First Saturday LSD

It's been a very long time since I ran the 20k Hartamas route. It used to be a regular training route for me before the KLIM. Since I would rather be spending my time with my family and attending various church meetings over the weekend, I have decided to run my LSDs on Saturday mornings.

This morning I was glad to have the company of Choi, Eugene, Wong and Geraldine most of whom I'm meeting for the first time. I had met Choi for the first time at the Mizuno run last weekend. After not being able to make it for two runs in the previous months, it was nice to finally be able to join them.

I was really feeling very strong for most parts of the run. At the beginning I was running at an easy pace with Eugene and enjoyed some good conversation with him. Learnt that he only took up running in the last 6 months, but used to keep fit by doing a lot of trekking and mountain climbing.

As we passed the mosque and were reaching the long undulating stretch at Hartamas, I picked up the pace a little. I saw Wong and Geraldine were not that far ahead. My split time when reaching the Petronas was about 63 minutes. We took a long 10 minute break at the Petronas while waiting for the others to reach before starting the run back to Bukit Aman.

This time I paced with Geraldine who could really hold a strong pace. Later on I found out from Choi that she could actually run a 10k below 50 minutes, so perhaps I had choosen a wrong pacer haha! I managed to hang on until we were approaching the traffic lights before the junction to Bank Negara and Choi had caught up by then. At that point I slowed down and was soon left behind.

After passing Bank Negara and turning onto Jalan Parliment, my legs seemed to be giving up. I've always had a problem with this stretch in most of my training runs and even races like the GE30k where I ended up walking. The final uphill stretch heading towards Bukit Aman is really demotivating but can be good to strengthen a runner mentally. Anyhow I couldn't surpass the urge to stop and walk. Overall time taken today was 2h15m32s.

This week I've managed to keep my mileage above the minimum target of 40k. Total mileage clocked for the week was 48k. I shall be doing some cross training in the swimming pool again tomorrow afternoon with Lee. Next week I will be busy at work so I hope to still be able to keep up with the planned training program.