Hi everyone!
I'm not exactly too new to this forum, just been procrastinating with writing this for months. :-)
I'm one of those people that just HATED running with a passion. Never managed to pass 2.4 during my secondary/high school days, and the annual cross country runs were absolute torture for me. So it came to no surprise that my first 2.4km categorisation test during my enlistment into the Army for National Service came in at a stunning 16 minutes. I can never understand why people would actually want to run for fun ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBmhDfWIE30 ) -- what kind of fun is that? :-)
So as a conscript in the Army, I never managed to get IPPT (the .sg military standard fitness test) Gold, although I did manage to get Silver. The fastest i've ever done in the Army (during SISPEC, an infantry leadership training course, at the peak of my running fitness) was around 10:15 I think. I just wasn't motivated enough to run any quicker. BTW, if you think that this is fast, you must realise that training in SISPEC (at least in the company I was in) is an intense intense endeavour (relatively speaking, excluding the elite units like CDO/NDU/Guards), and half of my company achieved IPPT Gold just 2 months into training. Running is just something that I do just to make sure I can book out for the weekend and not stay back. :-)
So fast forward many years to 2008. I didn't run during those many intervening years, unless i'm training up for IPPT, and even managed to fail 2.4 once and had to attend RT.
I realised I was turning 28 this year, and it suddenly dawned on me that i'll soon be hitting the big three-O. Like many, I came up with a list of new year's resolutions. I started thinking of things that I want to do while my body is still relatively young. I've come across books and articles before saying how one can finish a marathon by just training for a year, so I know that this is a surmountable challenge. I had this mental image that i'll be lying on my death bed one day, thinking of all the things i've done and not done in my life, and regretting that i've not finished a marathon when I had the chance.
So I shocked myself when I decided to finish a marathon before the end of 2008. What the hell am I doing??
I headed to the library to borrow this book: Non-Runner's Marathon Trainer and spent a few painstaking hours devising a training program for myself based on the author's original plan. Its basically what is documented in that book, but streeeeeeeeeetched out to fill an entire year instead of the original shorter schedule.
So 3 weeks later, I laced up my running shoes for the first time in a looooong while, and headed out to Pasir Ris Park to put my plan into action.
My god.
I felt pain and aches in muscles I didn't even realise I still had, and when I returned from that first 3km run (more like an attempt to run), I was TOTALLY exhausted. But I kept thinking positive and convinced myself that as long as I keep to my schedule, I will make it. Somehow.
Of course, it didn't help that I carry previous injuries in both my ankles and my left knee from my time in the Army that I need to keep a lookout for too.
Honestly, I hated running during the first 2 months into this schedule. I didn't really know what I was doing and it was just horribly tiring. I hated the act of running, but coming home after a run, plugging in the iPod to upload the run stats to the Nike+ website became a habit that became my source of motivation and inspiration. Without the little games that I came up with on the Nike+ site, and the encouragement of others leaving notes for me on the Nike+ site, I would not have made it past those first few months. Or it'll be very very difficult at least.
Upbeat music, podcasts and listening to US Army cadence songs (I know, INSANE!) helped a great deal with keeping myself slightly more interested in running during those early months. And I kept to my schedule religiously.
Then something changed. I started to find my runs feeling a little easier, and I really started to enjoy my runs now. I look forward to it as a way to destress after work and a way to get some fresh air and enjoy a bit of greenery and nature. I feel happy after my runs and the sense of accomplishment after breaking a previous unconquered distance made me feel a joy that i've not felt in ages.
I signed up for my first race, the 15km Passion Run (to coincide with a scheduled long weekend run) and looked forward to the Army Half Marathon I had put into my schedule too.
I tried to make running a little more fun by roping in a good friend of mine to run with me, and after nagging at him for a while, he finally joined in and I tried to spread my new found love of running to him.
Then disaster struck.
