On saturday morning, the team wanted to recce the last 4 km of the running route as we never had the chance to do it during our past training sessions. Turns out, darks clouds started to hover and soon enough, it started raining really heavily. Clouds were really low (and when i say low i mean low like the clouds were hitting the buildings) and looked something like a scene right out of war of the worlds.
So we had to cancel our plans and squeeze about 20 men into 3 vehicles. With the rain continuing to pour, we had to shelter our guys one by one with the aid of a tiny umbrella into each of the cars; that is, until one construction worker (God must have seen our pitiful plight), appeared with a 10 men umbrella, to fetch his fellow construction friends to the site. Jun Hao seized this opportunity to borrow the umbrella and true enough, the transition of the runners to the vehicles took only one more trip. Jun Hao then returned the umbrella alone to the nice fella, but not before looking ridiculous carrying a 10 men umbrella alone.
After the recce drive, a few of us went to eat before adjourning home to rest and to return to Hotel 81 (yes, Hotel 81) to spend the night there. Nothing much happened much during dinner, except for Azreen who could not stop eating and eating and eating. Oh, i forgot eating.
As we tried to sleep through the night, my room, consisting of Willie, Suan Boon and Jasper had a rather interesting night. With Suan Boon's track pants rubbing against the thin mattress, the whole night was full of shuffling sounds. By the way, we all slept on separate beds. Then periodically, Jasper's handphone rang with an extremely annoying message sound that sounded like "you got a message! you got a message! Booya!"from the voice of Homer Simpson. So basically, we did not manage to sleep much.
So came sunday and we were all preparing our usual routines for our big day after training for 6 months. We did our visualisation (courtesy of Mr Vasanth) and tried as much as we could to psych ourselves up.
When the race ended, 7 of us, did much better than expected, all of us coming in before 1h 30mins, the time we originally expected ourselves to run. I beat my personal best by 3 mins and 42s to come in with a timing of 1h 25mins 21s (yes yes, i know, show off. I don't care), not exactly exuberant, but definitely satisfied.
After we all came in, we sat on the padang talking and laughing with anyone and everyone. In the midst of all this laughter, some mother fucker came along and stole my Adizero Pros, and was actually considerate enough to leave one of my socks behind as a souvenir.
Seriously, don't let me find out who took it but i swear i will break his legs (or face) given half a chance. It ended up with me burying the sock as a sign of respect and walking like a hobbit, barefooted, back to the hotel room. Well, a few of my team mates were nice enough to walk back barefooted with me as well, so i won't feel left out. Truth is, they didn't want to dirty their shoes either! Either way, that worked for me.
We also lost out of our medal hopes by a mere 1 min 28s. We had a combined timing of 20 hours 31mins 08s from 14 runners and lost out by a fraction of the timing. This year was our best year yet and we really thought we could win something. Apparently not.
But honestly, i felt that this year the team really bonded well. Really different from the past 2 years where people came and went. Of course I understand that people will still come and go, but this team has the potential to develop.
Just want to thank these few people (if they ever come across my blog) and how they have made this year's AHM the best and probably the hardest to beat. Not in any order of course.
Nadeem
Sami
Suan Boon
Jun Hao
Azreen
Rafiq
Kelvin
Victor
Willie
Jasper
Kumar
Wee Kiang
Kin Wei
Arvind
Nabil
Din
Allan
Armadeep
Raymond
Not forgetting our team managers,
Roger
Chee Beng
Ronald
Thank all of you and hopefully this will be the start of our domination!
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