It’s Sunday 24th May 2009 with just one week to go before the highly awaited Sundown Marathon and this race is meant to be part of my tapering for the Marathon .With 1 hour to go before the race starts I am still pondering over the right pace to run for this event. As so far I have always been disappointed with my 15km race results and I do hope to change that. The only thing that holds me back is my preparation for the coming marathon as I am in the process of recovering from months of rigorous trainings and I do consider that a marathon pace of 5:30mins/km will be a more appropriate option. But nevertheless with just 10min before the gun goes off, I decide that I will just go out there and do my best and just enjoy this race.With a slight delay of about 10min the race starts at about 7:10am. I started off enthusiastically with a pace of about 4:20 - 4:30mins/km and feeling so far so good till at about 3km before I slowed down slightly to catch some breath, hmm…. Think I have over paced myself. But as soon as I reaches the 5km mark I took a glance at my Polar watch which shows 24min, overall still quite pleased with myself as 1 hour 15min is still achievable.
Along the way I saw a number of familiar faces from Safra Running Club, especially Lawrence at just over the 6km mark taking photos, well think he caught me with his camera from close range :p. Soon as I reached the 7km mark I started to feel really tired and I had to slow down to a pace of about 5:30mins/km, guessed I really over paced myself during the earlier part of the race. At the same time I was trying really hard and telling myself to run at least 5mins/km
Just after the 9km distance marker I met Vincent Leong (Safra running club) doing his own training run, wow…. so nice of him to cheer me on. Meanwhile I realized that I am slightly behind time as my watch shows 46min, oops… I am supposed to reach 10km in at least 50min, and as it turns out I took 51min. But still I am really that glad I have finally reached the NSRCC U-turn checkpoint and that means I have only 5 km more to go!!! I was hoping that for the remaining part of the race I can go below 5mins/km to make up loss time for a better timing. Meanwhile I met Shirlyn (Safra running club) at the 11km mark while she was running towards NSRCC while I eagerly run and push myself as I was almost reaching the Sailing Club. Tired and trying hard to maintain a pace of at least 5mins/km until I notice some discrepancy from the 12km to 13km distance markers, I pulled back a little so as not to burn out. As I finally reached the F2 carpark area, I am certain that there was only 1km to go I made the final effort to finish strongly, just hope to get over it fast as I started to feel pain from stitch.
Finished in 1hr 16min, average pace of 5:03mins/km.
