Marathon Day

Met a lot of people yesterday and today, hence proving what a small world it is.

At Holland Village, while waiting to meet Audrey to get the ticket for the night's Law Bash (where the ratio of boys to girls corresponded roughly to SAF doctrine, i.e. 4:1), I bumped into Ian who was there to get his haircut. We walked a few rounds around the Village and talked about what everyone from our class was doing now. It was great catching up, also because it was so unexpected. Met Adrian too, who was also meeting Audrey, and we had a long army boy talk about army stuff while waiting at Coffee Club. Audrey managed to convince Adrian to buy a ticket to the party and so we went down to Clarke Quay, though first dropping by Adrian's place. On the train at Chinatown station I saw Mr Chua who was out with his wife and youngest son, of all people. He's flying off tomorrow to Xiamen on a trip with Prof Ben Tan so it was even more unlikely that I'd bump into him. We had dinner at this pasta place at Robertson Walk; I had gnocchi done in the restaurant's proprietary way and it was quite nice, just slightly spicy. After dinner we spent a pretty long time waiting outside the bar for people to come, because Audrey was supposed to pass them their tickets. Among the surprise encounters were my 'first friend' (Eugene) and Lt. Khairil, who'd long since finished his service but still has the same loud nasal voice. Having heard it so much on Tekong, I tried to stay out of his way as much as possible. Later that night I bumped into David Pflug who was also quite alarmed to see that Khairil was around. But the biggest surprise of the night was meeting Pamela (Tham) again on the dance floor; she was with a few girl friends of hers and was, I think, quite surprised to see me too. I'd caught a glimpse of her earlier while having dinner but wasn't too sure if it was indeed her. She'll be leaving to study in Australia soon, so it's also fortunate that I saw her before she left.

I left pretty early, around one in the morning and went to Sgt Samuel's place to camp overnight before the run this morning. Changed out of my smokey clothes and slept on a mattress that he had in his room. We left around five for the start point, after a breakfast of eggs and a bun kindly provided by his mother. Surprisingly it wasn't as chaotic at the start point as I'd thought it'd be, possibly because the marathoners were separated from the half-marathoners and the 10 km runners. At any rate it was still a pretty large crowd (6500 people) and the music they were playing to psyche us up was disturbingly similar to that at the party last night. The run itself was great, though extremely painful. Somewhere along the way in Marina South I saw Sarah Ng running in the opposite direction as I looped back from the turning point; she was running the half marathon. I called out to her at the same time as another person behind me but I think she didn't notice. Other sightings include Vivian Balakrishnan, who was running 10 km with his bodyguard, and the blind half-marathoner Henry Wanyoike and his friend and guide Joseph Kibunja who were running hand in hand the whole way, stride for stride. Henry came in ahead of Joseph by only one second, and they went up to the podium to accept their medals together after the race was over. There's a short writeup on Henry in today's Straits Times for those who are curious.

By the 33rd kilometer my legs were giving way and cramping painfully, so I had to stop and stretch. Stopping was the worst thing that I could do but I felt that I had no choice. After stopping it was very hard to get running again and the temptation to simply walk the whole way back was strong. But I remembered the promise I made to myself to push all the way, and started jogging again, though it was more of a shuffle than a jog. After some time I managed to run through the cramp and open up my stride again. This lasted for about 2-3 km before the cramps came and I had to stop and walk once more. The last ten kilometers were hence an alternation between stopping and starting: stopping when the road appeared long and bleak and starting when the marshallers and pretty cheerleaders pipped up my morale. Somewhere along the Kallang River, at the stretch leading underneath the Sheares bridge I had the strongest sense of deja vu because that was exactly the place where I felt like giving up during last year's Sheares Bridge Run. But this year I can at least tell myself that my performance has improved: where last year's run was only 10 km, this year's was 42. The last two kilometers stretched out into 20 minutes of hellish battle with myself. I'd no hope remaining of finishing under 4 hours when I hit the 40 km mark at 4 hours. Likewise I'd no more energy to keep up the same pace of 1 km per five minutes that I'd been trying to keep for the whole race. In the end my average timing per km over the whole race was closer to 6:15. Eventually I managed to struggle through and by the time I hit the Esplanade, I was running again and no longer stopped to walk. I rounded the corner and for the last 200 metres, the road was straight and terminated in the endpoint gantry. Just then the Lemur song from the movie Madagascar played up and I thought well what the heck and sprinted the last stretch as fast as I could. My own hand-timed result was 4:24:28, not as good as I'd hoped but still passable for a first timer. The official result, though, would probably be longer becasue I started timing when I passed through the start gantry but the race had already begun before that; I was somewhere in the middle of the crowd. Along the route there were water points at every 2 kilometers and each point was literally strewn with empty bottles flung to the wayside by runners who'd taken their drink on the go. I tried my best to throw the bottles into dustbins or trash bags though, but sometimes I did miss the target. I took at least one or two bottles of water at each waterpoint, to cool off my head and to drink, as the day got progressively hotter, in all totalling almost 30 bottles. Aside from my own two packets of powergel I brought along for the run, I also picked up one of the free packets they were distributing at the 26 km mark, consuming three packs in all. Sgt CK also was waiting for us at the 16 / 33 km point with cans of Red Bull and I took two of those too. Hence all in all I have to admit that I had a lot of help for this race, without which I'd probably not have completed it. It was an amazing experience, though I'm not sure if I'm up to doing it again. Next year when this date comes round again (less than a week from my ORD) I hope to be more prepared. This year's training programme was useful, for certain, but somehow I felt it wasn't quite enough. It was a good run, but hopefully next year's will be even better.