A "Fool" Print

I reached the Safra Club at 6.30pm. The sky was cloudy and looked about to rain anytime. Without waiting for the rest, I started my run earlier and jogged towards Mt Faber.

At my first loop, my pace was slow, taking it as a warm up exercise for me. There was still no sight of the any Safra members yet after the completion of my first loop. I picked up my pace faster for the second loop. I always like the Mt Faber loop, as the venue is quiet with little traffic passing by. This allows me to ponder over things while I am running.

At my third loop, my pace was getting even faster. At the upslope of the hill, I spotted Sok Hua, and bypassed her. Subsequently, I saw Angelina, Peter, Wong, Emenila etc and bypassed them one by one. Heng was in front of me. I tried to catch up with him but to no avail. At this moment, I could feel breathless. The sound of my breath was so loud that I swear that it would hear from 5m away. Luckily, the down slope of the hill always provided me a good opportunity for recovery. After a short while of cruising down the slope, my breath was back to normal and I started to pick my pace again at the start of my fourth loop. I overtook few other runners and spotted Heng in front of me. I attempted to maintain a distance from him and careful not to overstretch my breathing again. When he finally caught up with Chairman, I gave it all my might to complete the last 100m run and overtook both of them.

Yean had arrived shortly after my run. I waited for the rest of the runners to complete their training before we headed back to the Safra club where I saw PS and Albert working on their stretching. I didn’t see them in the training today. However, my attention was soon drawn to the smell of the food coming out from the buffet beside the billiard room organized by MPA. After Julie had conducted her warm-down exercise, I swarmed towards the buffet and grapping the leftovers.(Of course, with permission) There was not many left over except Mee Hoon, French fries and Spring rolls.

After the bath, most of us drove down to Henderson market to have our dinner there. During the chitchat session, Alan was transferring his knowledge of running to us. He emphasized the correct technique of running should be using the tight muscle at all times drawing Julie, Teck How, Kurmara as examples. Hmm.. I couldn’t agree with him completely as I always thought that different terrain should be using different part of muscles instead.

I arrived just in time to see the group when they started their run at Macritchie. After queried with Toh on today’s running route, I immediately packed up my things in the locker and chased after them. Strange enough, at the first 10 km, I couldn’t detect any sight of them. Thinking I might be ahead of them, I waited at the Lower Pierce’s toilet for ten minutes. Still, there was no sight of them and I continued.

At the midway of Old Upper Thomson Road, I finally met up with the rest of the group. Teo and Macus beckoned me to make a U-Turn and joined together with them. I agreed.

As we were running (me, Teo, Macus and his elder brother), Teo updated me that the group had geared up and improved a lot in their timing. Macus joked that we couldn’t be lazed around anymore with Toh spying on us like a “watchdog”. In fact, Toh was in front of us and made a few stops to check if we were following him closely.

The pace was unusually fast, roughly around 4mins/km. Even for me, I hardly could catch up my breath. Teo was joking we had to run faster and not letting Tan to overtake us. (Tan was running 20km while we were doing 16km) Else, we would be totally losing our “face”. Eventually, we arrived back to Macritchie 1 min before Tan. (Lucky for us) Tan was really fast, I could not remember anyone I known of whom could do 11/2hrs for 20km distance. And, he will be joining the coming Biathlon held on March. Good Luck to him. :-)