k r i s a n d r o

Great news is that I finally got the dreaded RT out of the way upon passing my IPPT last week. Not so bad news is that my marathon training starts now!

And after taking some time out to read and plan for a marathon training schedule, this is what I came out with.

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29 weeks of intensive training.

Being a first time marathon runner, I am already quite reserved in my planning and it still looks mighty overwhelming. It starts off with 3 days a week of training and from week 6 onwards, it’s 4 days a week that I will be running! And as my mileage increases, so will the amount of time taken and that make me think if I should actually spend the night out at the park after a 3-5 hour run. *faints*

Along with the shock of seeing how much time and effort I need to put into this, I am actually quite excited to start and see how far I can push my body limits. All I have to do now is to hope for great weather during runs, an injury-free year ahead and minimum distractions from my training days. To my team of first-timers at FortyTwoPointOneNineFive, I hope you guys are starting your training soon!

Here is a page where my schedule is published to let you guys compare your training plans!

It’s my 5th week into RT and I am starting to enjoy sweating it out, especially during the 3km runs and interval trainings.

Even though jogging is one of the best forms of cardiovascular exercise known to mankind, I do realize like most people that it is also one of the most boring exercise ever. Depending on how hard you push yourself, one can probably jog for hours before fatigue sets in. Unlucky people like me who wants to avoid breathing in exhaust from automobiles and live far from stadiums and huge parks, have to resort to jogging in tiny ‘gardens’ that the NEA disguises as parks. Jogging 6km for a session in my nearby public ‘garden’ means seeing the same tree, bench, sleeping ah pek on bench for 19 times. I am not quite looking forward to the day when I run a full marathon around that ‘garden’.

132 rounds! *wails*

But I do discover that once I get past the reluctance of jogging and do it regularly for at least twice a week for a month, I get pretty much in the groove and I look forward to running faster or covering longer distances each time I take the road. And this new love for pushing my body to new distances came at such a good time. It’s about 7 months to the Standard Chartered Singapore Marathon 2009 and it’s about time that me and my team train hard to be able to complete the grueling 42.195km.

Just let me get past the IPPT test next week so that I can rally my hibernating teammates and get them into a running mood as well.

Okay.. that's a lot to un-hibernate....

I have been wanting to take part in a full marathon since 2003-2004 and if I wrote it on a piece of paper as a thing-to-do, the paper will probably be yellow with the faded words barely recognizable.

In order to motivate myself, I gathered people over at plurk to find people who will be crazy enough to train for the Standard Chartered Singapore Marathon 2009. Besides the advantage of staying fit while training for such a gruelling run, I decided that the group should adopt a charity as well to give a greater cause. So the group “FortyTwoPointOneNineFive” was formed.

“We are a group of people who wants to complete a full marathon (42.195 km) at least once in our lives. Instead of procrastinating like we have always been doing, we decided to form a running group to challenge the Standard Chartered Singapore Marathon 2009!

We will most likely have a group effort to raise funds for charity as well to make this even more meaningful. Stayed tuned for more info!

Join us as we push each other to train for the gruelling run!”

Since most of us are very active online, I think it will be quite interesting to find ways to raise money and awareness for the adopted charity. If you are interested in joining us to train for the Standard Chartered Singapore Marathon 2009, do join us on facebook and also on our group at mapmyrun.com (A great way to log your runs and monitor your progress!) Since we live all over the island, we are using mapmyrun to log and monitor each other and will only meet for runs bi-weekly or monthly.

As you can see, we haven't really started and I am 2nd on the list with only 2.36km clocked. WAHAHAHAHA!