What are you running for?
Siemens has a reputation for hosting one of the more “fun” races in KL and with them donating the run proceeds to charity, it’s a run that’s always worth supporting. I missed the 2009 run as I was late to the party and the registration has closed. I did sign up for last year’s but due to some last minute engagement, couldn’t make it on run day itself.
Siemens only has 10K as the competitive category and with limited medals (150 for my Junior Veteran category), you need to make sure you come back fast enough to grab one of the finisher medals. Their running vest is from Brooks and usually far much better quality than those from the “more famous” brands.
This would be my first road races after SCKLM (which was at end June) and while I’ve been (trying) to keep to my practice runs at the gym and KLCC (thanks to new-found Sunday running buddy, Ang), the practice sessions been irregular at best as the project at WSM is rolling towards it’s Go-live date – and BGC taking up whatever slack time I may have after WSM.
Which brings me back to this article’s topic, what do I run for? Simple…. to ensure I’m fit enough to continue doing what I’m doing – work, business, personal, boardgaming, etc. And for this 10K races are the best way to keep me “honest” in terms of getting myself fit. Life always gets into our way of maintaining a healthy lifestyle and good fitness level – we’ll always have the “excuse” to skip today’s training in order to complete another assignment or report.
But when you know you’ve a race to complete sometime in the horizon, you will make an effort to get to the gym if only to make sure you dun suffer needlessly on race day. If you follow Covey’s Four Quadrants, then “running to keep yourself fit” is usually a Quadrant 2 (Q2) activity and one we tend to “sacrifice” when push comes to shove timewise.
Ensuring I keep myself fit enough to run 10K races (which fits sweetly into a one hour time slot) helps to avoid this Q2 activities (exercise) turning into a Q1 firefighting crisis (when we’ve to take a rest/break from our hectic schedule due to reason of poor health).
Yeah, that’s what I run for. 🙂
The run itself was not a good one for me though. Perhaps I’ve been slacking in my treadmill sessions. The route is similar to SCKLM 2011 except where we turned into Syed Putra, we kept along Jalan Tun Sambathan instead which made the route shorter by about 800m.
I’d an easier run during SCKLM, doing a 5:51 average pace and generally just chugging along fine. This time however I were struggling a bit to keep even a 6:00 pace even though it’s on the same route. Told myself I won’t be surprised if I’m past the 150 medals when I reach the finishing line at this pace.
But surprisingly the medals were still around when I came to the Finish point around the one hour mark at position #118 (within my category)! And the finisher medal – made of wood instead of the usual pewter – indeed looks good.
RESULTS
Distance: 10.06 km
Position: 118 (Men Jr Veteran)
Time: 60:45 min
Pace: 6:02 /km
This is the first of a series of races I’d signed up for in Sep/October (August was Puasa month so no races scheduled); the next being the much anticipated Adidas King of the Road held at Sunway next week.
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