Year of Running in Tandem, Asynchronously

Some days back completed First year of Running with my better half Shilpi Agarwal CSM

Although we didn’t ran simultaneously even once (in order to manage our 1.9 yrs Power house)..we did completed our journey together.

Stats on the way

• Together completed 2300 Kms of run that include 5 Half marathons, 92 10Ks and 156 5K runs. (more high level stats in our interactive dashboard tracker here)
• Achieved an elevation gain of 2.5 times the height of Mount Everest.
• 6 Finisher medals from as many Running Events.
• Wildest dash being 250 Kms runs by each one of us in 31 days run challenge.

Reflections on the way

• Age can be a sign of maturity but not a sign for not making a fresh start. Yes physiological constraints can play a role but determination, enjoying the journey and comparison with only self… do help.
• Extrapolating current/past situations to a future state linearly is futile. Four years ago, when I underwent ACL tear reconstruction surgery twice, never in my wildest dream imagined picking vigorous activity like running. You may never know what the future holds for you so always be Curious and Open ended as this wonderful life's journey unfolds.

• Your comparison has to be you. This I learned from my better half. We decided to add another team member to our family pretty late in our life and it took us some time to adapt to the change (and more so during Covid). But her determination to get better than her Pre- pregnancy fitness levels while managing all the changes around was commendable and did helped me also to keep the growth mindset with comparison with myself.
• ?Taking others together makes the journey enjoyable. During the journey we supported each other to achieve what we believe we can do. But we also had check-ins to evaluate whether we are enjoying the journey or not. And did take corrective actions as needed.?
• Your comparison with others should be to take away best practices, to feel inspired and, to celebrate their success.

• Enthusiastic and Inspirational vibe around ..do help you to get out of winter when you feel like giving away. We both are lucky to be living in a community of age defying fit friends who keep encouraging us with their child-like enthusiasm.?
• Starting small and Consistency helps. We started with running 1-2 KM runs but being regular did help us to push the limits.
• Downtime is nature's way of bringing back the zing. We did had some Health breaks ranging from COVID to tooth surgeries to nursing kids and vacations but those helped us to get back strongly at Running.

• Being hands-on helps. When we started tracking our runs last August, I wanted to track our runs and milestones. Strava, although provide visualizations but didn’t provide head to head or aggregated visualizations. I was able to build a daily refresh Interactive dashboard in Tableau. The code can run on demand from my phone on google drive to fetch data from Strava and data is visualized on Tableau Public dashboard (which refreshes automatically once in a day).?
• Momentum of confidence. Confidence in one area can help you to get better in other areas. Running helped me to get back to my another love Cricket. I was good at Cricket during my School/College/Initial Job days but left the same due to knee problems and other priorities. Getting back at Bowling with the same college level intensity has been possible due to increased confidence in my ability to pick things again.?

The journey so far has been amazing and it is just a start. Planning to take this Momentum in other areas of life as well. Lets see what unfolds.

#runningmotivation

#agenobar

?Track our runs on Strava: Vaibhav and Shilpi

Track our neck to neck runs on interactive dashboard here