10 miles 

It all started with a meaty 0.5 miles almost 2 years back and culminated at a awesome 10 miles yesterday . Well I would not call it culmination , there might be many more races to come but ya this would sure be a landmark to mark it all . 

I have been running off and on for 2 years now and slowly but steadily improving on the scale . One thing is for sure  , once you get to a point say 3 miles its so easy to stop yourself there and not proceed any further . 

The way I like to put it is that after 3 miles it is all in the head . If you can run 3 ..then you can as well run 10 but it all comes down to pushing yourself not to stop and achieve your maximum potential . 

The preparation for the race started by a gently nudging by a friend saying I should give it a try .

I had been practicing for the last 2 months going steadily upwards from 3 miles to a high of 8 miles until 2 weeks back I started getting cramps in my leg and thats when I started worrying if I could actually make it to the race . 

But the race day came and I was there cheered by my friends who unfortunately had to get up at 6 in the morning to drop me . The race day was simply beautiful . Early hours of the morning there were around 600 women aged 20 to 70 all participating in a 10 mile run for the benefit of the girl child . It was the exact time of the year with fall colors just starting to set in and the trail being right next to the missisippi river . The whole ambience was just so great that once the race started there was no stopping back . I used to run and walk , take breaks while practicing but on the race day the adrenaline rush just kicked and there I was running 10 miles at a strech not stopping anywhere till I crossed the finish line . 

At the end of it I was ecstatic , it was unbelievable that somebody who used to huff and puff for running half a mile had finally cruised through 10 miles . This sure goes down my diaries as one of my proud moments . :-P

Predictability of Future 

This is a question I have been pondering over a lot over the past one year . How is it that some astrologers who know nothing about you can predict your life so acurately ? What kind of patterns exist in this world if any . There have been almost the same answers every where , yes life is predictable but ultimately it lies in the hand of the human being to decide his course .

Recently I came across this beautiful written paragraph of predictiblity by E.F.Schumacher in his book Small is beautiful ( which btw I think every Indian should read ) .

Here is how it goes  " When the Lord created the world and people to live in it . He must have reasoned with Himself as follows : " If I make everything predictable  these human beings , whom I have endowed with pretty good brains with undoubtedly learn to predict everything and they will thereupon have no motive to do anything at all  because they will recognise that the future is totally determined and cannot be influenced by any human action . On the other hand , if I make everything unpredictable , they will gradually discover that there is no rational basis for any decision whatsoever and , as in the first case , they will thereupon have no motive to do anything at all . Neither scheme would make sense . I must therefore create a mixture of the two . Let some things be predictable and let others be unpredictable . They will then , amongst many other things , have the very important task of finding out which is which ."