Hope!

We had been at Ravianna’s (Megha’s cousin) place last night. Three of his contemporaries, Ajit Shelat and Raghunath Iyer from IIT Bombay and Mukund (Emulex CTO) were also there. Ajit and Raghu were the early founding members of Switch-on which they successfully sold to PMC Sierra. They then went on to start the India operations of Nevis Networks and were here on work.

It was interesting meeting them over a glass of single malt. I’m always in awe of entrepreneurs. Contrary to what I used to think, they all come in different flavors. Ajit is a very quiet person. Raghu was very energetic and was passionately showing photographs of birds in his garden in Pune that he had taken. Mukund came across as someone eager to know about everyone and catching up with old friends. And I’ve met enough entrepreneurs to say that each is unique in his or her own way.

And so it was over a glass of single malt that I wondered what was that common characteristic that makes an entrepreneur an entrepreneur. Surely there is something that binds them all. Perhaps its not seen on the outside. But somewhere in the far distance, when one gets to the top of the hill and jumps over to the other side, I have a feeling one will find all these entrepreneurs waiting there with open arms, knowing that you’ve figured it out…

The (Better) Half Iron Man.

The funny thing is, whenever I met anyone after this event and told them I completed a half iron man, their first reaction was, “why???”.

I would’nt blame them. The 1.5Mile swim, 56 miles bike and the 13 miles run definitely took its toll. Was eleventh out of the water after the swim. Lost count of the number of people who overtook me on the bike. But managed to maintain a consistent average pace of 17.5 miles an hour. Now the run was the hardest. I had injured my knee running in the San Francisco half marathon a couple of weeks earlier. Owing to that, I had almost decided to opt out of this one. But I figured I would walk it down in the worst case. And that is pretty much what I did through half of my run. By the time I finished, my left knee was really sore and I could barely sleep that night.

Here’s a link to the final result http://www.capitalroadrace.com/results/07_BK_AGEGROUP.HTM

It reminded me of the line from Grey’s Anatomy where Meredith says something like, “Sometimes I wonder why we keep hitting ourselves on the head with a hammer. And then I realize it’s because when the hammering stops… it feels real good!”. Touche!

Swim-Bike-Run: My First Triathlon!

Well, not exactly my first. I had run one back when I was in school. But I had not seriously trained for that back then. And had pretty much decided that the bike was not for me after that event.

Thanks to my poor memory, the pain of the triathlon back then was not there to prevent me from signing up for this one. The main cause of my madness in signing up for this one was that completing a triathlon figured in my list things to do before I was 30.

Of course, working at Marvell and on just about everything else, meant I had very little training before the event. the race was a 1.5K swim followed by a 40K bike and finally a 10K run. I was 2nd out of the water. 300th after the bike. And finished 298th after the run, managing to avenge my bike loss to two runners ahead of me.

A great experience and definitely addictive. Met Vikram Asrani, a batchmate from IIT Bombay. Hadn’t met him since IIT days (8 years ago). He said he planned to do the Half Iron Man which is twice this distance. I was impressed at his resolution. Decided I would or rather should do it too.