It all happened finally on Nov 18th. I had been looking forward to this day from long time.
Just 2 weeks before the marathon my friend Monna also decided to run a half marathon at Phili. So me and Chendur hopped on to his car and drove down to Philadelphia. As all marathon runners we had a pasta dinner the previous night. We were with the Lend A Hand for India team for the dinner.
2 weeks back the weather prediction for Philadelphia was pretty bad. The highest temperature was supposed to be 1 Degree Centigrade and there was supposed to be ice and rain. Thankfully the weather finally turned out to be slightly better. But it was still close to 0 Degree Centigrade, it was drizzling & was windy. But it was not enough to stop us We got up early and reached the marathon start location. We could see a huge crowd of over 10,000 people. Apart from the runners there were so many people all around to cheer the runners. There was lots of excitement all around.
Finally the run started. I and my friend Karthik were planning to run the full course together. But even before completing the 1st mile both of us decided to use the restroom. There was a huge line in front of the restroom and guess what we both lost each other there! So I was running all alone for most of the time. I lost some 10 minutes due to the rest room. Due to this and also due to the fact that I started my run at the end of the crowd, it took almost 10 miles for me to cross the people who had come to walk half marathon. All along I was wondering where the runners are? I ran at a relaxed pace as it was my first marathon. I did not want to risk getting an injury. I crossed the half stage after 2 hrs 50 mins & guess what the winner Timothy Psitet had completed the run well before I could even complete half. His timing was 2:25:01. He said he it took more time for him due to the rain and windy conditions! Anyway I was not running to win the Gold and neither the silver The track was such that by the time I finish half my run I can see the ones finishing the full run at the other side of the road. I could see lots of people finishing full run. Most of them had amazing body and I watched them with awe! I could see quite a lot of people of age over 50 finishing the run at around 3 hours time! Maybe someday I can also try finishing in less than 4 hours at least (well I guess I am not going to aim to finish at less than 3 hours, that’s a bit too much!).
I took some inspiration from these amazing runners and continued my run. I saw lot of interesting runners along the way. There was a lady who was completely dressed like a panther. There was a guy juggling 4 balls while he was running! He was doing it all along. First I thought he was doing the half marathon, but later I saw him at around 20 mile mark & was quite amazed that he was still juggling the 4 balls and was on his way to complete the full marathon!! For some distance before I completed the half marathon I was running with a lady who was probably 70 year old! I later came across a mother and son running together. The young son was cheering his mom all along saying ‘Common mom’ & the mom was saying all along ‘Coming son’! At around 14 mile mark I came across a guy who I am sure was at least 75 year old! I came across a group of around 6 people with a lady holding a balloon and a board saying that they will complete the run in 5:30 hrs. They were doing the run at different pace, the lady would instruct everyone to run faster they will all increase speed, then she will tell everyone to decrease speed they will all reduce their speed. I thought I could do much better and I overtook them and went further. After crossing mile 15 I was quite tired and my pace started varying. I was running quite slowly also at several distance & later the group of 5:30 overtook me. The 75 year old guy had also joined them. I decided to join this group & later I realized that running with a group was really very helpful! I came to know that the lady leading the group was a professional pacer!
Philadelphia is a very beautiful city. It is an old city with lots of history. It has lots of colonial style buildings with marvelous architecture. That made the run more memorable. There were lots of volunteers at multiple points along the track offering water, Gatorade and energy gel. Not to mention there were people all along the 42.2 KM track cheering the runners. ‘Go runner go’! At some of the places there were people playing live music along the track. And at many places where the track passes through residential areas people has put loud speakers on their window and were playing music loud for the runners! One more interesting encounter was to see a group of people who were offering beer to the runners! What a spirit the Phili people have got! After finishing mile 20 I was so damn hungry. Few volunteers were offering cut pieces of Oranges. I could only grab one piece of it because I was wearing leather gloves. Man! That was the best piece of orange I have ever tasted! I wished I should have grabbed more. After running for half more mile I even thought of running back to grab more oranges! But that would have been a real silly thing to do!
And guess what, at mile 24 I met Karhik with whom I was planning to run the full marathon. He joined my 5:30 group which had grown to a sizable number by now. He had developed severe knee pain as he had expected before. We ran the last 2 miles and finished the run together. My chip time was 5:27:55 which is nothing great to talk about. I think I really need to better this record by running one more marathon!
I should thank Lend A Hand for India for all their support. Charu took my photo on the way. I met Raj at mile 8 and 20 and even he took my running photo and video! I will post them on my blog once I collect it from him.
