***
An aside: I don’t really expect most of
the people I am connected to on social media to read, much less remember most
of what I share here. If you clicked through to read this, thank you. TL;DR: Running helps one to think, and is good for one’s health.
Make time to run.
***
That being said, I still write and I still
share because, despite my STILL being in the employ of the G@hmen four years
after I decided to start blogging somewhat regularly again, some part of me
still has a vague idea that maybe one day, sooner than I think, I will retire
(that’s what it is, isn’t it? RETIREMENT) to take care of the boys. Putting
writing out there, even if it’s “self-published”, isn’t easy. The older I get, the
more judgmental I feel people can be behind their screens, and the more I
sometimes fear I’m saying too much. But if I do retire in the next three to
four years, I foresee I will need the mental stimulus of blogging regularly,
probably about running and motherhood in Singapore, joining the 23093429871
other blogs about the same thing that are already out there demanding attention.
So I continue to write, because I want what I write to be worth reading, for
that time. Even if that time never comes, even if it ends up being only I who
think that what I write is worth reading, there is value in writing for its own
sake. I’ve always been nosey (aren’t we all?), and liked to read about other
people's mundane lives, so it seems natural that I would write about my own. I
know there are others like that out there; this is for you as much as it is for
me.
***
After my various epiphanies following Hospital
Ship last year (you can read about them here), I wasn’t sure whether I
wanted to run any races this year after TransLantau, which was really just a
fun run and turned out to be a rare “date”. Husband was pretty sure that I
wouldn’t be able to resist, though, and he was right.
I signed up for Great Eastern (again),
found a training plan online that I figured I could finally follow through
(this was Kara Goucher’s Project 1:59 plan for Strava. It’s not bad! I’ll leave
a brief review below), and set to work getting myself to Slow. Down. and
properly build my aerobic base before starting the plan.
I’d realised the hard
way (plantar trouble, mostly), last year, that I’d tried to do much, too soon after having Andrew – and although
it was fun blogging about the training for the Income Eco Run, and I’m thankful
for all I came to learn about myself last year through two training cycles, I’ve
finally come to accept that I am just not one of those women (you know,
those who bounce back scarily quickly after having a child, or two, or three,
and are running their households with aplomb and effortlessly setting PRs with
every race they do post-partum. Those). I’ve never really thought I was
a particularly spectacular runner, but I thought I could do it, you know? Looking
back, I don’t even know what gave me the idea that I could train at the paces I
was training at. The fact that I had, at that point, been running for over a
decade? But so what? I’d not run much during either of my pregnancies, and had
gotten pregnant again just after Daniel turned a year old, right after I ran
Great Eastern in 2015 (2:08. I’ve allowed this race to get to me, haven’t I?).
I’d been through two bouts of labour, wasn’t sleeping nearly enough, was
constantly worrying about my figure and the baby weight, was back at work and
also managing the household… you get the drift. It wasn’t always that way
though.
***
I started running towards the end of JC,
after seeing seniors who came back to visit having gained quite a bit of
weight, even those who had been in a sports CCA. I was terrified of the same
happening to me – I was never fat, but the year I turned 18, I got a bit chubby,
and it was something my parents would comment on. They weren’t being mean, or
body-shaming me or anything – they just commented, in the way parents do, and I
think I can safely say they weren’t the reason for what followed after I first
started running.
So there I was, a little chubbier than I
used to be – I was somewhat scrawny in secondary school, and could eat tons
without a second thought for my weight. Genetics definitely had a part to play,
but on hindsight, I realised that it was also my walking to and from school
almost every day from the time I was about 8 to the year I graduated from MGS
that had helped me stay so trim before I entered junior college (whereupon I
got a lift to school from a neighbour, and took the bus home). MGS sits at the
top of the longish hill that is Blackmore Drive (named for the school’s
founder), and I had to cross an overhead bridge twice a day in addition to
walking up that hill.
The total journey from my front door to
the school gate was probably just about a kilometre or so, but I was often late
for school and usually had to brisk walk, sometimes almost jog, to make it
before the second bell. Even then, in Secondary Two, my conduct was “Fair” because
of my late-coming, and my form teacher commented that I needed to be punctual
for school. Isn’t this always the case when you stay nearby?
