Hill or Hell? May be a Happy Hell!

Once in a while you need an eye opener. At least I do! An event that kind of throws the harsh reality at you and tells you that you have a long way to go. A really long way. Mt.Washington road race is one such event for me. I knew it was not going to be an easy race especially after hearing about it from our coach Jonathan who ran it in the past, but I was still surprised. To begin with, if it’s an easy race there would not be a lottery to get into it. Ironic. Isn’t it! It’s only a 7.6 mile road race. What’s so unique about it you may ask. Well, read on.

If you ever ran on a treadmill and played with the incline feature you know what the inclination percentage number is all about. I typically set it at 1 to 3 % when I train on treadmill. The Mt.Washington road race has an average inclination of 12 percent and the last stretch is around 22 percentage. I am not kidding! Doesn’t it sound brutal? Well it was. And that’s the whole point. Some treadmills don’t even have 12 percent option. They stop at 10 percent for inclination.

Even though the drive to the mountains was picturesque, waking up at 4AM and driving for 3 hours was a pain in itself. Especially if you are not used to seeing the sunrise! It’s been so long since I hit the road so early. The foggy roads and streaks of bright sun light through the trees was a thing to savor. My friend Mahesh (my ride) and I took a wrong turn somewhere in the route but managed to reach the base of Mt.Washington just in time. He was the last guy to be allowed to drive to the summit. He’s my ride (and for three other runners) downhill once the race is over.

It’s 20 minutes to the race and the green slopes, white and yellow daisies and almost clear blue sky were a true treat for any person, let alone a nature lover. Relishing the scenery, I did a quick 5 minute warm up flowed by 10 minutes stretching. Runners were all over the place looking at a Mt.Washington simulation video, stretching, and just relaxing before the race. We all gathered before the start line and the opening speech ended with “remember it’s just one hill!” and the canon went so loud that I kind of felt it in my heart. The echo from the mountains was very evident and the runners started the divine journey to the summit.

The first one mile was not very inclined but it’s the longest single hill stretch I ever ran until then. All I could hear was panting. All runners were panting so heavily that it sounded like I was in the middle of some sought of a tribal ritual. Mile one was cool and mile two was OK and then the game started to change. As I was approaching mile three I realized that I was not trained for such a mountain. My initial target for Mt.Washington was to finish the race in under 100 minutes (it’s just 7.6 miles!) or even better, under 90 minutes. Now the targets started to fade off.

Once I crossed mile mark three I was very eagerly looking for the half distance mark. I started taking many walk breaks, tried to talk myself to relax and enjoy the scenery and just keep covering the distance. My focus was to take small steps and just keep moving. Crossing the half mark at 50 minutes was quite a relief. I thought I could finish the race in under 100. Then I went through a very unique experience, something I never felt in the past. In my previous races, no matter how hard I was running my legs listened to my mind. I would order my legs to stop and they would. In this race it seemed as if my legs separated from my body and started to develop a mind of their own. As strange as it sounds, I did not want to stop running but my legs would almost cease and go into walking mode. I was just not able to control them. Period. Damn!



Instead of taking walking breaks during the run I felt like I was taking running breaks during the walk. Boy, the hill was steep! At mile 5 or so the temperature started to fall down. We were passing through clouds and I felt the chill deep in my bones. Then came the real test of the race. The clouds cleared and the visibility improved. All I could see was a long stretch of steep uphill. Just one hill and no relief in the vicinity. It was quite demoralizing and and my heart kind of collapsed and I asked "Why am I doing this again?" You know that feeling when you begin to question the very purpose of a journey. I just wanted to finish the race now. Timing and pace does not matter. Frankly, I do not even remember how I ran or walked from there to the end.

A runner was carrying a big US flag on his shoulder and I thought I should at least keep up with this guy running with such a weight. It was a liberation when I saw people on the side of the road cheering runners. It’s a sign that I am close to the finish line. I saw Mahesh with the camera and before I could enjoy the relief I saw the brutal 22 degree stretch. I wanted to run it without stopping but I was forced to walk for a few seconds. I some how managed to run the steep stretch and I was very glad to cross the finish line. My legs were in tears thanking me because I finally stopped the painful uphill conquest. The temperature was below 40 degrees and they covered me with a mylar space blanket and threw a medal around my neck. The race was over. Finally. What a relief and more than that, what an experience!

I walked around the summit, cheered runners trying to reach the finish line, and started our journey downhill once they opened the road for cars. One of the runners we offered a ride finished in 72 minutes and I did not even bother to ask the other two. We saw other runners walking and running the uphill and cheered them. One of them looked so old and beaten and that I thought he would collapse before the finish line. I checked later and he's 76 and finished the race. What can I say?
We finally reached the base camp to enjoy a massage, cold beer and hot soup. What a pleasure. Surprisingly my legs below the knees are super fine. They felt as fresh as ever and were ready to race a 10K. But the glutes, hamstrings and quads were aching. My butt never hurt so bad!

Takeaways and free suggestions:

1. More training for harder races.
2. Enjoy the 50 meters 3% uphill stretch during the race at mile 4. That's the flattest stretch in the entire race.
3. Do not run this race. Drink a beer in a bar instead :)

Would I do this again? May be yes. Only after lots of hill training or after smoking some good pot!

