I did feel lousy but my temperature was at a measly 35.9 – 36.1°C throughout the period and that was pretty reassuring even though I did read that a large number of H1N1 patients didn’t experience fever.

KuKuNehNeh and I stayed apart for 2 days since the onset of my flu but she longed to see me and missed me to no end (Hey it’s my blog, I say what I want to say. :p) and so I decided to travel to Ang Mo Kio to let her have a dose of her bf.

With flu, a slight cough and a running nose that is out of my control, the best thing I can think of to be socially responsible is to purchase face masks and wear one for the 1 hr trip down from Jurong West.

Boy! Was it an interesting experience.

Besides the obvious lack of comfort of wearing a 3-ply mask in the disgusting, sweltering heat of Singapore, I had to sniff constantly to prevent drowning myself in my own mucus in the covered mask considering it makes no sense for me to remove the mask and blow my nose in the train cabin right?

The social aspect of wearing a mask was astounding. Despite the fact that most Singaporeans are aware of the H1N1 and it’s spread, not one human being I see on the street is wearing a mask except me. It might be just my mind but I swear people give me 2nd looks upon realizing that I am wearing a mask. I get the feeling that they are probably deducing that I am a carrier or I am extremely afraid of catching the virus.

Upon entering the train at the busy Jurong East MRT platform, I was lucky enough to get a seat and guess what? NOBODY sat to the adjacent seats on my left and right. Do bear in mind that the rest of the seats in my cabin were soon filled up and as far as I can see, so were the seats in the other two cabins adjacent to mine. There are people standing all around as the train moved from station to station and still nobody took the empty seats beside me!

I was practically smirking at situation, half amused at the elbow space I got and half amused at the reactions of the passengers around me. It was only until 4 stations later that a brave (or oblivious) man came in and sat beside me.

Very scary meh?

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I got to thank my iPhone and my data plan on instances like this when I was travelling underground in the MRT and received the invitation from Alvin of Omy.sg, telling me that United International Pictures (UIP) are giving away 10 pairs of tickets to the SG Blog Awards finalists watch the VIP Gala Premiere of Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen.

KuKuNehNeh (KKNN) was extremely excited when I got news that I was one of the lucky 10 bloggers who got the tickets as she was a big fan of the first installment of the movie even though she can hardly tell an Autobot from a Decepticon much less recognizing who Optimus Prime was when a group of mascots appeared at the Cathay were the premiere was held.

A retro and movie version of Optimus Prime were there amongst the insanely popular Bumble Bee and one Decepticon in the form of Starscream or Megatron. I couldn’t really tell as it looked as though they carefully crafted all the nice Autobot costumes and didn’t know what to do with the remaining material and thus decided to put them together and paint it all grey to make it look like one of the bad guys. I don’t have a picture of that poor dude in that Starscream/Megatron costume but trust me, it was baaaaaad.

KKNN was even more excited after spotting quite a few bloggers from the SG Blog Awards and especially at the local celebrities and came in dribs and drabs like Elvin Ng from Mediacorp.

The picture above summarizes very well what happened: Me before spotting Elvin Ng, KKNN after seeing Elvin, Me after seeing KKNN see Elvin.

So I mopped the remains of the starstruck KKNN from the floor and went up to the cinema theatre where she hoped for Elvin to sit in our theatre while I hoped for Megan Fox to do the same.

The movie was AWESOME! There were more robots and favorities from the original cartoon, longer and cooler fight sequences and the animation was top notch. It was a little draggy in parts because of the over dramatization of certain scences which sometimes involves Megan Fox running in slow motion in a top that left little to the imagination but that didn’t stop us from enjoying the movie thoroughly. I am definitely going to watch it a 2nd time just to check out all the action again.

I do realize that even if I say the movie sucked, people are still going to watch Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen just because of the love for action, the Transformers & Megan Fox.

Thanks to Omy.sg and UIP for the tickets and all the sponsors for the goodie bag!

