This year's AHM starts at 5:30am. I hardly sleeped the night before and woke up at 3:20am. After some bread for breakfast, packing and installing the champion chip, I head out at 4am. I arrived and parked my car at the Raffles City. Since I was early, I took some picture first and return the camera pack to the car before heading to the starting line. Man, it is really crowded.
At 5:30am sharp, the run started. I run the first 1km and then switch to my strategy of brisk walking. Obviously, I was one of the slowest at the beginning. I am able to maintain a pretty good pace of 7.5km/h with pushed to 8km/h for a stretch of about 1km. I had to tell myself many time to calm down, keep my pace slow at the beginning. I know it will take up to 45 minutes for my Shin muscle to get into condition.
Around 45 minutes into the run, I still keeping my 7.5km/h even on the uphill climb portion. Then, on the downhill portion of ECP, I practically let the gravity to do the work. My speed pick up to about 14km/h during the 400m stretch. The downhill run + stretch of push has gained me 5 minutes over my scheduled pace of 7.5km/h.
In the next 2 hours, I was able to maintain my 7.5km/h. At the end, when the FINISH sign was in sight, I started to think about how long can I sprint. I guess I can do a 100m. Therefore, I start sprinting about 100m from the Finish sign. However, it turned out that the Finish sign was for the non-competitive one and the Finish sign for the Half Marathon was after another two turns and another 100m away. I end up sprinting for 200m. The GPS said that I had a max speed of 23.8km/h during my sprint.
At the end, the time is 2:44, 13 minutes better than my SCSM 2006 timing of 2:57. Even better than my most optimistic target of 2:45. By the way, my timing at 10k mark is 1:16:13, almost as good as my best 10k timing of 1:15.
Back at home, I examine my feet. They are still in good condition, no blistering at all. The toe sock really work well, though the pair of sock was completely wet. Now, it is time to go to sleep.
congratulations on completing the AHM and starting a blog! Yeah, you put many guys to shame with your engagement of such activities. I know the problem with sweaty feet cos I have this problem too.
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