We collected the medal and went to the food tent to have some food. It was only after I stopped running that I realized how cold it was outside. Few minutes after I stopped running I started shivering. I had to wait in the cold for 2 more hours for all our friends to finish running and complete all the formalities of the marathon. Those 2 hours were actually much tougher for me than the marathon run itself. I thought for sure that I am going to fall sick due to the cold. But thankfully nothing happened and went to sleep that night with a great sense of achievement!
Finally, thanks for all those who supported my cause by contributing to the fund that I am raising for Lend A Hand for India. There has been a good collection in my fund and I will soon post the details on my blog.
First time I heard of the concept of Marathon was nearly 6 years back when I was doing my Engineering at REC, Surathkal. I still remember, Times of India had a big article with heading "Run Anil Run". This was about Anil Ambani & how he took up Marathon to trim down is 100 KG plus body! It was an inspiring story for me & boom I also started running. I inspired many of my hostel mates to take up running and many of us eventually ended up participating in the 10,000 meters run in the college. Running a full Marathon was always a hidden desire in me. I always knew that New York is a place where lot of people train for Marathon. And now life and brought me to New York and given me an opportunity to fulfill my long cherished dream.
Running a Marathon is not just a personal challenge to me; I am also doing it for a cause. I attended one of the Salsa party of Lend A Hand for India and got introduced to the kind of work Lend A Hand for India. There is a famous quote by somebody
Give a poor man a fish to eat and he will have food for one day. Teach him fishing and he will have food for his entire life.
This is exactly what LAHI is doing. LAHI is giving Vocational Training and Career guidance for young boys and girls in rural and urban India to make them employable and to help them find job. LAHI works with lots of schools and helps them reduce the school drop out rates. LAHI has several other activities. You can get the complete information about the organization on www.lend-a-hand-india.org
I am running full marathon at Philadelphia on November 18th. I am running 26.2 miles and I am trying to raise $100 per mile that I am going to run which would be $2620. It would be really nice if you can contribute some amount and support my run and help Lend A Hand for India. These are few of the ways that your contribution to LAHI can help–>
- $100 pays for the tuition fee of two boys / girls for a vocational training program - $400 pays the one-year salary of a trainer at the school - $1500 pays to purchase a PC and internet facility for a high school - $4000 pays for the one year of operating cost of a batch of students for training programs (includes teacher’s salaries, consumables, coordination, and monitoring) or meets the capital cost of launching a vocational training center at a high school.
Lend-a-Hand India is a 501(C)(3) organization, and all donations are Tax Deductible and eligible for company match programs. You can contribute by sponsoring me online through PayPal (click on the button below - no PayPal account required) or by check payable to "Lend-A-Hand India" to the address below. Most of the employers do match your contribution, which means that your contribution gets doubled! Click here for a selected list of companies that match donations.
Thank you!
Shesh
Please use the below button to contribute.
For a contribution by check, please make the check payable to "Lend-A-Hand India" write "Sponsorship for Shesh Paplikar" in the memo and mail to:
Lend-A-Hand India 784 Columbus Avenue #10G New York NY 10025, USA
Lights representing the WTC twin towers… WTC lights are reaching the sky…
Well it’s 09/11 again. The world has changed a lot from the past 6 years! The security at New York was much higher today as expected. One could see NYPD every where. Since, I have to go though the World Trade Center station everyday, I had a chance to catch some piece of action. From past 5 days, lot of people can be seen in and around WTC. There are lots of activists going around with different agenda. Some say that "WTC attack was an insider job. Investigate!". Some are there to say, "Ongoing war should be stopped". Some are there to pay tribute to the people who died in the attacks!
One can see US flags all around. There are couple of gaint US flags flying over the nearby buildings. For me the most eye catching part is the two strong beam of lights reaching the sky. These two beams represent the twin towers which were destroyed during the 09/11 attack.
I had a long wait for this. When I was planning to buy an iPod last year, my friend Spot told me about the full screen iPod that Apple is planning to launch. Since then I have been waiting for the full screen iPod. I was very exited when Apple announced the iPhone with full screen. But, I didn’t buy an iPhone due to reasons like–> i. iPhone comes with 2 Year contract with AT&T. So, if I move to India anytime in between I will be forced to pay extra money to break the contract. 2. Also, I am already having a very good contract at a great monthly rate with Sprint. 3. iPhone cannot be used with other service providers. It doesn’t allow the user to put a SIM card into it. So, the phone will be useless for me when I visit India for vacations.