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Yep, it’s official! I am shortlisted in Omy’s Singapore Blog Awards 2009 in the Best Laugh-Out-Loud Blog category. I am feeling weird to be shortlisted this year knowing that I failed to be shortlisted last year even though last year was probably my most “LOL” year and I did win Ping.sg’s Most Entertaining Blog and Blog of The Year awards. I have been quite serious this year with all the marathon training posts but maybe the judges felt that running a marathon is the most hilarious thing they have ever heard and I am more deserving this year.

So if you do support me in my quest to win Omy’s Singapore Blog Awards 2009, do head down to the voting page and cast a vote for me. Voters stand a chance to win a Creative Vado (5 to be won. Worth S169) or a 250GB Portable External Hard Disk (5 to be won).

You have to register for an Omy.sg account to vote and it’s free to sign up for one over here.

Head down to Omy here and do the following:

Click on the category ‘Best Laugh-Out-Blog’ and click on the word ‘Vote’ on the top of my avatar.

Log in with your Omy credentials.

Use your own L33T intelligence to navigate after that because I forgot my own Omy credentials to login and I cannot screenshot the rest of the process nor vote for myself. WAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHA!

I cannot find the voting information as of yet but I think Voters are allowed to cast a vote once a day for each category. So do vote as often as you can!

And in the event that you do not wish to vote for me, do vote for other peeps in my category except for this particular contestant. Anybody should win except him. I do not need to say much. A picture of this particular nominee will do…

Yup. The words and actions on the picture below the said individual says it all.

Voting ends on 31st July 2009, 2359H.

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Setbacks like that are very good for my analysis and besides, the rest for the 26km ran that week was better than what I have expected.

It’s now week 7 of my marathon training with 25 weeks remaining to the Standard Chartered Singapore Marathon 2009 and although my margins for improvement are starting to get smaller, it is still quite apparent that I am getting faster and longer. Faster in terms of pace and longer in terms of distance of course. You peeps don’t get dirty now.

Besides the improvement of my resting heart rate from 66bpm (beats per minute) to the current 60bpm, I can see from the logs of my Long runs that even though my pace and distance has increased, the effort perceived by my heart rate has actually lessened!

It’s quite exciting and interesting to see my body improving and adapting to my exercise regime and that makes me look forward to the next run as I can predict and plan my pace much more easily than just running by pure feel and intuition. So I highly suggest that everyone who is training to collect as much statistics as you can about your runs. At the very least, invest in a watch that has a lap function. And I believe the same applies to training for any sport as well with reference to collection of statistics.

Grab your shoes and a watch and head out to run peeps! Feel alive!

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KuKuNehNeh on the other hand, should have super memory and be extremely meticulous based on the rule that opposites attract but it ain’t so. And yesterday was a testament to her forgetfulness.

We conversed over email during work and I asked her to go straight home after work instead of waiting for me at City Hall but she told me that she would rather wait for me and head home together. So I reached City Hall and turned around the corner where I would usually find her sitting on the bench but found an Auntie sitting there instead. Odds are low that she is late to the meeting spot and odds are lower that she has aged this much in 24 hours so I called her up on her mobile.

“Hello?” She answered the phone.

“Hello Dear! Where are you?”

“Er…. I am on the way….” She replied with hesitation in her voice.

“On your way? To where???”

“Errrr…. Home lor. ALAMAK! I FORGOT I WAS SUPPOSED TO MEET YOU!”

It turns out that she reached the platform with her colleagues and saw a train arriving and boarded it like every train hungry Singaporean and promptly forgot all about me until I called her.

And later during the night after my 7.2km run, I went to the toilet to shower to only find that my towel wasn’t there.

She was washing the dishes and I turned to her, “Eh Dear ah. I got no towel here leh.”

“There should be ah.”

“No leh. I will go get one.”

“No need Dear. You bathe first. Let me get the towel for you later.”

“Ok! Thanks Dear!”

And so I showered peacefully and wondered why my towel has not arrived after scrubbing my body from head to toe. I could not risk exposing myself in my birthday suit to her family and I slowly popped my head out from the sliding door and called for her for about 10 mins before she came running by with a towel. It was hilarious seeing how forgetful she is like me.

