11th run of 2010

February is the CNY feasting month and yet I run so little. Sigh.........

Tonight is not my running night but because my last run was last Monday evening, I better run especially yesterday bai nian lunch was almost 3hours of feasting.....

Did 7km in 52:53 (Avg pace 7:33min/km). Felt very exhausted and a little out of breathe during the run. The little bit of running nose didn't help either. I don't know if I can squeeze a short 4km run on Wednesday night. Got to see how. Tomorrow got 9am meeting with the Top 3 of my company.

Well, HK is this Sunday. Weather seems cooling though not as cold as TPE. :p

10th run of 2010

8 days no run. Sunddenly, become fat after CNY Eve and CNY Day makan. Jialat.

Did it real slow. Completed my laps totalling 17km as follows:
7km: 00:53:45
14km: 02:00:18
16km: 02:17:48
17km: 02:26:38

Become slower and slower. Knees also feel pain. Ankles also pain or not really pain but serious aching. Hamstrings especially the left one so tight especially when I was doing my post-run stretching.
Anyway, only got HK 10km on 28 Feb and North East 16km on 14 March 2010. Working towards these two run since I'm not doing PAssion Run 25km anymore.

9th run of 2010

No mid-week run since outstation on biz trip.

I did 7km loop x 2 + 2km loop. If I remember correctly, 1st 7km loop completed in 55mins. 14km completed in 1hr 58 mins. 16km completed in 2 hr 13mins 45 secs (8mins 22 sec/km avg pace). Slightly slower  than last Sunday.

One concern is my knee especially the right one seems to be wearing out(?) Feel pain, not really pain, pain but annoying discomfort. To monitor. Looks likely I won't do the 25km PAssion Run in May 2010.

8th run of 2010

31 Jan 2010: Done my 8th run for the month. clocked a total of 71km for the month which is way above average. But that's because I had two weekends of 16km.

I did the 7km loop and then the 5km loop. As I was completing the 1st km of the extension 2km loop, I was telling myself the cramps are staying away longer and another km to complete 16km. suddenly it HIT me. I was only completing my 14th km and not 16km!!!! Last week, I did 2 loops of 7km and then the extension 2km loop. Today, it was 7km + 5km and that meas only 12km. :(

Press on. Walk 1km, jog 1km, more or less.

Very happy to complete 16km today within my desired target of 2 hr 15mins. The actual time was 2hr 13mins and 23secs (Avg pace of 8min, 40secs per km). A good improvement from last Sunday's first 16km attempt of 2hr 21mins. If I can do this for NE Run in March, will be very happy. No grand plan to hit 2hrs. It's not the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak, but the hamstrings (yet to condition for longer distance) and now my knees (arrrgghh! - probably over-running & giving me discomfort and then pain) just needs time. Every human being has a limit. I'm probably almost there. Just pushing it a little and see how...



I'm quite sure I won't be signing up for PAssion Run 25km solo based on last week's and this week's 16km. The hamstrings won't be conditioned for the distance. I can try and build up to do another 21km this year and hopefully it won't cramp by the 11km mark like last yr's AHM. It's not I don't have to walk, but I hope not to walk 11km dragging two hamstrings hard and cramped to the finish line. That is miserable way to be a finisher.

7th run of 2010

I started out today, the 4th day after my 16km last Sunday. I didn't know if I should do 4km or 5km or 6km before I started.

At the end, I did 5km. 2 loops of 2km and 1 loop of 1km opposite my place. 43mins 13 secs or avg pace of 7min 34 secs/ km which is alright.

The only issues are that my shin felt a little teeny pain at the 3km point and after the run, my knees felt not so good. The ITBS stretching cured the outer ITB problem but the inner knee, I haven't found a solution yet.....

North East Run 2010

After thinking about it for a few weeks, decided to sign up for the 16km North East Run @ Pasir Ris on Sunday 14 March 2010.

Actually, between this 16km and the May 25km PAssion Run, I think I don't think I can gear myself up to even walk the 25km. For now, this will be my 2nd 2010 run event. 3rd run signed up is the 12km 2XU in April 11, 2010.