In addition to that, Singapore has never
been known for having cool and dry weather, even before global warming became
such a huge deal, so I would usually make the same journey back under the hot
sun, aided sometimes by a Crunchie or Time Out bar, or my favourite, Myojo Tom
Yum instant noodles, from what used to be a Mobil but is now an Esso
station. Two of the aunties from my
secondary school days are still cashiering there, if you can believe it, and
they’ve met the boys when I take them there to buy chocolate milk as a
post-Gong Gong-Popo-house-playground drink. One of them remembers me.
Sometime after I graduated from JC, I
started eating less and running more. I didn’t set out to do it deliberately –
I got a part-time job as a waitress, along with a choir coaching gig and
helping out at a before and after school care centre, and being so busy helped
me conveniently “forget” that I was hungry.
Some days, after a slice of plain toast in
the morning before a run, I wouldn’t eat anything until lunch. Then, I would have
caifan, “one meat two veg shao3 fan4”, do whatever I was signed
up for in the afternoon, have a da4 pao1 for dinner, and spend the next
5 to 6 hours on my feet, waiting tables. I drank everything without sugar –
strong, creosote coloured tea (just like Cormoran Strike!), tau huay zhui, chin
chow.
Other days, I would pack just a wholemeal
sandwich with tuna and cheese (canned tuna, packed in water), and eat only that
for lunch, followed by caifan at dinner (I am a creature of habit). I
didn’t eat ice cream for almost a year (I know, sounds incredible), and measured
everything I ate in terms of input and output – I never weighed my food, but in
my mind I assigned everything I ate an arbitrary time for which I had to run.
Savoury food meant less time running than, say, a slice of chocolate cake. I
talked about what I had eaten all the time, worrying that it would go straight
to fat; my mother lost her cool one day and said to me, Why do you keep
talking about that slice of cheesecake you ate yesterday? I lost about 6 kg
in 7 months, and considering I had been about 52 kg towards the end of JC, the
doctor I saw at the mandatory pre-university check-up declared it an unhealthy
loss of weight and told me to watch it.
I was in a state of perpetual hangriness,
but the hunger felt strangely cleansing. At 18 going on 19, it’s also a lot
easier to power through the side effects of a negative calorie intake. However,
I digress. This is not a post about disordered eating and a warped body image
(if one can even call what I experienced a “disorder”) – it’s about running.
I thought of all those things as I ran Too
Many rounds around the tracks at the two polytechnics closest to my home (Ngee
Ann) and workplace (Singapore), as I completed, by sheer force of will, runs
that felt like a sluggish swim through humid air. They crowded out my silent
prayers on the treadmill (I was usually praying I wouldn’t shoot off it and
that the cleaning uncle would keep his mop away from my treadmill!!!!), and occupied
my subconscious through runs where the heat from the sun continued beating down
mercilessly despite it being evening time, mocking my attempt to keep to the recommended
paces. Familiar voices, flashes of images from those years –
Back then, even though running was one of
the primary means by which I chose to control my weight, I never really cared
about how far, or how fast I was running. Sure, I wore a stopwatch and
estimated in my head how long a particular route was (I found out much later
that those routes up and down Dunearn Road were shorter than I had imagined),
but my pace per kilometre and my weekly mileage didn’t matter in relation to
how long I had spent on my feet, or how sweaty I was at the end.
I also know, now, that more sweat doesn’t
equal more calories burnt, but it just made me feel good about myself back then
(alright, I said it wasn’t my parents’ comments that affected me – so what did
was probably my break-up with my JC boyfriend. I’ve alluded to it often
enough, and it was traumatic in the way peculiar to romantic relationships
between people in their late-teens who think they know a lot more about life
and love than they really do. To this day, despite having a good friend with
the same name, something inside me gives an involuntary shudder when there’s a
character in a book named after him. One of Thomas’s friends has the name –
happy guessing! Please do not message me your guesses, there will be no prizes
for guessing. There goes the involuntary shudder).
