Started writing the below on 13th October:
Its been 4 days since I participated (not competed) in the brutal, grueling and difficult North Face 100km duo challenge. My legs are yet to forget that experience. When I did the 50km in HK at the GreenMile race in Feb this year, the weather was awesome while the course was tough. I had trouble during that race when encountering the hills but thankfully, there were long stretches of flats in between hills and that allowed for some recovery. This time, the weather conspired with the route to chew me proper and spit me out mid way into the race. After that, it was sheer desperation to see what the finish line looks like that made me come home in 8:36 approx, with 24 minutes to spare for the 9hr cutoff.
Going into the race, I knew that Chacha, my partner in crime in the previous edition of this race wouldn’t be able to make it due to ITB issues. So I was prepared to do a 50km solo. Mentally. Physically, I was in such a pathetic shape that it’s a laugh looking back now that I even tried to do this race. My longest run in training for this was about 22kms and that too about 8 weeks before the race. After that, I just hadn’t got back to running longer distances and so was setting myself up for a world of trouble. And sure enough, there were no surprises there. I went into the race thinking I would “wing it”, sure enough after 3 hours, any wings I might have had were deafeningly clipped.
The start line saw several of the SGRunners friends milling around and it was good to see quite a few were running the distance. At 7am sharp, the race kicked off, and we settled into a very relaxed effortless jog knowing well that the later kms would be killers. Throughout the race, I was yoyo-ing with a few other SGRunners (Aplelite, Yankee, Joanna, Tiwazz, Yeehua) and so that kept a lonely journey seem a lot more bearable.
Edit 12th November: I don’t have the enthu to complete the race report I started above so will conserve my writing energy for future races! To cut a long story short, I am at a point where I am feeling disgusted by merely “completing” races where I am not putting in my best effort at all, or even a self-respecting effort for that matter which needn’t even be a very good one. So my plan for next year is to do fewer races but of higher quality of performance.
