CH92: Crossing the Line

...the finish line, that is.

Last Sunday, around 12:30 midnight, my friends and I embarked on a journey. A 21km long journey which started off slow because of the huge amount of people waiting to cross the starting line. It was nice though chatting with friends. Or maybe for them, it was more of me making fun of other people just to get the humour going and beat off the boredom.

An hour early. The people behind me are running 42km.

With SG friends.

More friends

My decision to join the 21km run was not self made. I was never (and still am not), that very much into running. I never took it seriously as to run twice or thrice a week to train. The decision to join the Sundown was inspired by two things:

1. When I told my friend from Infineon that I tried to run 10km and finish it in 1 hour 5 min (or maybe 1hr10min, I forget), she insisted I go and try to run 21km as a challenge since the time I made running 10k is good. She went on babbling about how we need to strive to push ourselves further - ala - test your limits kind of speech. And I was just like, "yeah, yeah. sure. whatevs"

2. It's a night run and I have never really tried running in the day because I don't want to go out and bake myself. I already have a sport for that "baking" or "tanning" experience - dragonboat. So, since I'm not sure if there was any other run in the night as "okay" as Sundown, I decided to give it a go.

The experience itself wasn't too hard to be perfectly honest. I think the dragonboat trainings and the active lifestyle I decided to go for really helped reinforce my endurance and stamina (I had a dragonboat race Saturday morning and only a 2 hour nap to rest for the race).

This is my first ever "official" race. I've never actually joined any races before even in the Philippines because I was feeling, "blah! these people are just running because it's a fad."

 The Runkeeper app I decided to try conked out on me during the times I lost a signal. The distance skipped by 1km, then 2km etc. And soon enough, I wasn't able to keep track of my pace and that set me off a bit.

 This being my first official race, I didn't know what to expect - particularly if I can 'actually' finish it 'whole' and without cramping. So, to avoid that fear from becoming a reality, I ended up stopping at all the hydration stops to get a drink of water. My initial plan was only to stop every 4km for the 100-plus drinks.

After some analysis and mulling over why I didn't meet my goal of finishing under 2 hours 10 minutes, I've compiled the following:

1. Get dry-ft socks and train or practice run with them - At around 10-11km, I started to fill my socks soaking in the sweat, and I felt like my run was making a "tsuk tsuk tsuk tsuk" sound. I guess it did help to avoid some amount of blisters (I didn't get any after the race)

2. Get compression shorts/pants - At around 18km, whenever I started to try and do a sprint and increase my pace, my left leg would cramp a bit and a jolt of adrenaline would shock me to slow down. This became harder when crossing the finish line since there was a bit of an incline going up the bridge near the finish line.

3. Don't forget to set the music to shuffle. As much as I like Avicii, I forgot to set my playlist to shuffle so I had to power through the whole race with only his tracks. My power tracks from LMFAO, Madonna and Rihanna were not played - so that's a bit of a downer.

4. Eat a banana or get a source for potassium to prevent the cramping sensation (in case the #2 compression shorts/pants are foregone).

The medal. I'm bringing this home to the Philippines to have my mom put it on display - maybe in my room or the living room. It would make for a good conversation piece / ice breaker for guests - don't you think?