No Sweat Chicken Feed Haha all the way! TNF 100 report 2010

In case you are thinking that I sailed through the race, you are mistaken. Far from it. For months, the spectre of doing the toughest race in SIngapore dogged myself and EW. we had taken a blind leap of faith; actually it was through my constant egging that we signed up for the 100 km duo and over the months we asked ourselves whether trail running would be "any sweat?". The SAF correct answer when your superior asked you was to spew out the spinal answer " No Sweat Chicken Feed Haha all the way". A kind of SAF trainee vernacular. That became my mantra, a sort of false bravado.

The training began in earnest sometime in July but it was never followed according to plan, not least because trail running required daylight and a decent 2 hours or more to cover the distance which realistically meant the weekends, something which was taken up by cycling.

Well the mileage was not really enough and the most I had covered was a 40 km distance( over the week 0 one month before the race and the longest run was 25 km in early september.

My race strategy was to run at 8 minutes/ km and try to reach Lorong Asmara( 22 km) and then push and to 32 km and if I was really down and out i would bail out of the race at 32 km which would be the most I have ran at least on the trail.

We started at 7 am and i found that highly agreeable because when we did the 25 km, it was blazing by the time we started and in 3 minutes your heart rate would hit 160; we ran through the same route as last year, took it easy and the 4 of us ran together. at the 2-3 km mark EW had gone ahead and with the large throng of runners, I thought it best to keep aerobic and a HR of less than 140 and kept it comfortable. We chatted about chek's new dogma and was doing a decent pace of 7:30/km.

We got out to RRR soon enough and the weather was still agreeable. We got to the satellite station and stopped to refill and me to clear my bladder. we resumed at that point and i realised when we got into the kampong trail i had lost cheks and mh. we turned towards Hindhede road and entered the MBT. i had not ventured there before.  MH caught up with me and i learnt that cheks had taken a tumble and slowed down. we ran together through the Mandai PCN and caught up with EW at Mandai road and then stopped to refill at Lor Asmara at 21 km. One of the volunteers told us it was 2 km up and EW and MH contemplated re-filling only when we are out. I was out of water for the last 5 km and thought it prudent to put in about 400 ml of water and downed some more isotonics before we went on. As it turned out this was where the race began. This was where the mind games started. There was little cover( i knew that); it was pretty hilly( i knew that too) and it was 13 km!!( i didn't know that). At one point we were on all fours climbing a steep slope. the promise was the checkpoint at 32 km which took forever to reach. I was over-heating, my last drop of water in the hydration bag long gone. My toes were beginning to hurt and I felt out of breath when i climb yet another knoll.

i caught up with MH at the lorong asmara CP, got some deep heat on the legs, drank some more and doused my over heated body with ice cold water. I told MH to go ahead as i wanted to wait for my buddy. By 15 minutes, he had still not appeared and i was getting stiff so i pushed on.

The sufferfest  was truly on and once you clear 32 km and left the CP at 1045, you were always in with a decent chance. I walked and ran with a fellow dude called ray and we chatted a bit till Zhenghua park. I had a second wind and started running slowly. a trot that took me all the way back to finish at 7:10. It felt great to finish the 50 km and i was pleased that i could do it with the amount of training. It was definitely a tough race. Psychologically you always had to dig deep. Being mentally prepared was half the battle worn.

will i be back for another race? i am not sure. my memory for pain is short...