When I first started running longer distances,
I found the idea that people would pay to do something they could do for
free with a decent pair of running shoes strangely abhorrent, and vowed
that I would not spend more money than necessary on running attire or pay to
run a race unless it was a marathon. (Yes, I was into reverse snobbery even
back then.)
I had a couple of cheap sports bras (these
were sufficient as I was and remain quite flat-chested), and wore the dark blue
FBTs I had owned since I was 11 and were still in good enough shape to protect
my modesty. I had a decent pair of Asics shoes. A couple of ratty old t-shirts unearthed
from the depths of my cupboard, mostly from when I was in primary school, completed my usual running outfits. The few on heavy rotation included a
Langkawi souvenir tee I probably owned from the time I was around 10 years old,
and my Primary 5 outdoor adventure camp tee – the theme was “Strength In Unity”,
and it featured a drawing of three (?) large, smiling ants, two pushing and one
pulling an appropriately sized wheelbarrow up a small hill. Perched on the
wheelbarrow was an apple about the same height as the ants, which had a hole
from which the smiling head of a worm peered out. There were speech bubbles
issuing from the ants’ mouths, and they were saying “One, two, twee, pu!” (you
can message me if you remember this, and the reason this design said to have
been chosen – do you remember? How catty girls can be, even at 11). Whenever I
went for a long run, I would wear the sleeveless cotton shirt from the choir camp
when I was in Secondary 1. I can’t remember what its theme was, but I remember
that a cat was part of the design, and the front bore a yellow circle over the
heart, which was meant to represent a full moon. I wore it out completely,
those early years of running.
I also remember that I used to go running
with my father, about a 3 km loop through the surrounding neighbourhoods, and
after every run he would give me a high-five and thank God that his knees had supported
him through one more (he still runs now, but more slowly).
I finally ran the Singapore Marathon in December
2006, back when running was taking off here but was still not a very cool thing
to do, long before amateur runners were indoctrinated by the Church of #instarunners
and the GPS Watch, and didn’t have as many means of self-flagellation other
than the actual training they were doing.
That year, the Straits Times ran a very
rudimentary training plan (it didn’t have paces, if I recall correctly, just
recommended distances), and during the lead-up, there was an article by Rohit
Brijnath about weird things people who run marathons do – I will never forget
that he wrote that people who run marathons eat gel, whereas normal people use
gel on their hair. Something like that. My mother read bits of that article out
to me, and he has from then on been known in my head as Rohit Brinjal. (I am
not being racist. I would have been equally annoyed had a journalist of any
other race written something so juvenile in the country’s “leading” English
newspaper. Energy gel did taste horrible back then, though. I distinctly
remember that only “chocolate” flavoured ones were readily available, and the
citrus flavoured ones were more Mama than Meyer lemon in taste.)
I finished in just under 5 hours. Running
a marathon is something I do not at this point in time care to repeat, nor do I
wish to better my time. I ran the Singapore Marathon again in 2007 and 2011
with times nearer six hours, but it didn’t faze me one bit.
***
To be perfectly honest, I didn’t think
very much about training – proper training, with speed work and tempo runs –
until after Andrew was born. The year we conceived Daniel, I didn’t do very
much that was different from the years before, except that there was a period
of time I became one of those people who woke up at 4am on Saturdays to run
around MacRitchie and Upper Peirce, and later in the year, I started a habit of
running to work on Fridays. I’ve written before about how that was one of my
favourite things to do when I was still working in the CBD, and I still think
of it with some wistfulness now. I think it was those runs (which I did not
measure, except by time) together with my doing more spin classes and yoga,
which led to me achieving a sub-2 in two of the three half-marathons I did that
year (2013). The only one I didn’t sub-2 in was, you guessed it, the Great
Eastern Women’s Run. This blog tells me I ran about a 2:06 that year.
I have written in some length about my
feelings about motherhood and the role running played in that, so I won’t
repeat those things in this post (and this is getting to be really long), but,
as you know, I was desperate to cling on to some part of my irresponsible, child-free
self, and running seemed to be the only tangible thing there was. There was a
whole gamut of other emotions involved too, of course, but that was probably
what it came down to at the very core of the matter.
