5:07

5 hours and 7 minutes. That’s how long it took me to complete my marathon last July 16. Not quite as fast as my previous three runs, all of which were under 5 hours. But I did finish, and I managed to raise more than P40K for charity, too. So when all’s been said and done, it was another great run.

Wasn’t easy though. I keep saying this, but this year is definitely the most poorly trained I’ve ever been for a 42k run. The first time I ran, I had been running regularly for 5 months leading up to it – lots of 5-10k runs for the first three months then fairly regular long runs (15-20+ km) for two. The second time I did it, I trained for about 1.5 months, which isn’t ideal but I did manage to go from 8k the first week to 16k the second week to 21k the third week to 28k the fourth week. And in between that I had a lot of shorter runs to make sure my stamina was up. Last year, I didn’t train distance-wise, but I was the lightest I’ve been in the last 10 years, and my regular trips to the gym combined with tennis allowed me to be the fittest I had ever been in years.

This year though, I knew during my training runs that I was in over my head. After each training run I felt a lot more spent than in previous years. I ran 20km twice and 15km 2-3 times during the last month, but one of those 20k runs was supposed to be 25, but I just ran out of energy and had to cut it short. Oh and this is also the heaviest I’ve ever been during a marathon and the extra 5-10lbs certainly didn’t make it any easier.

The good news is that it didn’t storm during the run (I was worried coz there was a typhoon during the days leading up to July 16). The bad news though was that it was so incredibly hot and humid! Even as I was doing my warm-up at 4am I was already sweating. I ended up with what I think was heat exhaustion or something coz I fell asleep for 5 hours after my run and even after that 5 hour rest, my heart rate was still up and my skin still felt hot. I ended up getting sick for several days after that too, which is a lesson to me to make sure I spend at least 3 months in training for my next marathon.

One more downside. It was the 30th anniversary of the Milo marathon, so to make it special, Milo decided to award a medal to everyone that finishes in the regulation time of 5 hours. And since I missed that by 7 minutes, I end up with no medal. Damn! Why couldn’t the 30th anniversary have been last year?!?! Hehe oh well. Such is life.

Anyway, thanks again to all those who helped out and those who donated. Hopefully next year I can once again break my personal best.