If you ever need someone to remind you of something, do not; DO NOT ask either of us to help you.

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On the positive end of things, my knees are starting to get used to the idea of running 30km a week and I can feel my fitness levels rising steadily. It’s still a long way to beating the fitness level I had when I was 20-22 years of age but I believe that I can overcome that very soon if I keep at what I am doing. It’s still pretty amazing to think that I am now scoffing at how short a 10km run is when just a few months ago, I was having cold sweat just thinking about a 2.4km run for IPPT.

On the negative end of things, I am on the way to a career change and as bad it is to do so during such a economically bad period, it’s quite exciting to think of what the future might hold with this move.

Life changing moves with my health and career. 2009 might prove to be the biggest and potentially best year yet!

[Image by Michael Mistretta]

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Of course the best way to run is to run even splits whereby one races at a constant pace throughout the length of the race but that is quite hard to do unless one was on a treadmill or has extreme running discipline.

It was with extreme interest when I discovered that many top athletes & coaches around the world train and enforce negative splits in their runs which is to run the 2nd half of the course faster than the 1st. The theory behind this is that by holding back during the first half of the run, the glycogen in your body that acts as fuel is reserved better for the latter part of the run. It is also said that it takes a couple of kilometres for the runner to get over the inertia and running too hard from the get-go wastes too much energy. Another very important aspect about running negative splits is that the picking up of the pace during the 2nd half of the race will have you overtaking other runners and this brings a lot of mental strength which is so very important in a long distance run.

So much for the above in theory but I actually put it to the test at 12.30am on Sunday morning for an 11km long run. The last long run I had was a week ago on a Thursday and it as at a 10km distance with a pace of 6mins 29secs per km and that run was a struggle from the halfway mark and it was like any of my runs before, a big positive split.

Now, to help you guys visualize better on how a negative split run looks like, here is the breakdown of my run on Sunday.

Despite running for a longer distance on Sunday, I actually improved my pace by 6secs per km! You can see how the negative splits work by looking at the columns highlighted in yellow. I aimed to run my first half of the training at a 6mins 38secs pace and the 2nd half at a 6mins 14secs pace and as you can see, I mostly ran faster than what I set out to do. I was actually struggling to hold back my speed at the start of the run. But by the time I hit the halfway mark, I realized that I was so much comfortable at this point then previous runs. Pushing up my speed for the 2nd half was hard but comfortable enough which was almost impossible to do if I stuck to my old way of running. And at the end of the 11km run, I felt that I still had some gas left in the tank compared to feeling spent for previous runs.

There is still a long way of experimenting on this tactic for running and I will update you guys as I go along my training for the marathon at the end of the year. For those runners who are interested in trying negative splits without having equipment like Nike+ or GPS watches like Garmin/Polar to track your pace and distance, you can either try running around the track where you can plan & track your lap timings or do like what I advised KuKuNehNeh to do for her 10km run for Adidas Sundown that happened on Saturday; run the first half of the race slower than your comfortable pace and try to push your pace up at the halfway mark. The race results are not out yet but I think she improved her timing by at least 10-15mins and experienced a more comfortable run to the finish. Read about her experience here!

These are some links to read up on negative splits.

The Positives of Negative Splits

Examples of Negative Splits That Worked

Calculate splits for runs here

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There a many lessons to be learnt as I approach the end of a one month cycle with regards to running and these are some that I want to share.

Read. Read. Read.
There is a wealth of information out there with regards to training, scheduling, running posture, diet & nutrition and many more. Don’t leave it to pure trial and error, make use of the knowledge that can be found easily online and in books.

Adapt.
This lesson acts as a counterpoint to the one above. As important as it is to read up on the knowledge of running, it is even more crucial to adapt to your own conditions of the body. Everyone has different levels of fitness and adaptability. Just because a source says that runners should start to clock 50km a week doesn’t mean that you should too. Just because some schedules say that you should run 6 days a week doesn’t mean that you should too. Know your limits and start small. Don’t bite off more than you can chew.

