Preparation for my first Marathon

Finally, I got my bib number from River Jungle Marathon last weekend from Running Lab @ Tropicana CityMall. And its time to finalize my thoughts and trainings about this coming marathon.

In my own believing (or you can call it naive-thought), as long as I can finish the race distance in a week’s training, it should have no problem to complete the race on the race day (key emphasize: to complete! Good completion timing not included). I am now ready to prove it myself. So far, my maximum trained distance in a single ran is only 25km on last Saturday. But I had keep my passed 10 weekly mileages averaged about 39km, with 5 weeks had more than 42km, and 3 weeks down mainly due to ITBFS and flu.

One of my colleague (whom a season runner too) said the Half Marathon distance should be set to 30km. 21km is only half of the distance, and not even close to 1/3 in term of effort compared to a full marathon. I will be exam this quote myself too this Sunday.

I had really enjoy the excitement come with the 42km race and the process to get myself ready (or not) to handle it. I experienced lots of self-doubts, withdrawal, injury, and other challenges especially to talk myself out from these negative conditions. Not forget the work loads in my 8 to 5 are picking up too with my new boss on boarded. On the good side, I PB at the previous race before the Fasting month’s break (Men’s Health Night Run 12.3km with a pace of 5:39/km), did some enjoyable speed works, back to back LSD and meet some new friends. Those are priceless experiences and it’s hard to tell the payoff is worth for the efforts. Anyway, happiness is a way of travel, not a destination!

I will fill in the final piece of this RJM preparation on Sunday. I can’t promise a good timing or even an enjoyable race (this will be based on my feeling of cause, please don’t expect me to say this is an enjoyable race if I reduced to crawling back to finishing line after beaten by the 42km). But I can assure you that this is just the very beginning part of my running journey. More marathons will be schedule in future; in fact Putrajaya Night Marathon is just right around the corner and Singapore Marathon in early of December.

Some day, I will definitely able claim that 42km is an enjoyable running distance. Now, let see what I will bring back from my very first attempt to the 42km.

Enjoy Running!