Today got my Race Acceptance letter for the SCHKM 2010. Finally came.

6th & longest run of 2010

Weekend run.


Since I have 2 minds about whether to do the 16km North East Run in March or the 25km PAssion Run in May, I thought I would do at least 14km since last I haven't do such a distance in a long while (Based on my records, the last time I ran more than 11km was the 14km I did on 18/10/09). Actually, after the AHM 21km, I had no desire to do any distance nearing 21km especially how many painful and crampy an experience it was including how lousy an experience to walk 11km with both hamstrings cramped.

I completed the 1st 7km loop in exactly 56mins (8min/km pace). The 2nd 7km loop was interrupted by buying H-Two-O from Prime Supermarket and 2 sessions of walking 8-11mins after consuming some H-Two-O to minimise the stitches. Well, didn't get the stitches but the slow timing means I completed the 14km in 2 hours 2mins 15 secs (Avg pace of 8mins 44 secs/km). Some runners will know how fatigue makes one make silly decisions. Anyway, even though I almost literally walked the 14th km in 10mins, I decided to extend to the 2km loop in front of my home and see if I can jog-a-bit and walk another 2km to see if I can complete 16km in reasonable shape. Well.....took 19 mins to complete the last 2km with mostly walking and a little jogging. But I tried jogging but could feel my left hamstring tightening and the tightening increased after the 15km. So just walked mostly though I jogged the last 200m to complete the 16km in exactly 2 hours 21 mins (Avg pace of 8mins 49 secs/ km).

My feet feel tired. More so the left foot and hamstring compared to the right. My right knee as usual, the inner knee feels uncomfortable. After doing the ITBS stretches, I don't have ITBS on my outer right knee but the inner right knee feels pain. I'm  guessing it's my running posture or gait but can't be sure.

Today I wore the white Aviation Tee. It's good. I forgot to use the handiplast but I completed the 16km with hardly any nipple burn. Good material. Wished I had more than 1 :)

I'll not run till Wednesday night earliest. But I hope I can continue to run 12km and above on weekends and see if my hamstrings, ankles and feet can take longer distance w/o failing on me. What to do. Can try and clock mileage but human body is unique and there is a limit to every person's muscles, ligaments and body system. I'll see how. Early bird for PAssion Run is end Feb 2010 and I guess the North East Run got till Feb 2010 to sign up.

Keeping Up With the Pack

An old NYT articles on why people like me don't or seldom join group runs.

