Home field advantage

I always believed that home field advantage was over-rated. How much of a difference could a venue make for athletes? It was a convenient excuse (or so I thought) for teams to blame the heat or the cold or the light or the winds.

After running in unfamiliar conditions this morning, I realised how much of an impact familiarity has on performance regardless of the sport. All I did was change my marathon training schedule to run in the morning instead of the evening but my performance wasn't even close to what I could manage on Tuesday.

Everything seemed to bother me from the morning chill (my body didn't warm up as fast as I wanted) to the fact that the beach was dirty! The cleaning crew was just starting to remove piles of garbage from the shore. While on the topic of garbage, I wonder why is that Indian people abuse nature like this? The sea just dumps the coke bottles, plastic bags, pooja flowers and assorted garbage that is thrown in it. I appreciate the fact that Juhu Beach is cleaned every single day and is one of the cleanest big city beaches in the world.

Back to my running, when I finally did get warmed up, it was past sunrise and not past sunset so the beach wasn't exactly as nice to run on. And the winds weren't blowing the way they do in the evenings! I managed to run 5 kilometres before deciding that I had enough. I'm going have to the hit the beach this evening again but my fantastic evening runs may have given me a slightly false sense of preparation for the big day.

I better start running more in the morning since the run starts at 6:15 am AND also start running on the marathon route to familiarise myself. The run is in my hometown but the route is 25 kilometres away from where I normally train and I better get used to the sights, sounds and smells.

Here's to not judging visiting sports teams and athletes that make valid excuses for under-performing.