 31k runners which gave me a much needed boost in morale. All of us were struggling, so it was not much of a consolation.

This is me at the 18k mark.

This is a photo of the rock we were running to

On the way back, things were much more easier. I used up a can of RedBull on the way down. It was mostly un-eventful except that one of the people I had crossed on the hill, overtook me here. She came from behind me when I was walking and urged me to run with her. I tried to match her pace for sometime before giving up and settling back on a slower (and much more comfortable pace). I finished 15 mins after her. Running with her in the middle of that lonely section gave me much needed mental energy to power through the rest of the course. Ashwitha; if you're reading this; Thank You!! I really needed that boost.

I finished the race in 6 hours and 45 mins. The official declared cutoff was 7 hours. (Or it could be 6 hours). Depending on what it was, I will either DNF or finish. Either way, I think this was a great run.

The aftermath

There was food available after the run. I spent sometime lying on the ground and eating much needed food.
Soon I realized that I had booked the wrong bus and suddenly I had no way of returning from there. I asked Ganesh and his gang for a lift to Mysore.
I headed to the hotel and cleaned up and we left for mysore soon after. The drive was excellent due the presence of 3 great runners in the group. It was amazing chatting with them. I figured my way back from mysore on a KSRTC bus. I wish I had planned this out to make it a longer stay. That is for sometime else.

What am I supposed to learn from this ?

• I need more training. Significantly more training if I want to run the larger races.
• I need to teach my body and mind to continue to run even when my brain is tired. During the run there were a lot of places where my head stopped running even though my body was perfectly capable of running.
• I need to get used to running downhill. In some of the downhill sections I could not run as fast because I felt extremely uncomfortable about the rate at which I was descending.
• I need to train running in the heat more. The race day turned out to be significantly hotter and it was affecting me more than I would have liked it to.
• I want to increase my running volume to 50k a week in the coming 6 months (I am not an idiot, i will follow a plan to hit 50k per week target)

That is it for now.