Singapore Marathon 2009

What meant to be a record-breaking race for me turned out horribly wrong.

Stopwatch time: 0:05:02

A deficit of over 20 minutes! At the 30km mark, my right knee began to hurt again. I had to slow down. But later I had to reduce my pace to a walk. At about 38km, I was already seriously contemplating giving up because of the unbearable pain. But here's the thing about giving up: It sucks big time! And I knew that I would kick myself in the butt if I had given up. So instead, I walked for a good 5 - 6 km until I realised that I had about 2-3 km left to the finish line. Then I tried running again, but not quite successful at it.

In retrospect, I don't think it's such a clever thing to do. It felt like the right decision to make then though. I mean, I trained several months for this race. I flew all the way and spent some bucks on this trip. Giving up just seemed so wrong. But now that it's all over, I think it's a stupid thing to do. I hope I did not injure my knee permanently. And because I forced myself to run, now my ankle is also in trouble.

It's a real pity. The weather was so good, in fact I'd say perfect for record-breaking. Absolutely no excuse that I should fail today. Failure is such an ugly word. Oh I'm so tired now. I'll stop here for now. I really need to rest; I need the time to sulk on my failure. More report later. Stay tuned.

Update (8 Dec 2009):

KK to Singapore:

Saturday was quite a busy day. We arrived at the airport quite early, although not as early as Drs Helen and Liaw. When we entered the departure area, they were already there having coffee. The flight was quite pleasant, except for a slight turbulence. Silk Air gives a bit more leg space when compared to Air Asia or Mas. We more or less agreed that flying Silk Air was worth the money. I would certainly fly Silk Air again in the future.

We touched down in Singapore in the early afternoon. Then we went to the race pack collection centre directly from the airport. That was dealt with very quickly. But after that we spent a good hour or so visiting the many booths next door.

We ended up buying some stuff. By the time we reached the hotel, it was already past 5pm. We freshened up a bit and then went for an early dinner at the nearby stalls. We were back to the hotel again quite early. In fact, we were ready for bed by 9pm. That night I turned and tossed around in bed trying to sleep, but without much success. I was thinking of all the things that could go wrong the next morning.

Marathon Day:

By 3:30am, it was too late to try to sleep. I got out of bed and started getting ready for the race. A quick shower before putting on my running gears. Mia decided to come with me to the starting line although her event was scheduled to start at 6:45am. We walked to the starting line, which was only about 10 - 15 minutes away. It wasn't a very long wait. Shortly before the flag off, I lost sight of my friends in the sea of runners.

The start was a bit frustrating because there was hardly any space to run. That was more or less the case until about 10km before the runners finally began to thin out a bit. It's not so much that I wanted to (or could) run any faster than that, but it would have been more comfortable to run without rubbing elbows with other runners. Dr Liaw finally overtook me at about the 5km mark. He said "hi" and then quickly disappeared into the dark amongst the other runners.

It was probably a kilometre or two later when I finally caught up with the 4:30 pacers. Well, I wasn't really chasing after them. I was merely keeping a constant comfortable pace of about 1:05 for every 10km. The weather was perfect that morning. I was still feeling good after 20km. I was still holding my pace at the 25km point, but shortly after that, my right knee began to ache. I didn't think it would get any worse if I did not push myself beyond that pace.

I arrived at the 30km point with a 3:15 on my watch—and I was very pleased with that, as I felt I had it in me to increase the pace for the remaining 12km of the race. By then, I had begun to feel a bit of exhaustion, although still manageable. But my knee was getting worse. I decided to slow down a bit in the hope of letting my knee improve. And so, I began to lag further and further behind the pacers.

By the time I reached the 32km mark, the pain in my knee was already unbearable. A very embarrassing moment when I had to reduce my pace to a walk. In fact I walked for a good 5 - 6 km, all the time people were shouting from the roadsides, e.g. "C'mon, don't stop, you can do it, a bit more to go!" And an hour later, people were still shouting "A bit more to go!"

It was not until the last 2 -3 km when I finally tried to run again. By then, it was quite a challenge to weave through all the other thousands of runners from the other categories who were mostly walking to the finish line. Let me tell you the last few steps were such a big challenge.

I'm happy to finish the distance of course, but am so disappointed that I missed my target by more than half an hour; and off my BIM time by more than 20 minutes.

We waited some more for Helen to arrive. And then Mia and I excused ourselves to go back to the hotel first. We had shower and went down for lunch and then spent the entire afternoon catching up on sleep.

All's not lost though, Mia improved by about 5 minutes to finish her 21km in 2:30! And later on, I found out that Dr Liaw achieved 4:04, an amazing improvement of about 22 minutes from his 4:26 in the BIM in October, and almost an hour ahead of me! Now I really need to do something to close up the gap!

So what next? I will still aim to achieve the 4:30 one way or another. Probably not in the BIM 2010 though. Helen and Liaw are looking at Gold Coast and Penang Bridge for 2010. Bring it on!


Upon arrival at the Kota Kinabalu International Airport.

From left:

Judy Liew (Full Marathon)—5:21
Dr Helen Lasimbang (Full Marathon)—5:40
Yours truly (Full Marathon)—5:02
Euphemia Thien (Half Marathon)—2:30
Dr Liaw Yun Haw (Full Marathon)—4:04
Bhavani (Half Marathon)—2:45