Sunday Long Run

I reached the usual meeting place at 5am. The morning was chilly unlike the previous Sunday. There was no sign of Bruce nor Ngae, the traditional early birds. Instead I had Penguin-2 for company as agreed over the phone on Saturday. I'm sure both of us had some apprehension with regards to the 5am start time but yet quietly know that this was driven by the need for long runs. Just 7 weeks separate us from our trip to Singapore and there's no better time than now to work harder.

Boey, training for the Auckland Marathon next month, was already nearing the Selangor Properties building when we pulled up to him. P2 and I had been doing about 6:45 pace and we decided to run with Boey at least until we cleared the contruction area at Duta roundabout.

Further up the route was some road patching work but after that part, where the new luxury homes were being built it was completely dark. P2 and I decided to wait up for Boey - safety in numbers. We could barely make out the white painted road lines and I even ran into a mound of sand. We spotted 2 runners returning on the other side of the road, the second of whom was Yaziz (he must have started at 4:45am). We shouted greetings across the road and went on our ways.

On our return trip we saw Ngae with Barefoot Tan, Bruce and a whole lot more people. I was occasionally sipping on Performance which was a change from the usual Excel and tore open a PowerGel somewhere the 14K mark (near the mosque).

All these while, P2 was maintaining a slightly faster pace than I but as with his training runs, he always double-backed. He'd charge up the hills or simply engage himself in fartleks. In the Bukit Tunku area, we saw Ronnie pacing with Khoo Yit Kiat, Justin with Adam and Chen. There was to be no PowerGel Tongkat Ali Power Root from Chen!

The return journey took us 57 mins which was pretty fast for a long training run. Not contented we decided to push it a bit by running a lap around the lake which I only managed to complete 3/4 of it.

At the end of the workout P2 went his way while I linked up with the other club members. There were plenty of stories and photos shared by Tey (who participated in the recent Kinabalu Climbathon). One could see how hard the event is just by looking at the photos. In fact this year's edition claimed a life.

Then it was Adam's turn to show us his finishing medal for last month's Sydney Marathon. Naturally I drooled over the Sydney medal. One day...