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Waking up on what is usually a non-rest day to rest – in the name of taper – gave me a reason to sleep in a little extra today. After cooking breakfast for the young boy – something I hadn’t done in ages – I settled down to a bit of work and reading.

I had a long work day ahead of me. Combining race week taper and work can be tricky – at least for me. An uneasy rest that feels neither here nor there. But here is a very interesting excerpt from the etymology of the word ‘rest‘:

The original prehistoric signification of the Germanic noun was perhaps a measure of distance; compare Old High German rasta, which in addition to “rest” meant “league of miles,” Old Norse rost “league, distance after which one rests,” Gothic rasta “mile, stage of a journey.”

League of miles; what a nice sound about that, an apt name for a movie or a play.

An easy run on a taper week makes me think about the usual questions. Have I trained well? Am I feeling rested? How will it go?

On one hand, a few days before a race, this suggests nervous energy but on the other hand, I tend to have a removed and dispassionate attitude. What Will be, Will be.

The one feeling I can’t quite get a grip on is if I am at a racing weight that makes me feel light. As a middle aged amateur runner, that joyous sense comes far and few in between. Quite like the super blue moon this August.

This morning, my sister Roshini, the young boy and I went to Nehru Park. It is Raksha Bandhan. At this time in the morning, the roads were in anyway empty, but a festival seemed to lend another kind of freedom about the day.

It was an easy run and the young boy and I chatted through the run. We spoke about effort and attitude. About warming up and speed. But most of all, we spoke about the word ‘tired’.

Merriam-Webster defines tired as ‘drained of strength and energy : fatigued often to the point of exhaustion.’

Oxford is gentler defining it as ‘feeling that you would like to sleep or rest; needing rest.’

The word needs to be crumpled up and thrown in the trash can. Its usage, in my mind, dulls the brain further into feeling that way – and worse. While of course, I am no behavioural scientist and have only a personal opinion about this, I would much rather err on the side of using that word sparingly. You have to earn the right to tiredness and keep nudging it further away.

Most of the run, he ran barefoot, many times he did fast strides to add to the run. At the end, we were dripping with sweat. But tired? I don’t think so.

It’s race week for a 10k this Sunday. The taper starts after an interval and tempo workout today.

While two hundred metre repeats are a decidedly short interval session, it’s the effort put into each repetition that makes it hard. An obvious fact but one that tends to feel masked because of of the short distance.

But just how hard? Today, I was running with much faster boys who were at least five to seven seconds per repetition faster – essentially an eon ahead. Because of their pace, my repetitions were faster than expected – following their stride and cadence for as long as I could hold on to them.

Pakar ke rakho, Coach Ravi kept shouting out.

In the final set – a two kilometre tempo – I kept up a decent pace and finished reasonably strong. A satisfactory run before the taper.

Early morning, dawn was just seeping past the kitchen window. It was a rest day and I was working early, furiously tapping away at my laptop but aware of the changing sky, the change of light.

Just twenty four hours earlier, I was well into my long run. A lot changes within a day, a short period of time – supposedly.

In this period the earth travelled 2.6 million kilometres or over a hundred and seven thousand kilometres every hour. And then the earth is spinning as well, at over 1600 kilometres per hour at the equator. I find these facts simply mind boggling. Everything, momentarily, seems trivial. 

But life here, the spin of life here and now, is the seemingly implicit reality. In that, perhaps the mix of life – from work to family, friends to birthday celebrations, problem to solutions – all this too happens in the course of a day, often at its own frenetic pace. And, of course, too much dessert. 

By tomorrow, millions more kilometres would have been traversed, and I would have less than an atoms worth of that in interval sets. 

When we reached Nehru Park, my sister and I parted ways. She ran with friends, and I was meant to run alone. But soon, I bumped into Shikha. After exchanging a few sentences, we ran in silence but not in solitude, with awareness of each other, in step and probably matching cadence and stride. After about an hour or so, I ran alone.