Plan but don’t over plan.
Case in point is my own scheduling of my training plans. I have actually planned my workouts all the way to December… twice. But I realized only yesterday that I should not plan so far ahead and instead, I should listen to my body and plan about 1 to 2 weeks ahead at most. There will be weeks when one will struggle or overcome easily with what that has been planned and it’s important to adjust the following week’s workouts accordingly.

Have a goal and split it up into bite sizes.
Without a goal, one will lose direction. Having too big a goal and not splitting it up into manageable sizes, one will lose motivation if it’s a long journey.

Rest.
As important it is to push your body to new limits, adequate rest is crucial to an injury free and progressive training. The human body is such an amazing thing. Every time you push it to its limits or near limits, it breaks down to the molecular level and it tells the body to heal with the nutrients you provide and makes it stronger; and the cycle continues till you reach your potential.

The problem with most fitness enthusiasts is that they fail to rest adequately and go for their next workout and fail to perform and worse, risk injury. In a perfect world, the most logical thing to do is to go for a workout at 100% fitness with 100% effort and resting till one is 100% again which produces maximum improvement of one’s maximum potential in one workout cycle. But we are not living in a perfect world and it’s too hard to tell how long does one need to rest to get to 100% fitness without underestimating it and failing to perform or over estimating it and failing to maximize the gains of the last workout.

So, apart from obvious signs like fatigue and sickness, I feel that the next best thing to be able to judge when one is over training is by comparing the current workout to the last similar workout. You should be running faster or longer each time for the hard workouts or at least have similar results as we all hit plateaus once in a while. If you find that your workout is very much poorly performed than the previous one, it’s a sure sign of inadequate rest. And this applies to body builders as well I think (Even though many will disagree with me).

Don’t forget that apart from the muscles you are training, your internal organs like your heart, lung, and liver also need time to recover. 24hours in between each workout is sometimes just not enough.

Take a longer break and don’t worry about under training. If you have been putting in effort previously, the longer rest period will do nothing but good for you. And to practice what I preach, I am taking an extra day off to rest my tired legs.

Cheeseburger buffet anyone? I think I lost 1kg for the last 2 weeks.

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KuKuNehNeh had a 4-5km run to prepare her for her 10km run over this weekend at Adidas Sundown and after ending our sessions and a dinner afterwards, we plonked ourselves in the car, preparing to drive off and head home. By the way, she drives and I don’t. Times have changed. *wink*

She released the handbrake and proceeded to look out for traffic as her left hand reached out for the gear stick and she found my sweaty right knee instead.

Half laughing and half trying to drive, she and I started one of our fake quarrels which involve bad Singlish and the raising of ones voice with an irritated tone to it.

“Wah lau! Leg open so big for what?”

“Leg open big cannot meh? I got Dua Lumpa what!”

“WAH LAU!!! LUMPA SO BIG FOR WHAT?”

And then we both break out in uncontrollable laughter. Life is full of great little moments.

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Deciding on taking part in my 1st marathon this year has made me trawl through the internet like a hungry hard drive on a data rampage. There are so many things to read about and to learn amidst all the ‘Enter if you are 18′ sites.

I realize I treat the marathon training just like how I treat my gadgets; I always read the manual first, play with it, and then read even more about it online. I think it’s so much efficient this way rather then just slipping into a pair of shoes and running off without an aim and ways to collect statistics for reference. The more I read, the more I understand how similar/different of a level I am with other runners. The more I know about my own body from the statistical data I collect, the better I can plan for my future runs to ensure maximum efficiency.

There is really a wealth of things to learn if one is really interested like me. The right type of attire, the type of shoes for the type of feet, the proper diet, the training schedules, the training types, the breathing techniques, the running techniques, the appropriate running pace, heart rate zones and the list can go on and on and I am still discovering new things as I trudge along.

There is no doubt that a better runner can come along and tell me that knowing all the above is useless knowing that he/she is better/more experienced than me but the point is that by training with science and the proper knowledge, I decrease my chances of injury while maximizing my own potential within the shortest amount of time.

I will be experimenting on myself (sounds weird. I know) with everything I have learnt and share with you guys as I move along.

10km training run coming up today!

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