Newton Active Run 2009

After a night disturbed by the adrenaline coursing through my veins, my first thought upon waking this morning was, "Not that many people know I signed up for the 10K this morning. If I don't go, it's not that big of a deal." But knowing that I would know, I got up, spent an hour hydrating, fueling, and limbering, and set off for the MRT station.

There, I was encouraged to see other runners also waiting the 14 minutes for the train to Punggol (they don't come so frequently at 6:23 a.m.!). At each stop, a few more runners would trickle on. Making eye contact with them gave me the same feeling I get when I am in a foreign country and see another foreigner. It's that feeling of, "I don't know you, but we're in this together."

When I reached the race at Sengkang, I scanned the crowds for other foreigners. I counted maybe 40 out of the thousands there. One of them was kind enough to lend me $2 for a 100 Plus (think less drastic version of Gatorade) because I was feeling hungry again, and I had only brought my MRT card and my POSB card.

The race began at 7:30 for the open competitive runners, and 7:45 for the veteran runners, which I knew meant that at some point those people would be blowing past us, blinding us with the sweat flying off their more conditioned bodies. No matter. I was ready.

Or was I? I determined not to look at my watch for the first part of the race, nor to think about the fact that I would be running for the next hour. I spent the first five minutes thinking, "Why am I doing this?" But when I glanced at it by the 2km sign, I was surprised to find I'd been keeping just over a 5 min/km pace. I doubted I could maintain that the whole time, but decided to press on rather than slow down.

Sure enough, around the 6-7km mark, the first of the veteran runners loped past me like a gazelle, causing me to glance at my watch and see that I was still doing well. But I know from recent history that I am good for about 7 km and then I want to be doing anything else. And as I suspected, when I entered my last three kilometers I started to drag. Thankfully, at that point my strategic placement of "I'm Taking You With Me" by Relient K and "You Can't Stop the Beat" from Hairspray, as well as a few others, helped me pick up the pace.

The last block was brutal - I could see the finish line the whole time, but I could also see the giant square I had to run around to get to it. When I hit the last stretch I had hoped to give a last minute push, but found it was all I could do to just maintain what I was doing. My goal for this race was to make it under 60 minutes, which I thought would be tough since I had only trained 5 weeks and the only time I timed myself in training I ran it in 62 minutes. But to my great joy, I finished in 56:08! The only downside of this is that I told Erik and the kids it would be an hour, so they showed up 5 minutes after I finished.

But I did it. It was nice to run a shorter distance after that brutal 1/2 marathon. Of course I was quick to think, "Now, next time . . . "