Standard Chartered Marathon Singapore 2010

Finally came my long awaited race, 5th Dec 2010 Standard Chartered Marathon Singapore. As this is my only marathon this year, I really hope I can do well especially after weeks and months of preparation and things were looking bright after my latest Taroko Gorge half marathon PB.

It was a cooling morning with the race starting at 5am, I was hopefully that I can finally go sub 4 hours in Singapore. Soon as the race starts, I tried to maintain a constant pace of 5:35min/km for the first 10km and 5:30min/km for the second 10km and things were looking good as I continue to up my pace to 5:25min/km when I suddenly find it difficult to keep pace after 25km, very soon my pace started to deteriorate to 6min/km pace and was forced to stop as I felt pain in my glutes.

All hopes of a sub 4 hour finish was no longer possible after the 30k mark. The rest of the race ended up as a demoralizing walk run session as I suffered cramps on both inner quads and calf. I was tempted to just give up with a DNF, well in the end I just want to get over with this marathon.

Post Mortem & race analysis

It is another disappointing marathon which I had spend weeks preparing for ended as race day plan of doing a negative splits (5secs cut down every 10k) failed miserably. Energy level drops drastically after only 25k and I could no longer maintained my intended race pace. After much thoughts, I felt that what happened could be due to:

1) not consuming enough Carbs just before the race and also during training, my idea is to control weight gain, I certainly felt lighter and is doing better for shorter races, which I had PBs for Nike City run 10k and also the recent Taroko Gorge half Marathon.

2) my furthest long run during training was only 30km which includes the 2k warm up run followed by stretching exercises and 2k cool down run. Continuous running was only 26km, which was my actual longest LSD clocked and so mentally I was not prepared to run far enough.

3) I was down which cramps obviously shows that I was not well-prepared on certain aspect of my training, I will need to look into proper strength + cross trainings.

Split	Time	Distance	Avg Pace
Summary	04:23:04	42.62	06:10
1	00:05:13	1.00	05:13
2	00:05:06	1.00	05:06
3	00:05:30	1.00	05:30
4	00:05:39	1.00	05:39
5	00:05:55	1.00	05:55
6	00:05:00	1.00	05:00
7	00:05:35	1.00	05:35
8	00:05:42	1.00	05:42
9	00:05:39	1.00	05:39
10	00:05:34	1.00	05:34
11	00:05:29	1.00	05:29
12	00:05:24	1.00	05:24
13	00:05:35	1.00	05:35
14	00:05:32	1.00	05:32
15	00:05:29	1.00	05:29
16	00:05:27	1.00	05:27
17	00:05:25	1.00	05:25
18	00:05:35	1.00	05:35
19	00:05:26	1.00	05:26
20	00:05:33	1.00	05:33
21	00:05:25	1.00	05:25
22	00:05:26	1.00	05:26
23	00:05:23	1.00	05:23
24	00:05:29	1.00	05:29
25	00:05:32	1.00	05:32
26	00:05:41	1.00	05:41
27	00:05:44	1.00	05:44
28	00:06:01	1.00	06:01
29	00:05:56	1.00	05:56
30	00:06:08	1.00	06:08
31	00:06:12	1.00	06:11
32	00:07:22	1.00	07:22
33	00:07:04	1.00	07:04
34	00:06:36	1.00	06:36
35	00:11:02	1.00	11:02
36	00:10:52	1.00	10:52
37	00:07:58	1.00	07:58
38	00:06:00	1.00	06:00
39	00:07:50	1.00	07:50
40	00:06:51	1.00	06:51
41	00:07:16	1.00	07:16
42	00:07:33	1.00	07:33
43	00:03:34	0.62	05:45