I'm Running My First Full Marathon on December...

... and its in Singapore!

I and three running buddies - Eugene, Chrissie and Mils, have all signed-up for the Standard Chartered Singapore Marathon which will happen on December 5, 2010. Eugene and I will be doing the full marathon; the ladies will be doing a half-mary.

The decision was quite impulsive - I always had this dream of doing a full marathon somewhere else, somewhere special. I was very fortunate my running friends were game to the sudden idea; of course I wanted to have people to share the experience with.

• May 20 - SCMS opened the registration for all race categories (42k/21k/10k)
• June 2 - I was browsing the web and the idea of joining a full marathon came to mind (Inception level). I told my friends about it and we decided to register the next day.
• June 3 - Eugene and I registered for 42.195km; Chrissie and Mils registered for 21.097km. We were ecstatic!
• June 4 - Registration for the full marathon closed.
• June 7 - Registration for the half marathon closed.
• June 8 - Registration for the 10k category closed.

That's how lucky we were. Everything seemed meant to be. We also got last-minute flight promo fares from Philippine Airlines. Sweet.

Here's the proof (I advertently omitted some of the fields):

I'm now on the 3rd week of Runners World's 16-week marathon training program. Thanks to The Bull Runner for the training tip!

Booboo Alert! Run to Read No Show

I've heavily promoted the Run to Read race event. I've registered early for the 15k category, excited to get my hands on that cute, purple singlet. The race was scheduled for the 15th of August. All the while, I was highly anticipating running on this event. What's wrong then?

Schedule conflict! Me and some officemates booked a very cheap flight to Jakarta, Indonesia way, way before (I think it was last year). Our vacation date: August 11 to 19! Can you believe I seriously considered cancelling my vacation just to run on Run to Read? Talk about running addiction. Haha!

But since I share the same passion for both running and travelling, the trip did push through. Besides, I miss my travelmates (they're the same people I've been with in my Beijing trip last year).

Instead of posting the usual running pics, superposition and all, let me deviate from that for once and post some travel pictures here.

Borobudur
perfecting the art of a jumpshot

nice solo shot

Borobudur is a UNESCO heritage site

Prambanan

Brahma statue inside one of the Prambanan temples

I definitely had a blast! Next time, I'm going to combine running with travel. :) Find out how on my future posts!

Lazy-blogging the Rexona Run

I've been too lazy to blog lately; I've noticed a lot of running blogsites I'm following have no updates too. Must be the weather or something.

Almost a month has passed since the highly-anticipated Rexona Run. This was Coach Rio's first attempt to organize a race at the Mall of Asia grounds. New innovations were introduced: paperless registration - using iPad on registration centers, Runrio cards which can be used on future Runrio race registrations and D-tags replacing the plastic timing chips racers normally wear on their shoes.

I fought the urge to register for the 21k category on this event. I knew it was still too early for me to declare full recovery from my previous ankle injury so I just settled for 10k.

I enjoyed the race with only one complaint: There were a lot of walkers. I'm fine with people just walking on the race route, but if they're all lined-up and blocking the path of runners, it gets quite unnerving. I hope these people observe proper running etiquette and just stay at the right side of the road. And please, stop the cam-whoring sessions at the middle of the road; there's plenty of photo opportunities at the race village area anyway.

Oh well, that's too much ranting already. Since I'm lazy blogging, I'll just post a lot of pics. Haha!

Me and Rap at the 10k starting line (taken from my celphone camera - shaky hand i got)

Me and my sister (she did 3k again)
Me and William (he's also from HP and I think this was his first race) With the band

Superposition (missing Early and Tey)

TGIBFFMKTBZ

Bumped into Char-char and her friend Kristine

Oh and by the way, I finished in 55 minutes and 15 seconds - top 4.4% of all 10k runners. Great, eh?