Spinning: The Wombats - Tokyo
Well I'm supposed to be writing my paper now but I'm completely uninspired...
So here I am to blog about my experience with my first ever 10km run. Or first ever run at a mass run event anyways. The Great Eastern Women 10k run.
A lot of friends thought me crazy and said I was already a bamboo stick HAHA but seriously, I signed up because it was a personal challenge. I've never been the athletic sort - well I wasn't that bad either but it just doesn't run through my veins I guess, that athletic streak.
So I signed up to prove to myself that I could run 10km without stopping. I was just kinda curious whether my body and mind had the tenacity to do it. The initial plan was to go for once-a-week trainings to make the actual experience less painful; to start from a measly 2km and bump it up every week until it reached 10km. Legendary plan, right?
Of course it never worked out. Well, to give myself some credit it did for awhile, I was running 5km at one point for 2-3 weeks consecutively. But work kicked in, and (insert all sorts of excuses here), I dropped training regularly. And boy did i regret it a few weeks before the race day. I started trying to train desperately, but I still couldn't reach 10km.
So did I survive the actual day?
Yes I did.
At the start point, all was well, I was pumped up with adrenalin and raring to go; looking all chipper with friends:
By 3km I was starting to feel a little tired, I had started lagging behind my friends. But the worst has got to be the 5-7 km stretch. You're neither here nor there - not at the beginning where you can tell yourself, "Come on, it's just the beginning, you can't drop so fast", not at the end where you can tell yourself, "Come on, it's almost the end. You've come so far, so keep going".
In the middle, all I thought about was "Shit. I just did 5km - that was torture, and I have to repeat that all over again". As evidenced in a photo:
I was smiling, but I was dying inside! It was more mental than anything else I think, to keep telling yourself to not allow yourself to start walking...
But by 8-10km it got a little easier thanks to strategically placed cheer teams, and angels sent from above in the form of Yu Chen who somehow appeared magically again after meeting briefly in the 5-7k stretch. We ran together for most of the 8-10km stretch, both of us kinda silent but knowing we were in it together!
And finalllyyyyy
Seeing the finishing line looming ahead had to be one of the BEST feelings ever. EVER! Celebrated with me friends.
Aaaaaand, a big shoutout to a big prawn who swam his way earrrrly in the morning to the start line and helped me prepare for the race! And swam around the race course as I ran and ran, and swam to the finish line and revelled with me after I crossed the finish line! :)
And maybe... just maybe, I might do this again next year. Yeah, I'm crazy.
Labels: friends, leisure, personal, photolog
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