The race, 2010.

I'd love to begin with the end, since everybody would curious how it turned out, but the end has no meaning at all, without the juice of the journey. And I believe you're interested in the story, of a first timer of a full marathon runner.

When you tell people that you did a marathon, the first question would be, half or full? Did you finish it? How was it?

Well, I asked these questions before, and that was before I ran one myself. Now i have a different set of questions - What's the timing? How was the route? When did you start walking?

I've always quoted 'marathon' in my projects to our programmers. Seems that it's the logical thing to do. Since it's long, you don't see the finishing line, and the shit that you go through makes you want to give up. Since last year, i realise you've got no rights to quote marathon till you ran one before.

And I thought, this is good opportunity to actually try one.

And along the way, I reflected in so many ways, the analogy of life to marathon, is actually a pretty close one.

You see, the first 30km ( surprisingly ) was ok for me. I reached the 21.5 mark in 3hours 10 minutes, and i thought hey, i am still alive. Given that i'm overweight and only trained weekly for the past 2 months or so, I thought i was ok. Since the start at Orchard Road, I've been pacing myself, ignoring others. I've been overtaken by hordes of people continously, till we reached the end of east coast park. After the 21.5 mark, people started to walk. I was still moving, noticably slower. This time, i was overtaking hordes of people.

And along the way, I was listening to conversations. at least 50 of them, and some talked about travel, some talked about their girlfriends, some joked about the marathon, but most of the time, I caught keywords with negative emotions attached to it. "the marathon really very long ah", "my legs very pain", "i think cannot already" ( i can remember most of em, just lazy to type, since you should have got my drift ). And I feel that those are not very useful. It's all about expectations i guess.

The furthest that i've ran in my life, is maximum 8km i think, when i was with the NUS dragon boat team, when we ran the Dover Route. And those guys were running, not jogging. And along the way, my mind was helplessly creating thoughts to distract itself from the pain. I've through about practically everything, and all in all, i think I prayed to the God the most number of times.

The water points, and the only banana point, became my only motivation.

And so, God sent her to me.

You see, I didn't know why my left foot was so painful after 30km, but when i reached home to take a look at it, i saw it. Here you go :

There must be something wrong with the way I land. And it was really painful. I was not panting or anything after 35km, but rather suffering from the stupid blister. Damn it.

During the last 10 km, there were lots of people walking, sitting around, and even more in the last 5km. I was thinking to myself, how come these people give up now ? Why now? Why when you know the finishing line is so damn near already? You've come so far? I have the urge to tell every single random person i saw, suddenly slowing down/stopping this - hey, come on. This is my first time, im fat, and if I can continue, you definitely can.

Why is life so similar to a marathon? We go through shit, we have our moments of motivation, and we definitely can't see what is our finishing point. But we strive everyday, vowing to make our next step better. We can, if we really want it badly.



And so, I finished the Official Standard Chartered Marathon Singapore 2010 . When I looked back at the route, i didn't know how i did it, but I did it. And now, I'll prance around with my finisher shirt, disappoint people's expectation that I would not have completed :) And of course put some ice on my poor legs.

"It's all in the head."