Mizuno Run 2006

This is one run I hadn't intended to take part in but was persuaded by Peter, Lee, Lim and Albert to register. With almost no regular training I was really not keen to run a hill race. As I mentioned in my previous post, I have just started a planned training for the Bidor Half race so I decided to use this run as part of my training.

The night before I managed to almost go to sleep by 11.30pm but all of a sudden my wife woke me up saying she smelt a cockroach. My wife has a sensitive nose so I turned on the lamp next to me and the next instant she was screaming and sure enough there was a big roach on the bed. By the time we had killed it, I was wide awake and could not go back to sleep.

Upon reaching the Bukit Aman car park in Peter's car, I was greeted by Jamie and Lawrence. Jamie commented that I look like I had just woken up. I suppose that could be due to me not waking up for any races or long runs for a very long time and only waking up at 8am for work each day. Good life huh? Anyway all that will come to an end with my 'planned' LSDs for the next 5 saturdays with C-Cube.

I mingled with some of the PMs before the race began and was not ready when the horn blew for us to start. I think we had more runners this time round, so I just took it easy not wanting to push my way through the crowd right at the very beginning. I guess that easy and constant pace really set in and I just maintained the pace right till we had taken the U-Turn on the Mahameru highway and was heading towards the palace.

At that point a sub one hour seemed borderline for me but I really didn't mind not clocking below 60 minutes. I was not overly tired and still kept on overtaking many runners who had run too fast from the beginning. I only picked up the pace in the last 800 meters but and overtook at least another 50 runners before crossing the finish line with a time of 61m22s, my position card showed 450.

Overall it was an enjoyable run and I did what I came to do which was to maintain a strong even pace to the end. In a training run it would have defeated the purpose for me to turbo from the beginning and start walking later, even if I had managed a sub 60min. The satisfaction in a better timing if I had walked would not have been there. My time in this same event last year was appx 59min with some walking.

This week's training mileage totals 45.5k, 1 week down with 7 weeks to go.

Monday - 10.1k
Tuesday - 10.4k
Wednesday - 8.1k
Thursday - 6.8k
Sunday - 10.1k

I am signing off now to join Lee for a swim at the Matsushita swimming complex in Shah Alam. I have a phobea in getting darker and swimming at 2pm should help me get rid of that phobea. Ah... that cool water is going to feel great in this heat!