But, today my wait is over. Steve Jobs finally announced a new generation of iPods. And the hot launch of today is the iPod touch. This new iPod is very similar to the iPhone except that this is not a phone. So, this doesn’t come with a contract with AT&T which is good for me. The pricing of the new range of iPods looks pretty good. The touch screen with lot of patented technologies makes iPod touch (like iPhone) way ahead of any other competitor product. And not to miss, this comes with Wi-Fi capability with a built in browser. Now one can easily sync one’s iPod to get latest podcast like news etc which can be downloaded from iTune built in the iPod touch. One can easily buy songs, movies and TV shows directly from the iPod!
As always Steve Jobs came up with a great Key Notes today & I placed the order for a 16 GB iPod touch after watching the wonderful Keynotes. The product won’t be shipped until the end of this month, so I am eagerly waiting for it.
The large screen makes it so much more easier for me to watch movies on the go, especially when I am travelling long distance in flights or trains. Also, now it’s much easier for me to share my photographs with my friends when I meet them! Since, I am training for Marathon, the music part of the iPod will be much more useful than usual for me.
New Year celebration has been pretty amazing for me from the past few years. While I was enjoying the beaches of Goa last year, this year I had a chance to visit the Heaven on earth, the Las Vegas. The Casinos are so amazing and so Royal out there, sometime it becomes difficult to understand whether it’s dream or reality!
After many years, I had the chance to catch up with my KREC classmates Mohit, Divakar, Dharmesh & Vasanth. What better place to meet than Las Vegas!
Las Vegas is the true Maya Nagari of the current time. Every moment there was so absorbing. One can find the greatest gambling dens like Wynn and Bellagio over there which have been built at a cost of over a billion dollar! Visit any of these Casino’s and you will have to keep pinching yourself to check whether you are awake or dreaming! LV has everything that a pleasure seeker can ask for. Beautiful women, great bars with amazing bartenders, great shows, unbelievable live shows and the gambling dens which are open round the clock!
We were there for couple of days. Initial period we spent on top of the 1149 feet Stratosphere. There were lots of truly breathtaking rides on top of Stratosphere! We spent lot of time doing Casino hopping. Each Casino has been built on different themes. I was just spell bound at the grandeur of each of the Casinos. Whoever visits Las Vegas must and should visit a high profile Live Shows of Las Vegas. We visited the ‘Le Reve’ show at Wynn. It’s a show on waters! The show was so much out of the world that most of the time of the show I couldn’t believe that something like this was happening in front of my eyes.
Whats the fun of visiting LV if one doesn’t gamble! We started gambling at the Stratosphere Casino. My luck was so good at Roulette that at one point I had made so much profit that there was no place to keep the $5 coins that I had one. The whole table was following my moves. I got so absorbed on the ‘Roulette’ table that I played for 24 hours non-stop without even taking a break for food. I started on 31st morning and left the Roulette table on 1st morning. The only time I went out of the Casino was for 10 minutes when the 12:00 AM New Year fireworks was going on outside! Me and Mohit implemented so many algorithms on the ‘Roulette’ table and it was great fun implementing the algorithms!
Guys, this is supposedly an amazing vehicle. This is based on a technology purchased by Suzuki recently from Fiat. This car will supposedly give a mileage of 20kmpl !! So, it should work out to something like Rs. 2 per KM!
(An interesting fact about this diesel technology developed by Fiat is that in India this technology will be used by Maruti, Fiat, Tata and General Motors!)
Also, look out for Santro diesel, Getz diesel and Zen diesel which will be launched soon.
i. Diesel is cheaper than petrol in India (Petrol Rs.55 & diesel Rs.40 per litre in Bangalore -Jan 2007)
ii. Diesel cars give more mileage (distance per litre of fuel) than petrol.
iii. Diesel technology has improved a lot in recent times.
It looks like the era of diesel cars has arrived in India!
Skoda (they have amazing diesel engine technology), Toyota and Honda (will launch a small hybrid car also) will have their small car (hatch back) in India in in another year or two.
In 2007, 50 new car models are being launched in India.
Also, Mahindra-Renault, Nissan, Fiat-Tata have lot of plans for India and not to speak of Audi, BMW and Merc with their own plans for India!
Lot seems to be happening in the Indian car market!
This was a Thanksgiving I’ll remember for a long time.
I went to Smoky Mountains with my roomie Rahul. We had booked a cabin in Gatlinburg, the most famous town in Smokies. Man, the cabin was amazing. It had a really large TV, DVD player Playstaion, x-box……billiards table, foosball, jacuzzi. It was a truely amazing wooden cabin. We were joined by Rahul’s friends and their friends in Gatlinburg. Our gang was made of 18 colorful people!
