Well not quite. An arangetram is only about 2 hours long. It also has strong emphasis on musicality and expression. So more accurately, it is like a half marathon with miming and a few drum solos. How does one train for such an event??
That brings me back to the marathon analogy. Of all the crazy things my friends do, the physical endurance feats basically fall into marathon, bike marathon, or triathalon. Though I dance with plenty of people who have done arangetrams, they were all in their early teens at the time, safely shuffled about and stuffed with food by loving Indian moms and dads. So my preparation regimen needs to fit somewhere in between those two. I went with marathon training as a framework because it's pretty simple and I can learn about it online. I found a quality online training plan, chose a level (intermediate II), and created a forumla for mapping each marathon training week schedule to a Bharatanatyam training week schedule.
A marathon is 26.whatever miles. I usually run 10 minute miles (yes, I'm abysmally slow). Note, I do this in miles because the training schedule I was basing this on was in miles, and the units won't matter in a minute. So for me, it would take 260 minutes to run a marathon. My arangetram will take about 2 hours, or 120 minutes. I'm a slacker, so I rounded 260 down to 240 to make the math easier. That gave me 2 minutes for every mile run in the long runs. That was way too easy, so I threw in an extra multiple of 2 for kicks:
That brings me back to the marathon analogy. Of all the crazy things my friends do, the physical endurance feats basically fall into marathon, bike marathon, or triathalon. Though I dance with plenty of people who have done arangetrams, they were all in their early teens at the time, safely shuffled about and stuffed with food by loving Indian moms and dads. So my preparation regimen needs to fit somewhere in between those two. I went with marathon training as a framework because it's pretty simple and I can learn about it online. I found a quality online training plan, chose a level (intermediate II), and created a forumla for mapping each marathon training week schedule to a Bharatanatyam training week schedule.
A marathon is 26.whatever miles. I usually run 10 minute miles (yes, I'm abysmally slow). Note, I do this in miles because the training schedule I was basing this on was in miles, and the units won't matter in a minute. So for me, it would take 260 minutes to run a marathon. My arangetram will take about 2 hours, or 120 minutes. I'm a slacker, so I rounded 260 down to 240 to make the math easier. That gave me 2 minutes for every mile run in the long runs. That was way too easy, so I threw in an extra multiple of 2 for kicks:
bharatnatyam training time (minutes) = running (miles) * 2 (minutes/miles) * 2 (coefficient of tehmle)
Since I started this program with roughly the 18 weeks needed left, I've been using that multiplier to determine how much stamina dance (meaning non-stop, continuous dancing) to do in a session, especially in my weekly 'long dances'. This is week 2 and today I just finished my 44 minute long dance. It was hard, and was exacerbated by the squats I did yesterday. Lesson for this week: give more than a day between squats and long dances.
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