Keeping Up With the Pack
By GINA KOLATA
Published: September 23, 2007

Laura Pedrick for The New York Times

Jennifer Smith, left, and Alex Katen-Narvell stuck together along the Delaware & Raritan Canal in Princeton.
I USED to run alone. Who would want my schedule and who would run my pace, I thought. Anyway, I had my iPod for company.
But a few months ago, on a bicycling trip in Italy, a member of our group who is also a runner urged me to find some running friends. You will run farther and faster, he said, and the miles will fly by. Join a club, find a local group. Surely there must be some organization in your New Jersey town or nearby, he said.
Of course, there was. And of course, the cyclist was right about the group. What happened was that I discovered the world of runners' networks. It was a world I already half knew about, and it was a world right under my feet. All it took to join was opening my eyes.
Those who run in packs are part of a select society, or maybe a self-selected society. Anyone can join, but you have to run and you have to go to the designated meeting place at the designated time. You might join a club that sponsors runs each week or you might go to a place like a parking lot behind a school where runners gather on weekend mornings. It's not hard to find these meeting places; local running groups and running stores know where to go. And when you show up, ready to run, the society opens up to you.
For the most part, these groups are not made up of people who are jogging for their health or because they want to lose weight. They are made up mostly of people who have been running long enough to be able to continue for miles and miles. And they love it. They are running for the sheer joy of it and for company to push them to run longer and faster and to share the inevitable pain that comes with the effort to improve.
But if you crack open the door to the running community and wander in, you may get some surprises. You may end up with two separate but equal groups of friends -- those who run and those who don't. You will probably have conversations during runs that you could never imagine having if you were sitting face to face with a neighbor or a work colleague. And you may become unexpectedly close to people you would never have met or gotten to know in your other life.
Along the way, you will discover quiet roads and hidden trails to run on. You may find some nice surprises -- like a golf course along a canal towpath that has a large orange cooler filled with icy water and next to it, a stack of paper cups. It is put out for golfers, but runners help themselves.
You may hear comments from passing motorists -- one guy called out to me and my running friend Claire Brown, 34, "Bet you can't catch me." Out of his earshot, I muttered, "I'll bet we could if he got out of his car."
And you may find that the world of serious runners is surprisingly small. Everyone in your area seems to know each other.
I had already met some people from running in a few local five-kilometer races, including my nemesis, a woman who edged into my five-year age group last fall and has beaten me ever since. But the running community is more than the casual acquaintances you might strike up at races, as I discovered when I joined the Raritan Valley Road Runners and e-mailed its president, Gene Gugliotta, asking if he knew someone who could be a partner for me on long runs.
I got an e-mail in reply. "Gina, meet Jen," he wrote. "Jen, meet Gina."
Jen was Jennifer Davis, 37, a physical chemist and avid runner. When she was in graduate school, her adviser asked what she did in her spare time. "I run," she said. But what else do you do? he asked. "You don't understand," she said. "I run."
And run she did. One long run would lead to the next, which would be a little longer as she pushed herself to keep going. Now she runs 10 to 12 miles at 6:45 each morning and often runs 30 or 40 miles on a weekend day.
On our first run, Jen and I arranged to meet at Princeton University at 7:30 a.m. on a hot and humid Saturday. I saw Jen as I walked from my car to our meeting place -- it was obvious that she was the woman who was going to run with me. Not only was she wearing shorts and a singlet, but she and I were also the only people around.
We headed off, across campus, down a hill and to the Delaware & Raritan Canal. Jen turned out to be an entertaining companion and a tireless runner who set a great pace. While we ran, we talked and talked -- you can say a lot in 90 minutes or more, and talking made the miles go by. We spoke about books and about our families and, of course, about running.
We also spoke about cycling -- a passion for me and something new for Jen. She had just bought a bike because she wanted to start to train for triathlons and had been cycling with her neighbor. She told me about the longest ride she had done with this neighbor, 70 miles, and how tired she had felt afterward. But she never told me the neighbor's name.
Then, I decided to show up at a running store in Princeton on a Thursday night when runners gather. I ended up running with Tara Martin, 29, who turned out to be Jen's neighbor and the cycling buddy who had ridden those 70 miles with her, and with Amy Speckart, 36,, who also knew Jen. The next time I went to the store, the Running Company, I met Claire, who, of course, is friends with Jen and Tara and Amy and all the others in the informal group.
The men in that Thursday night group are so fast that they can seem daunting. Few of the women can keep up. But the fast pace is part of the appeal, the men say. They are serious runners who drive each other to go farther and faster than they ever would on their own.
"There's a lot of bluffing," says Jon Luff, 39, an aerospace mechanical engineer. "It's kind of like a card game."
He loves the group so much that he continues to run with it even though he moved to New York in 2005, a 90-minute drive away.
Jesse Smith, 34, who owns a home-building company, still remembers the first time he ran with the Thursday night group. It was the winter of 2002, and he had been running up to, although not more than, about 30 miles a week. Still, he thought he was ready.
"They were probably running at a moderate effort," he recalls. "But I was redlining it completely from a quarter of the way in until I got dropped a little over halfway." One man in the group slowed down to keep him company.
Jesse came back the next week, though. And he began running more miles during the week. Now he runs with the pack, and loves it.
The running group, Jesse says, showed him something that, in retrospect, seems kind of obvious: Fast runners, no matter how gifted they are, train hard. And, he says, "if you work really hard, you will tend to get a lot better."
Then there is the runners' camaraderie. Most in the Thursday night group linger afterward and then go out for dinner. So do the runners in Gene Gugliotta's group, the Raritan Valley Road Runners. Women and men in that group often run together.
Running friendships, though, really are different.
They often include people you would never meet in any other way. People in their 20s run with people in their 50s. Professionals run with students. The affluent run with the less so.
The men in the Thursday night group include a poet, two mathematicians, a seminarian, a historian, investment bankers, an aerospace engineer, a home builder and a retired letter carrier. The women include Tara, an electrical engineer; Claire, the executive director of a nonprofit program that sends recent Princeton graduates to Latin America for one-year internships; and Amy, a research historian.
The disparate backgrounds of the runners "make for some unusual conversations on runs, let me tell you," says Patrick Walsh, 40, the poet in the men's group.
The topics, Jesse says, are "more or less all the topics people steer away from in social situations." Religion, for example. And politics.
You may also end up revealing quite a bit about yourself to those running friends. Maybe it's because you don't see them in your other life. Maybe it's because you're running side by side and not looking at each other. Or maybe, as Amy says, "some of the intimacy of a running club comes from seeing each other unmasked, in a way, in bare clothing, sweaty and gross, at good times and bad." For whatever reason, as the miles pass, people often confide very personal stories.
"There's a certain baring of the soul that you get through runs," Amy notes.
Ben Cheever, a 59-year-old writer from Pleasantville, N.Y., who runs marathons and who shows up nearly every weekend to run with a group that meets at a school parking lot, spoke of the same experience.
"You get a picture of people and, I'm afraid, they get a picture of you, that you wouldn't ordinarily get," he says.
For example, he said, the last time he ran 20 miles, he was getting desperate for something to take his mind off the effort. "I called out: ?All right. The worst moment of your life.' " One man told of the time he dropped his son off at college.
Ben, the author of a new book, "Strides: Running Through History With an Unlikely Athlete" (Rodale Books, 2007), used to run with a group that met at a Y.M.C.A. in New York.
"None of us knew each other in any other way," he says. "So we could tell each other anything, and we did." They knew about love affairs and personal matters at work. They knew about family problems, he says. And they trusted that nothing they said would seep beyond that group.
"I have two separate sets of friends," Gene Gugliotta says. "When I'm involved with my running friends, it doesn't involve my family." Sometimes his other friends, the ones who involve his family, ask about his running, but Gene, 48, tries to spare them the details.
"I don't bore them by going into depth about it," he says. "I realized we have other things to talk about." And, he notes, all that talk about speeds and distances and training regimens can be dull, dull, dull to those who do not run.
"You know how much work it takes to get where you want to go in racing, but it is very hard for a nonrunner to relate to," he says.

