Arun Rajaraman

Kumbakonam is called the temple town for a reason, due to the sheer number of temples in area. Every single village irrespective of it's size has a Shiva, Vishnu and Devi temple, i.e. Shivan, Perumal & Amman Kovil as the Tamilians like to call. Since we got back earlier this week, I have been asked by at least 2-3 people on how to plan the Navagraha temples  darshan, I thought it would be worthwhile to blog about it. When we were planning the travel mid Oct, my enthusiastic plan was to do the Navagraha temples in and around Kumbakonam, temples in Thanjavur and temples in Tiruchirappalli & our family deity in Siruvachur in Perambular District. With back-to-back temple visit in the first 36 hours, my kids talked to me into knocking off Thanjavur & Tiruchirappalli from the  itinerary. I reluctantly agreed as we had done a trip with the kids in May exclusively to cover Tiruchirappalli and Thanjavur. If you are not the enthusiastic kind who likes driving hundreds ...

2022 was essentially a comeback year. 2021 was pretty much a washout, thanks to Covid-19, work, other priorities and my general lack of interest in running. I always knew I would resume one day, I didn't have any FOMO as such :), thanks to solo training for a few years. 2019 & 2020 were some busy training years, you can read about them here and here respectively. A meagre 522 kms in 2021, of those ~420 km came in Q1-2021 and the remaining 100 km across the 3 quarters of the year. Subpar training volume! Less said better. 2022 Started the year and the first week recovering from Covid-19 fading Delta variant at the time. Gave myself another 6-8 weeks to ease into the year, there was enough going on the work front which kept me occupied. I did a Tirupati trip with family early Feb, post the trip, I eased into walking 3-4 times a week. My cardio fitness was in the toilet, I was super cautious and patient to build it brick-by-brick. I did a bit of walk-run-walk regime in April to...