By now, the Niti Marg stretch was busy – almost carnival like. Shanti Path, true to its name, was relatively quieter. In brief stretches, I could hear the sound of my shoes against the tarmac, and for a few seconds it seemed all was still. But this, until I passed groups of runners chatting loudly or cyclists broadcasting old Hindi songs. I didn’t mind any of this in the least. Who was I to mind anyhow?

It was carnivalesque, joyous and Sundays at Nehru Park had a place for everyone. 

But if I wanted quiet, it is easy for me to hop across to the parallel Nyaya Marg which is broad, leafy and sparse. Further along, in the many tributaries of the many roundabouts of Lutyens Delhi, there are many avenues that offer their own type of morning. 

It seems many moons ago that I ran with my friends Maneesh and Amit, and we would take off – as we said back then – towards India Gate, via the seemingly endless Akbar Road, circumvent the India Gate quadrant, run towards Khan Market, down Amrita Shergill Marg or Aurangzeb Road, as we pleased, taking a kind of circuitous route back to Nehru Park via Race Course Road. These storied roads of Lutyens Delhi, the geometric charm of these radial boulevards.

Sunday mornings in this beautiful city.  

At the track today, it felt as if it had been a while. It had – a week – but felt longer than that. Nearly all the boys were here at the track, as was the young boy. The session was repetitions of three hundred metres with a slow hundred between each. 

End August, dawn would only break mid-way through the session. After a few laps of warm up and some drills with Ashwani – that he made look graceful and instead I felt and probably looked like I had two left feet – we stretched and were ready for the intervals.

Everyone ran fast but especially Pawan, who ran a good five seconds ahead of me and most of the others. It was in these short distance intervals that most of the boys were not only faster than me – to be expected – but had a kick especially towards the end that I couldn’t match up to in the least. 

I loved it though. Trying to keep up, watching their cadence, movement of their arms, their still upper body, the way their legs spun in that ever beautiful motion of the kind of jumping that is called running. 

The young boy did well, and especially where he was ahead of me – barefoot, legs moving as if on a motor.

On the treadmill today, with reasonable energy, I ran listening to music.

Music today after a long time. I don’t think I listened much although occasionally catching a familiar beat or tune. My thoughts were entirely elsewhere and occupied mostly with work.

I increased the speed steadily through the kilometres and towards the last mile or so, I tried some high knee running.

Catching my reflection in the window, it seemed I was doing some kind of funny jig on this moving belt.

A quick and vigorous workout later rounded up the morning to settle into the well earned second cup of coffee.

When I woke up it was just past three. I was briefly tempted to cancel today’s run too. I was better but didn’t feel a hundred percent. But to begin with, coffee helps. Especially as early as that – certainly for me.

Driving to the track, I contemplated whether I should make up yesterday’s missed intervals or carry on with today’s session.

I had no clear answer until I reached the track and decided more or less on a whim to run easy on Lane 10. A couple of gents who I see at the track joined me, weaving in and out as they pleased. As I progressed, each loop became marginally faster.

Because it is difficult to keep counting loops in your head – at least for me – and because I don’t have a watch that adjusts to the track lanes – I run the track in stopwatch mode and lap myself according to either the intervals prescribed (Lane One) or according to a convenient number that I can remember when running easy (Lane Ten).

Today it was sets of seven loops each. An easy number to remember. Each set was faster than the previous not by any mention in the session notes, but simply out of the nature of a warmed up body. I ran with my mouth closed, nose breathing, to keep at an easy six effort pace.

There is its own charm in running loops for easy runs – entirely different from running at Niti Marg. People will often say it can be tedious and boring to run anything but intervals at the track.

Perhaps so. But for me it is many things – an exercise in patience – in seeing the boys in Lane One run with precision and agility – me in Lane Ten – watching as if a moving spectator – and about simply repeating the oval shape in this most predictable manner.



When I slept last night, I could feel a wave of exhaustion and the possibility of falling ill. I rested in but went into work.

True to the body’s instinct (or the mind?), I was feeling unwell by early afternoon. I had carried my running clothes in the hope to run this evening. But instead, I came back home and passed out.

Perhaps it will be just one of those one day things.