More pictures here.

How much power do data centers consume?

With all the green IT stuff going around I always wondered how much power all the data centers in the US consume annually and if this a significant number? We talk about virtualization, low power consuming processors and servers, energy efficient storage devices and the list is end less. What exactly is the impact? To answer this question I did some research and ended with a rather extensive number of blogs and articles. One highly reliable report is the one from US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Let's talk some numbers now.

The nations servers and data centers consumed 61 billion kilowatt-hours, a electricity cost of $4.5 billion in 2006. So the check to energy companies was $4.5B. Sounds like a big number. But comparing this to the total consumption of power in the country it accounts only to 1.5%.
The total consumption by servers and data centers has only doubled since 2000 to 2006 in spite of the multi fold increase the size and number of data centers. Things have certainly become more efficient than they were in 2006.

So even though we work a lot on improving the efficiencies of data centers, we end up saving the power bill for corporations but will not make a big impact in the big picture of the energy sector of the country. How significant is a 20% saving in 1.5% of total power consumption?

iFund

Was researching VC firms for IT investments and came across this rather surprising fund. KPCB (for starters, Kleiner Perkins is one the top VC firms that funded AOL, Google, Amazon and the like) has a new fund called iFund. Yes, it resonated with iPhone and iPod. And that's what they wanted. iFund invests in ideas and companies working on iPhone and iPod platforms. iPod/Phone truly created a economy of their own and it's only growing. There is Rajnikant and then there is Jobs.

Rupees 1000 for Rape and Murder

A rather provocative title but it's true. It's a shame and tragedy that a woman was raped and killed, leave alone the fact that it was the employer's taxi driver who committed the crime while he's suppose to safely drop the girl from the call center to home (case is not proven yet). And as anyone exposed to Indian law would expect, the police registered a case on the CEO of the call center company. And if proved guilty he would have to pay Rs.1000/- as fine. Is it a joke or what?

Rich, high profile businessmen with out strong political or rowdy connections are quite often targets in media exposed police cases. Remember the Baazee CEO case?

Are we at Type I yet?

Never realized that there are levels of civilization defined and widely accepted by futurists and theorists even though I am not surprise. Did the concepts of super powerful power sources such as Vajrayudam and Brahmastram come from Type II civilizations?

Syriana

I remember that Syriana and Munich were released at the same time back in 2005. I wanted to watch both the movies for their close to non-fiction plots but ended up watching Munich in theater and adding Syriana to my 100+ list on Blockbuster after the DVD was released.
Last week, I was watching a session of Jeff Skoll on TED and learned the connection between Syriana, Charlie Wilson's War (a movie I liked), An Inconvenient Truth, ebay and social entrepreneurship. Jeff's company Participant Productions produced all these movies and is a great platform to learn, share and discuss geo-social issues and ideas. To take part go here. The first thing I did after realizing the connection was pushing all Participant Productions movies in my Blockbuster list to the top and I just finished Syriana. It's a movie that requires lot of focus and concentration. It's jam packed with plots and information on quite a few issues including capitalism, oil addiction, corruption, politics, terrorism, fundamentalism, CIA, family crisis and more. The movie requires quite a bit of explanation if you do not grasp it.
Energy as we all know is the numero uno priority of many nations and the world is going to be a radically different place if the current supply of energy is not replaced by the new innovations in geneology or other renewable sources. Yes, geneology. I am as far as you can go from biology but I believe that by modifying and engineering microbes we can certainly solve both global warming and oil crisis at the same time.

Damn the mega dams

As part of my volunteer work with the Boston chapter of Association for India's Development (AID) I handle projects from a NGO in India called Samata. If you are a grassroots activist (or anyone close) concern about tribal welfare and rights or environmental campaigns you would remember the name Samata from the famous Supreme Court judgment in India in 1997 often referred to as the Samata Judgment. After visiting the villages where Samata works and staying there for two days during my two week vacation to India in 2006, I became a greater admirer of the organization and the work they do. I met with the founder and current show runner (Ravi and Bhanu) and had a good chat with them along with some volunteers from Germany at their Visakhapatnam office.

After the school infrastructure project from Samata, I took over the Polavaram Mega Dam project for AID Boston. Mega dams is a global topic and I am still in the process of educating myself on the complexities around a resource management project as big as Polavaram. The Chinese Three Gorges project is the latest example exposing the two sides of the coin. There is a world wide movement around this topic and not much of this is talked about in the main stream media for obvious reasons. I never knew that US has been demolishing mega dams after realizing the "real" after affects of such projects. Many use cases and info here. An academic perspective of the problem can be found here.

I am more convinced about the de-merits of Polavaram project after reading relatively more reliable reports such as this. Though many entities in India are trying to leverage this topic for their own benefit (from political parties such as CPI(M) to established NGOs), I think there might be some real value coming out of the campaigns at the end of the day. Personally, I do not think the project would be called off. It's not practical. Instead, I would be very happy to see the project implemented with proper planning (not executing plans and relying on data dating back to 1985!). Visiting Polavaram and talking with people from the affected villages is high up on my agenda for my next India trip. Until then I have to reply on second hand information. I'll post some slides here after my presentation at AID Boston this month. Did I tell you that it's a three plus billion dollar project?