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Anu Vaidyanathan: Shepparton Half Ironman
By Anu Vaidyanathan
11/17/2009 |
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Someone made a remark recently that tooling around in Canberra is way better than shuttling between BLR and Mumbai on shitty flights, overweight co-passengers and delayed baggage. This got me thinking and I concluded that I still have to make my case that a week in Dickson, ACT (pop. 26,000), a small suburb of Canberra, while trying to get back into the thick of training and working and studying full-time is not as vanilla as it seems. My trip started with the flight from hell, which left at 7am. This meant a 4am wake-up call, loading my bike box (and myself, albeit a little chubby after 5 weeks of off-season) into a shuttle with a manic-depressed driver, who chose to stand on the other side of the fence in the pitch dark while I tried to patiently explain, at 4:20am, that no, the bike box really cannot scale a 6 foot gate. After some miracle of nature, I boarded the flight and did not have a month's salary charged for my bike box and promptly went to sleep on the very uneventful flight to Sydney. When I woke up, drooling, I was told that the flight had to wait on the tarmac as Sydney was not expecting us... how that happened was beyond me and I tried some eye-ball yoga to get my lenses fit back properly as they swam in a sea of slumber long deprived.
Being an endurance athlete in India is quite entertaining but the real adventure is in being a woman. In Canberra, the first person I met was a Bangladeshi taxi-driver, who seemed nice enough but, his chatter made me all the more nervous about the escalating meter. When we finally made it to my backpackers, 6ks from the central business district, I was quite glad to be on solid ground once again. The hostel was owned by a Chinese man called Harry, who had outstanding issues with the Indo-Chinese standoff in 1950, or thereabouts.. Everytime he saw me hence, he yelled "give me dollar", which I took to mean the code-phrase for something more important than breathing the air in the over-crowded corridor that lead to my windowless room........
I was in Canberra to attend a conference, paid for by someone else, hence the windowless room with 6 bunk beds for one person. Fitting me and my bike in there was crazy enough, let alone the five piles of clothes every triathlete needs. I took off on my long run around 6:30 pm after what had been 7 hours of travel, 4 hours in transit and an all nighter the night before dealing with a client's woes on the rapacity of the number 7. In the second hour of my run, I suddenly found myself flat on my face, having an intimate conversation with the pavement. I was bruised badly and my walkman had started singing to itself. I picked myself up, swore never to dream about being an item girl with the various Bollywood tunes in my playlist and ran back to the wonderful backpackers at around 9pm.
The week passed with about 20Ks of swimming, 11 hours of biking (to and from work and morning and about 8 hours of running in the concrete jungle on some terrible shoes with no support for my flat, duck feet. Come Friday, my work was almost done, 40 hours of tooling around, sticking forks in toasters with a bunch of Electrical Engineers can do one in. Happily for me, I was living in what was China town, 3 minutes walk from a 50 meter pool, air temps around 30+ degrees and good to swim in, 6am onwards and definitely, the best food. I thought I should take a little road-trip to re-build my personality. I remember when this used to be fun, long drives, new places, road-trips with my best friend, both of us too broke to pay for anything other than gas and places to pitch our tent. So, I took a trip down to Shepparton, just to see a bit of the country and just zone out for a bit. The trip itself was uneventful but, I was in a happy place. In general, ive never been so rested and chilled out before a race. There was always stress and expectations, all the time, before this. But, the past few months have been amazing, post-August. In short, the swim was tragic (non-wettie), the bike was a PR by more than 20 minutes and the run was also tragic (but, Im in training for a marathon soon so, I didnt care.. I just enjoyed the day.
Things are changing, for the better!
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