But I’d gotten over that, and during this training
cycle, looking at all the sacrifices I had to make to get in the mileage and
strength training, I had to ask myself why I continued to try so hard, despite
knowing that I didn’t have any inborn talent for this sport, that I would probably
never be anything but a mediocre runner, maybe slightly above the Singaporean
female average at best. I knew it wasn’t even that I was competitive – well on
some level, I was and always will be about running, but it’s not the kind of
competitive fire that would drive me to make the kind of sacrifices that kind
of competitive fire would demand. And it’s not that I’m afraid to try, really.
Anecdotal evidence has shown that hard work, just showing up and getting the
workouts done, goes some way to make up for a lack of inborn talent.
The boys drive me nuts, I yell at them
almost every single day (they laugh, and I’m convinced the neighbours think I
am en route to insanity) and I often dread pick-up. But I wouldn’t risk any of
the bonds we’ve forged by Husband and I being forced to be their primary
caregivers the majority of the time, just so I can get better at running. I
know us, we’re the sort of parents who would abdicate a large chunk of their parental
responsibilities to paid help if it was there. And I’ve always wanted to have a
home and husband to take care of, a kitchen where I ruled the roost. Maybe this
sounds a lot like I cannot let go, and maybe I am deluded for saying that I don’t
think that that’s what it is – but really, I think this is, quite simply, just
how I want to live my life, and I have to face the reality that I don’t have
very much more, whether in terms of time or emotion, to give to running.
I was freaking out at the start of taper
week, thinking of how much I had put in and how afraid I was that it was all
going to be for naught. Then, on Tuesday, I sat in my car in the office carpark,
wanting to drive right back home and go back to bed because I was emotionally so
exhausted, but I thought of how I had a taper run at lunch, and that
thought got me out of the car and to my desk. On Wednesday, I decided to put on
some Christian music in the evening on the way to get Them, and what a balm it
was to my fretful mind. How long it had been, since I had last sung of His love
and faithfulness.
After that, through the last workout,
through dinner the night before and when I was lining up to deposit my bag;
through that one hour the storm raged while we waited for news of whether the
race would go on, I was calmer than I had ever thought I would be in those very
circumstances. Something told me I wouldn’t sub-2, simply because my body wasn’t
ready to handle it. And that was okay.
***
I wanted to leave a review of the Project
1:59 plan because Google actually threw this up as a searched for phrase. To
borrow from someone else who reviewed it, I thought it was good that there was
a simulation of the different range of paces one could expect to experience
during the actual half-marathon (n seconds faster or slower than target race
pace), and I felt the recommended training paces were quite manageable for
someone who’s been running consistently for a while. There are minimally three
runs a week, which leaves a day of rest and three days of cross-training, if you
so desire. The not so good thing for people trying to self-coach is that the
plan leaves you to adjust the total weekly mileage according to what you’re
used to, which could lead to both under-training or over-training.
Which is why I finally decided that I
wanted to properly invest in running, and signed up for Coached, which is a
heart-rate based training programme. It’s pretty affordable, and suits my needs
at this current stage of my life. Plus, frankly, I am really looking forward to
finally running the easy runs truly “easy”, even if that means having to
walk-jog. I don’t know why it feels like such a relief to finally have “permission”
to take it truly easy, versus when I was training by myself. Stopping to walk,
even when I was hitting the wall, made me feel like I had failed the workout
somehow. The best thing about the programme is that it’s entirely time-based
(and heart rate, of course), which is also a relief. It feels right for me to
be hearkening back to how it was when I first started.
In light of that, I also registered for
the half-marathon in December with YL, although I swore to myself some years
ago that I would never sign-up for any of the race categories at the Singapore
Marathon again because there were just too many people. It’s apparently
improved greatly though, more space and everything, because we are, after all,
making a bid to be a World Marathon Major – but we’ll see. Don’t worry, I don’t
think my blog post following that race will be as long as this one (don’t bet
on it).
