PJ Half Marathon Race Report

I woke up 5am, and I know it very well that this is not my day. Even though the sore throat is gone, but the left nose still blocked. These are the flu bugs from my boy and its lingering since Deepavali. From experience, I should be ok to run with this condition, but need a longer warming up and tentatively sub-2 is out of my reach.

Reached the stadium around 6:10am and the road & parking to the stadium was already jammed. Lucky I still manage to find a parking. When I came off from the car, the warming up session in the stadium is just over and the emcee requesting all HM runners head to starting point located outside the stadium. With some quick warm up, I slow jog to the starting line. I am surprised with the number of HM runners at the starting line. There must be at least 1000 runners took part. This means the limited medal will also out of my reach.

We flagged off on time and I started from the very behind of the pack. We are heading to Federal Highway from the old airport road. We were diverted onto the motorcycles lane when we reached the Federal Highway. It gave me some tough time as the lane is narrow and kind of difficult to overtake others runners. The route is still dark until I reached the 1st water station and approaching the U-turn at the cable bridge. It took me 27 minutes on this stretch and 5 minutes behind my plan. As I don’t have an instant feedback on my pace, and the distance markers are limited. I only gave my best to keep running. I still have the sour taste on not giving my best during the PNM final leg. I would not want to repeat the same mistake and give up a race before the finish line.

The sun came out early by 7:30am, and all runners get toasted on the old airport road until we U-turn again in front of terminal 2. After toasted under the hot sun for an hour, I finally reached the exist point to the stadium. Step on the finish line on 2:09 and concluded my 4th HM. Deo is snapping some photo outside the stadium and he got my relieving look right in front of the stadium entrance :) 

I only managed to check my pace on Nokia post race, it shown that I am maintaining a good 6 min pace throughout the race. Also I didn’t walk at all for the whole 21km (only few steps after the Ara Damansara water station, the sun and the sweat got into my eyes). As my current training plan is focus to have a good FM finish time (sub-6 hours), so it will be hard to challenge the sub-2 target for HM. I know this HM result is properly my current best and I am happy with that. May be if I change 1~2 LSD into long 20km tempo run will help me to achieve the sub-2 in PBIM. But it may also hurt me due to over trained. Am I that dying for sub-2 HM? We shall see.

Another photo by Tey. Inside the stadium before the Finish Line.

PACM is organizing LSD at Bukit Aman-Sri Hartamas this coming Sunday. I plan to do a 30~35km on the route and this will be the last longest LSD before I tuned down the intensity of my training and rest for SCMS.

See you in coming races and training.