Hope, Honor and Half Mary

Note:  This post has been sitting on my drafts for almost two (2) weeks.  I was actually waiting for Dani to do the edits (yap, she is my editor and she's being paid a decent fee for it!).

I did it! I ran 21 kilometres, or also known as, *cough cough* the half marathon!.

The day before, Doods and I had planned to load carbo by eating pasta, bananas and what-have-yous.  It was perfect, because that Saturday, one of my closest classmates in law school was set to have her twins baptized, namely  Hope and Honor. The twins are very cute and so cuddly.

We ate a lot of pasta during the reception.  Our dinner was only boiled bananas, a very good source of, yet again, carbohydrates.

We slept at around 9PM and woke up as early as 2 AM. It was finally the day of our half-marathon! We planned to wake up an hour early so that we could have a warm up run.  At 3AM, we arrived at the venue..  Oh boy, the parking was almost full!  But, wow, the moon was beautiful. I was excited to run for hours under such beauty!

It was good thing that the race organizers split the runners in each category by waves.  This is to prevent clogging of the way up to the skyway.  We came across a familiar face - a fellow runner from our neighbourhood.  Then, it was time for the prep up for the gun time. Condura has really lived up to its hype - fireworks, marshalls, a helicopter filming, etc.

The runners were so excited to ascend the skyway... and off we go.  Doods had promised to pace me, so instead of speeding up and leaving me; he stuck by my side, even though I knew that he was having a hard time with my snail pace. The first half (10.5km) went smoothly.   The hydration stations were well spaced out and the water was plenty with some sports drinks (courtesy of 100 plus).   There was some pride brewing inside  me when I realized that I was really running the highway where our car would pass by every work day!

It's funny when we approached the toll gate and somebody shouted "free toll fees!!!".  For a change, we were not charged by passing the toll gates, he he he.

I took my energy gel when I was near the 1-hour mark.  So, I was very  energetic when I did the u-turn at the 10.5k mark.  The first problem I had was when I was approaching the 16K mark.  It was an uncharted territory.  My longest race so far was my Bull Run, an opening race for 2012.  A combination of fatigue and fear of the unknown brought some discomfort on my calves.  I was sensing some cramps (or maybe I was just imagining them).  So, I told Doods that I would have to stop running and instead just walk to avoid any untoward incident (of cramps).  I told him to continue running and meet him up at the finish line.  He willingly obliged.

I walked and jogged and walked for around half a kilometer.  Then, I did some stretching.  I felt kind of relieved so I decided to run again.  Well, the hubby could not leave me!  He waited for me (actually, I was hoping for it!).  We ran together towards the finish line.  Somebody took a picture of us holding hands while we were about to reach the finish line. Nice timing! :)














So, here's our official time:

Not too impressive but hey it's our first time!!!