I successfully ran Kodagu Marathon 2026! I wasn’t sure if I will be able to finish it this year. I ran my last half-marathon three years ago. I have been feeling completely out of shape for last couple of years: my running pace had been abysmal. But not only I finished the half-marathon but beat my PR by 2 minutes! I should have gotten a hair cut before the run.
My manager at Toyota finished with me 💪🏼! He helped me save at least 5 minutes. I saw him after half-way return point. We ran last 4 km together. Fun times!
My labmate and friend from Ph.D. times Adiya and his wife Chinmayee joined us for this half-marathon. He finished it in about 2 hours despite not in best of his form. We get to meet his 1.5y old daughter.
Kaalu had really good time at homestay near Gonikoppal! She got to eat fresh chicken and eggs which she gulped down like a hungry monster. The homestay manager was extremely pet-friendly and he took extra care of Kaalu (I say almost spoiled her).
Kodagu felt very dry this year. The local manager at homestay told me that there is hardly any rain this year. When driving past Brahmagiri range, I noticed no water streams which is a common sight during monsoon time. The Irfu waterfall had very little water.
We couldn’t go the waterfall since they don’l allow dogs there. So we played downstream where people come to wash clothes! Ookie loved time in the stream and Kaalu was shirt-scared of deep and noisy water, as usual. But this time, she stood inside the water.
Near Mysore, we found a pet-friendly cafe called Queens Coffee. It is ran mostly by women. It had all the good vibes — clean, colours that are easy on eyes, clean toilets, and very pet-friendly. If you pass-by, please visit and support.
On lobte.rs, I was complaining about recent increase in LWN subscription prices and how declining Rupee has made it harder for me to continue with “starving hacker” plan. One kind soul on internet bought me a subscription gift. I felt guilty accepting the gift since I can surely afford it. But I didn’t want to threw cold water at the kind gesture. So I accepted the gift whole-heartedly and I donated $35 (starving hacker plan that I used to subscribe) to PARI (https://ruralindiaonline.org).
I did some maintenance work for a few FOSS projects especially Smoldyn. The cmake build system major version is 4.x and pybind11was updated to 3.x series. Removed Cygwin support from build system since smoldyn can built on Windows now.
I’ve resigned from Toyota this month. I am service notice period. I’ll be joining Progress software from October 1, 2025 as a Principal Engineer on habitat/chef team.
I went through a few interviews and got a couple of offers. I’ll be switching into a Principal Engineer role early Oct. I picked the offer where team gave me the best vibes. I’ve started giving team the highest weightage.
I also learnt how to negotiate the offer. I was a little nervous but it went well.
Negotiations are most effective if you have some leverage. Or your interviews were great.
📔️Read ‘Designing Distributed Systems’ by Brenden Burns. Its a good book and very readable if you are just starting with them.
🦀️Interesting study https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3830438.3830958 Abstract: (notes in () are mine). We investigate the effects on code quality of the design patterns typestate and newtype in the language Rust, by conducting three case studies… The findings:
Typestate improves code faultlessness and testability, but comes at the cost of more boilerplate code and can degrade readability (use macros?). Code with extensive branching logic and many invariants likely benefits most from the pattern.
Newtype combined with the “Parse, don’t validate” principle improves code quality at a low cost and prevents invalid states at runtime.
🏃️I’ve finished 620 km of running so far. 4 more months, less than 400km to go to complete 1000km run. My pace is very slow but I don’t mind it. Also looking forward to Kodagu Marathon early next month.
I’ve been spending more and more time on rust-lang and rust-for-linux Zulip. Zulip is good but they have kept ‘mark it as resolved’ and ‘mark it as read’ so close that I ended up marking a few thread resolved and annoying a few folks 🥹️.
Funny to see LinkedIn added 'Seems like AI slop' to feed options. There is something so bad even LinkedIn is willing to filter!
🌧️ No rain this week! This is the driest I’ve ever felt in Bengaluru.
📚️”Domain Driven Design” by Eric Evans is an excellent book. I am half-way through. I plan to write a review later. Its written by a practitioner for other practitioner. There are a few powerful ideas in the book which I often find articulated bits and pieces often.
🏃️Kodagu half-marathon in couple of weeks! Not really prepared for it but looking forward.
🥤️Creatine supplements works for me. I’ve been feeling like 2024. For last one year, I’d been very low on energy. Tried multiple things like vit-D and b12 supplements (I was low on them) but only creatine helped.
It also brought back my nightly leg cramps. I think APT production is normal in my muscle :).
🏦️I’ve closed my GST registration today. I’ll be accepting a full-time offer soon and closing the consultancy gig this month.
124 km more to go to finish 1000 km run this year. Pretty doable in 32 days!
I am increasing my use of HTMX. A few things I loved about HTMX
I can use server to manage my app’s state. The client does not have to do any state management which is a huge win.
I don’t have to use TS/JS everywhere, especially on servers. I can write as little JS as possible.
I don’t have to update client when I update my app. Decoupling is easy to achieve!