We started the first day with Jacuzzi and beer. We later played poker till late night. Poker can be a very interesting game with lot of people around. The next day we went around for long drive around in the smokies. The traffic was real slow in the mountains. Along the drive we stopped for our Rang De Basanti. We had real fun while driving. Rahul’s car was top down most of the time. We were going on with full music. That day evening we had good food in a restaurant and then we had the highlight of the day. We went for bull ride. Even though it’s not exactly a real bull, the ride can be pretty tough! It’s a machine which looks like a bull. We are supposed to sit on it with only one hand on the rope. This bull shakes us off and believe me it’ll throw you off in 30 seconds!
The last day we went around for go carting and other games. We ended the day with Horse riding. We were a bit late and we had to ride the horse on the mountain track in darkness. Nevertheless, it was a wonderful experience.
The best part of our holiday was that the weather was great on all the four days. It was sunny thoughout.
Ravi and I had nice time in Goa and we headed to Pune in the Goa express. The journey was awesome. Lot of people from our Osho camp were with us in the train. And not to mention the track of the train was amazing. We get a water falls on the track & the train goes through the hills and forests of the wonderful Western Ghats!
We landed in Pune & took up a room at Popular Heights near Osho Commune. We stayed in Pune for 5 days. The experience at the commune was nice. The pyramid meditation room was as out of the world as it could be. It’s definitely one of the best man made structures on this planet. This is my second visit to the commune. Some how it was not as interesting as my first visit. I started to get a little bored this time. May be because there were very less people around in the commune this time.
At the right time I met Ma Rachana from Nepal in the commune. She said it’s a good time to visit Nepal and invited me to Katmandu. Again started my journey. I bought the train ticket to Delhi and started my journey without a confirmed seat. And guess what I spent my birthday on that train without a booked seat! Couldn’t sleep whole night! But I made friends in the train. There was a Kashmiri girl in the train who helped me sit through the tough journey.
Finally we reached Delhi.My KREC friend Neelesh was there to help us. We stayed at his place in Katwaria Sarai just behind IIT, Delhi. From Delhi Ravi left to Haridwar to learn Yoga from Ramdev & I left for Katmandu in a bus. Well, my intension was to fly to Nepal but a recent rule which has made it mandatory to have either passport or election id with us to fly to Nepal prevented me to take the air route. I met a travel agent who said it just takes 24 hours to go to Katmandu by bus. It was only I started my bus journey that I realized that I had been taken for a ride. As a matter of fact for a long ride They bus journey turned out to be one of the most difficult in my life. It was a 44 hour journey in a bus in which people had been loaded like cattle. I was the only Indian in that bus, rest were all Nepalis! God knows how I came out of that bus journey alive!!
I stayed at Osho tapobanin Katmandu. It was a nice experience over there. Tapoban is located on a slope of a mountain right in the middle of the Himalayas. Even here there was not much crowd as Sw. Anand Arun was out of the country. Usually there’ll be lot of people here when mediation camps are being conducted. I got a nice driver who stays near to Tapoban. He reminded me of the driver Salman Khan gets in the movie Saajan. This driver was having a 1978 Nissan & man that car was in a great condition! He took me all around Katmandu. I also met Ma Rachana who showed me places around. She is a popular personality in the Nepal entertainment world. She used to be the news reader on the national channel few years back. Now she is a producer, actress,…..She was the only friend I had there and she did make my Nepal visit a memorable experience.
The most amazing and unexpected fact about Nepal that I discovered was that the Nepali girls/women are extremely beautiful. Also, it is said that there are lot more women in Nepal than men. At least that’s how it looked to me. Women in Nepal are not conservative like in India. They have taken up all kinds of profession which is more visible than in India.
Overall it was a great experience in Nepal.
Finally I got a certificate from Indian embassy which allowed me to take the air route back home.
I had the pleasure of visiting Goa again this year! After all I started this year in Goa
There was a Osho camp being conducted in Goa by Bagmar swamiji of Osho Arihant Dhyan Kendra, Pune. That was an awesome news for me and my frined Ravi. We just started our journey heading towards Goa. The camp was held in a wonderful beach resort - Nanu Resort at Betalbatim in Goa. We got good accomodation, nice swimming pool, g8 food, awesome beach & of course the meditation camp. The crowd was mostly from Maharashtra in and around Pune. They were very friendly and I had great time with them.
After the camp we went around Goa for a day & we then left for Pune in Goa express. Man the track was awesome, I have photos from the train, checkout the full article!