While out in Pasir Ris Park during a warmup jog with my friend, I stepped on a dried fruit in the park in the evening darkness and sprained my ankle. So that's it. My old Army injury's back, and I was forced to stop. From my past experiences, I knew it would take 2-3 months to be even able to walk properly again and I was dismayed. I went home, soaked my ankle in an ice bucket (GAH, it hurts!) and hoped for the best.
Amazingly, maybe because of the ice soak quickly after the run, I managed to recover in record time, and I was able to run again in just one month! Trying to get back the momentum after stopping for a whole month was tough, but like finding an old friend, before long, its as if i've never stopped before.
There were a few times when my old injury in my left knee threatened to make things difficult, but rest and an increase in green vegetable intake made all the pain go away. Especially the latter, as now I have no pain in the left knee anymore after I did that, when it hurt consistently during my days in the military.
I trained hard for my first race at the Passion Run and I find myself strangely excited about racing. I had an amazing time at the very well organised race, and managed to come in at 1:23:58! I strove to come in at 1:20 (because its a nice round number, hehe), but I was very happy that I managed to complete the race. I found myself addicted to races and kept an eye out for more races to join.
On a totally crazy whim, I decided one weekend to run from Orchard Road back home to Pasir Ris just for fun. I bought a map from Borders, and off I went! It was AMAZING. It was such incredible fun, and although I took a loooong while to get back because I deliberately ran very slowly (its my first time doing anything like this and I knew it was going to be quite long), it was interesting the entire way.
I ran past thousands of migrant workers along the entire stretch of Serangoon Road (on a Sunday! You can imagine the crowds), past backalleys in industrial areas and when I saw familiar Tampines again, it dawned on me how small Singapore now seems. I knew Singapore is small before, but when I reached my lift lobby and realised that I actually started off at Orchard Road, "small" took on a whole new meaning. I looked at my Nike+ kit, and there it said - 25km.
I've just completed the longest run in my life.
2 days later though, I caught a cough and flu combo meal and I couldn't run for the entire week. I was devastated. The Army Half Marathon is just a week later and if I don't recover in time, I would miss out on a race I was looking forward to for 8 months.
Thankfully, lots of sleep and fluids made my body shake off the bugs, and I managed to recover 5 days before the race. I did one last training run on Tuesday and did abit of carbo loading to prepare for the AHM on Sunday. Its totally surreal. I'm entering my first ever half marathon race when just 8 months ago, I couldn't even manage 3km without wanting to just lie down and melting into the earth. Never in my life would I imagine myself volunteering to join the AHM. If you told me that i'll one day do this while I was serving NS, I would have asked for what you were smoking (and whether I could have some).
The route in the AHM was so-so, but the organisation was world-class (big thanks to all the NSFs and regulars who sacrificed their weekends for this!). I strove to make it in under 2 hours (again, nice number), but my Nike+ kit stopped working midway through the race and I couldn't keep track of my timing. I was really miffed at first when I realised I came in at 2:04:14 because I knew that I would have managed to keep it under 2 hours if I knew it was going to be this close (spent way too much time stopping at the water stations and looking at the few pretty girls around :-)), but I was still really satisfied with the race.
I just finished the Nike Human Walkajog (hehe, can't really call it a race when more than half of the people I had around me in the 2nd wave were walkers) and i'm really looking forward to more races in the future.
I've turned from a a kid who never passed 2.4 in high school, to a reluctant slow-ish runner in the Army, to someone who will now run for fun and kicks. I don't even need music to accompany me on runs anymore. :-)
Running has now become a part of my life. I'm still going to train hard for my first ever marathon (well, I guess for me, almost everything's a first-ever in the world of running) but even if I somehow don't make it, I don't think i'll feel too bad about it. I've picked up something that I think would stay with me for years to come, and this is all just the beginning.
Read more from FunkeeMonk
imaRunner is a series about ordinary people and their not-so-ordinary running achievements.
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