Sandeep Kulkarni is Sr. Director, IT at BMC Software.
I have always been a career oriented person until about 3 years back. I used to work indeed all late night hours, respond to emails right when I received those and looked for opportunities of how my career can advance. This got to me to a stage where I Was 104Kgs, I had high BP, I used to have unusual heart aches middle of night. About 3 years back I realized I won’t live in this physical condition for more than 6 or 7 years. Career wise I Was doing ok but health and family front I was a big failure. So decided to reprioritized my life. I decided that my health needs to be on top of the list, then family and career, Career is important but not above health and family. This order was defined after a deep thinking, if I don’t have good health, what good I am to the family so health has to come up. If I don’t have family then what good is career so career moved next to family. So as a first step I decided to lose weight, like any other geeky guy, I gathered knowledge about being fit, how to lose weight, what diet control required. One thing I realized is there are no crash course, being fit is a way of living life and it has to be permanent, you can’t say I will follow this diet and this work out till I lose weight and then go back to my normal life style, if you go back to your normal life style, you go back to your normal physique too J. Second most important thing, being fit and losing weight is nothing but competing with yourself. So note down your progress every day. When I Was noting down my weight every day for 6 months during my weight loss, I realized that for every day I followed the routine, I Was losing 150Gms a day and for every day I missed it, I was putting on by 400Gms, so basically every day I missed the routine, I was going back by 3 days. This made my determination to follow the routine strictly stronger. I lost about 28Kgs in 6 months and I still have the excel sheet that has notes of every day weight with a graph of falling waist line. My work out included about 30 minutes of cardio and weights. Laster on when I was done with 28Kg weight loss, I decided to take on long distance running, started about 2 years back and today I Can easily complete half marathons and in Jan next year I will be running my first full marathon. When I started running, I realized I started losing further and I finally settled after about 34 kgs reduction in my overall size. Went down from 44 inches waist to 30 inches today. 🙂
Gear and Tech
While there are plenty of gadgets and technologies are available, let me tell you my experience about shoes. I started running with best of the breed Nike/Reebok shoes, in a matter of year through my running, I injured my leg and was out of running for almost 3 weeks, being a geeky guy, I started doing some research on Internet to understand the right technique of running. I understand my landing of the foot was not right and that may have been the cause of the injury. At the same time I came across articles that talked about bare foot running and how many African countries have produces great runners that run bare foot. Given Indian roads, it will be suicide to run bare foot. So I decided to try the Vibram five finger shoes, these look like a caveman shoes, but they are amazingly light. I also realized these shoes lets your feet know how hard or soft the road is and accordingly makes your hit on the road soft or hard. My time per kilometer improved by almost a minute in these shoes. While there are theories both supporting and against these shoes, my personal experience is these worked the best for me. As far as gadgets are concerned, many of my fello runners use Garmin watches that plot the elevation, speed and many other parameters through GPS, iPhone with its simple apps work great for me. I started using Sports tracker in the first few days. But then when I got my JawBone Wrist band that tracks my steps per day and sleep at night, I shifted to Strava. These apps are cool, as you are running every one or half kilometer they give you a stat of how many km u ran, how much time you took, etc. etc. and final summary shows you elevation climbed, calories burned, your best time etc. etc. the apps are going social too and will let you compare your work out with your friends or rank you with others who took the same route. So again the socialization in the work out bring about more desire to work out and also the fun competitive element.
How Running Changed My Life
Running has lot of effect on my life, Now when I am working in office by evening instead of getting tired and worked up, I am excited for the next day morning waking up and run, I feel my creativity is at its peak when I am running, there has never been an instance when I started running thinking of a problem I need to solve related to office and I ended my run without having a workable solution for it. The run refreshes me, makes me look forward to next day and makes my kid be active too. My both sons are now running with me as and when their school schedule allows them to (believe me, their school schedules are busier than my office schedule). As a leader when I preach my teams the benefits of health, I am being listened the most. Since I have earned the trust and respect of my team with my transition. My office badge still carries my older pic when I was 104Kgs a grief reminder of where I came from and where I don’t want to go, I also often use this picture to show others where they are headed and what they need to do. My teaching to the teams is, its ok to work little less, to find time for yourself, but do something good to yourself. Have some hobbies and preferably something that will improve the physique.
My First Marathon
Marathon was not in my plans when I started running, in fact it always looked like dream that I Can never achieve, however as I was making progress, I started running 10 plus kilometer and that got me thinking of doing half marathon, so I signed up for my first half marathon in Satara last year in September. It is a hill marathon and completing that gave me lot of confidence. So far I have run officially 4 half marathons but in my regular practice once every two months I run half marathon distance. My future plan is now to run a full marathon and I am already working on it. I have registered for Mumbai full marathon Jan next year that I will be running as my first full marathon.
Motivation
Only advice I can give you is based on my own experience. When I was too focused on my career, responding to every email right when I got it, my career was not moving fast enough like I wanted to. When I shifted the career down and raised the health priority, my career actually went up quickly. Many times in life we get so possessed about few wrong things that we never realized what long term effects it has on you. I will not say carrer is not important, it is always important, however career is of no use if health is not with you. So it is important to understand the importance of being physically fit before starting your work. More over the calmness and enjoyment you get as you start loving your activities, make you refreshed and thinking a lot in your office life. You will realize there are lot of new solutions you are thinking for the problems you thought could never be solved.