This will be my 2nd full marathon in 2015 and the starting of the 4 marathons in 3 months kind of crazy ride. I have been barking too long for my sub4 and I won’t need to plan too much this round. I am going to set up my GF910XT visual partner to 5:36min/km pace. With the recent half marathon result, I am kind of confident that I am going to sub4 this time. Then the story turned sour.
I did 300km in July with the 3 to 4 times a week work commuting as part of the routine. Then early August I started some weight lifting training too. The body seem to have some trouble to fully recover from the double workouts a day, and the body muscles soreness from the weight lifting lasted longer than expected. I was obviously over trained. The body and mind struggled to keep up with the demand especially from the few double workouts routine. Even though I was looking forward to run in Kuching, but I was not ready to get the sub 4.
From my experience in Seoul, travelling to just run a marathon doesn’t work for me. This trip was booked before the Seoul marathon hence I just need to bear with it. I booked a guest house which is only 200m away from the starting line. Great guest house but poor marathoners stayed in the guest house. I don’t understand how people can stay up late (at least 11pm) on the Saturday night when they had a marathon to run 3am in Sunday morning. I hit the bed around 9pm, but waken by these noisy neighbour few times. Only got like 3 hours of broken sleeps before my alarm finally rang at 1:30am.
I walked to the starting line around 2:30am, met some running friends and joking a bit trying to ease my stress from the poor sleep. The event flagged off on time. I started off from the mid of the pack, then slowly picked up my pace to the target 5:36min/km. I was on the dot for this pace until 21km. Then I lost my push to maintain this pace. May be the long lonely stretch of road, may be the tiredness finally caught me, or may be…… finally, completed the race in 4:34’42”.
Overall the race is very well organized with sufficient water stations and manned with supporting volunteers. The route is flat and straight, it can be quite boring if you need external stimulus or attraction to assist in your race. The last 5km full marathon will join with half marathon, but no issue here because there are not many runners in both categories. Anyway, traffic control can be improved especially in the final stretch when we back in the town. The medal is really nice and the extra "top 200" finisher t-shirt is great too (just I didn't managed to get one).
On my end, I will need to rest until I am fully recovered from the exhaustion, then rework on my training plan if I seriously wanted to run to office few times a week. I will also adding in some weight lifting to build my core for next stage. I noticed that my mind doesn’t work very well to stay focused if I ran with my sun glasses. I think I gave up too early for all 3 races I ran with it. And I did well in Seremban half marathon where I actually forgot to bring the sun glasses. The sample size is too small to make any conclusion but maybe I need to give it up in RJM, run with normal glasses only.
Looking at current condition and the route, I will be very happy if I can sub 5 in RJM. 3 more weeks to go.