I gleefully watched South Africa trashing India 2-0 in home test series. Except for Jadeja, not a single player showed any fight or even some grit.
Also not giving Bumrah captaincy when Gill was out of the series reinforces the accusation that bowlers are a lower caste in Indian cricket. Even the great spinner Ashwin has to pose with a bat for this autobiography. For the f**k sake!!
I started running seriously on July 16, 2021, during the Covid lockdown. I had graduated. I could no longer walk or cycle to the lab daily. I was working very long sessions on my six-month-old startup, and these long programming sessions were taking a toll on my health. I needed a routine to sweat daily.
I enjoy cycling. I need at least two hours of sessions per day to feel like I’ve had a good ride. One day of cycling a week didn’t cut it. My muscles were getting stiff. I wasn’t sweating daily. Sweating is one of the best stress-busters. So, I turned to running, something I hated during my Ph.D.
I occasionally cycled and hiked in the Western Ghats. I tried playing badminton to sweat daily. I used to joke with a few friends who were runners, “Hunter-gatherers run, not scientists!” and “What’s the point of running after all this scientific progress? Can’t we go cycling? The best combination of machine and muscle!” I tried swimming, but I couldn’t learn how to breathe properly before the lockdown, and access to the pool was very limited during the lockdown.
Starting was tough. But I went out every day and ran as much as possible, which was very little. In the first week, I was running between 1 and 2 km. I was aiming for mileage and not pace. This strategy helped a lot. I joined the Subreddit r/runningng. It’s a great community. I also read many blogs about running 5km from zero. 5 km was the target.
All of my recorded runs so far till January 4, 2023. My pace improved by the end of 2022 when I hit almost 6 min/km pace. Then I slowed down because I was giving company to some of my friends who were starting to run. I had a bad summer in 2022 (running-wise) though I did a half-marathon on July 17, 2022, in Munnar, Kerala. I recovered in the winter of 2022 and finished 1000km in 2022💪🏽🎉.
From almost zero to 5 km
In my first 15 days of running (July 2022), I went out nine times (total 15.5 km, min 1 km, max 2.3 km) and cycled one time (60.2 km). I am a bit surprised that I went out nine times in the last two weeks of July! I must have felt really good after sweating.
On August 16, 2022, I ran my first 5 km in 41 minutes. I was not planning to run 5 km that day. I was touching 3 km for a week before this day. I can’t remember what was pushing me to finish 5km. I was very proud! I think I zoom-bombed my old lab’s lab meet just to tell everyone that I ran my 5km🥲.
It took me a month to go from almost zero to 5km.
First 10 km
On August 27, 2022, I ran my first 10 km. It had been two months and ten days since I began running seriously and one month and ten days since I completed my first 5 km. I put a lot of effort into it and was exhausted afterward. I had a slight fever and slept like a log the entire night. I didn’t brag about my 10 km accomplishment as much as I did about my 5 km😊.
Half marathon
Aditya, who often does half-marathons and marathons, told me to sign up for one. One in Munnar was coming up. So there was a chance that I could hike as well. We took our coworkers from the office to a homestay in Munnar. The trip wasn’t the best for everyone because of all the traveling. Four of us ran the half-marathon. The route was beautiful, but the roads were bad. You could still see the effects of the floods that happened in Kerala a year ago. I barely completed it; I mostly walked the uphill parts. It took me almost two hours and 30 minutes to finish.
I think I have developed a taste for running. I am planning to run 40,010 km before I die. That is the circumference of the earth passing Bengaluru.
The benefits of running are clear. Unlike other sports, you don’t need anyone else to do it, and you can run whenever you want. It also lets you sweat a lot in a short amount of time. Your body will get used to it and want it more when you keep doing it, like with any other exercise.
There is also Newton’s third law of inertia. When you haven’t been running for a while, you don’t want to start again, and when you do it regularly, you don’t want to stop. Nowadays, if I don’t run for two days in a row, my body starts asking for it.
Personally, sweating has been the most important part of my exercise routine. It makes me feel good throughout the day, and my mood is significantly better. My programmer’s body also likes it; my shoulder pain and wrist stiffness have gone away after four months of running.
I don’t think running is a complete exercise; my upper body is still as weak as ever, but I don’t care too much about it. And developing a routine also has its benefits.
Tools
I used an Android phone and the Runnerup app to record my run. I had a MI watch, which was costly by Indian living standards, to record my heart rate and other data. However, I disliked their official app. The Runnerup app could use the heart data from this watch. After the recording was complete, it uploaded my runs to Strava and Runalyze (https://runalyze.com/dashboard). I am very fond of the Runalyze platform. Its free plan is sufficient for my needs. Anyhow, I cannot afford their monthly plan.
I often use GOTOES to add times to a GTX file. Occasionally, due to power-saving settings, the recording fails and I must manually trace the route and add times before uploading to Strava and Runalyze. There are other features on this site that I haven’t explored yet.
I haven’t made any special plans for running. Maybe I should get a massage after running and do some stretching before running, but I’m not sure.
124 km more to go to finish 1000 km run this year. Pretty doable in 32 days!