5th run of 2010

Still haven't decided to sign up for March 16km North East Run in Pasir Ris or May 25km Passion Run solo. Already doing the 2XU 12km Sentosa run. Do all? Nah........

Tonight I reached home 7pm. Spend half day completing a draft report and half day doing forward planning.

First few clicks good time of chatting with God while running. 1st km completed in 7:30. 5km completed in exactly 35min but very tired. 2 minutes ++ at traffic light. After cross road, walked 250m. Then run the rest of the last km to finish 6km in 46 mins. From avg pace of 7:00min/km become 7:40min/km after walking and running the last km. Reached home do some stretching after downing some fluids.

Realised today very humid and a bit dehydrated after the run because didn't drink enough before running. Floor was a little wet bcos it rained in the afternoon.

4th run of 2010

Since I could leave office before 6pm, I decided to do a run if it wasn't raining.

It wasn't! Off I went. 1st km at 7:36. Reasonable. I finished my 5km loop in 38mins+. After thinking over it, I decided to extend 1km or 2km. Eventually, I finished additional 2km in ~13mins 13secs. Which means I went too fast since that meant average pace of 6 1/2 per km over last 2km which didn't feel like it. Strange.

Anyway, happy to complete 7km in 53 mins 13 secs. Pace was 7:36 which is reasonable.

Jon sms me about PAssion Run. Not one who like going ECP. But he say it's on Saturday afternoon. After checking website, will give it some thought. I think if I do this, I'll forgo North East 16km run. Wonder if I should walk 25km for PAssion Run since 25km finishers get additional finisher tee + race belt. Sigh.......
But then, there is cut-off time of 9pm and they haven't announced start time for 25km yet. Of course, never in my life walk 25km non-stop, so, will need some madness to sign up 25km at this point of time. ^_^