Adidas King Of The Road 2009

This will be my next run in 2 weeks' time. I have signed up for the half marathon category.

Meantime I'm still doing slow recovery type runs to take a break from last month's KL Marathon.

This event has a very stringent qualifying time. For the half marathon category, the runners have to finish within 2 hours 20 minutes. This is an average pace of slightly more than 6 mins per km throughout the whole 21.7km distance. Quite worrying for me since I have not been training at this sort of pace for a long time.

Anyway whatever it is, this will be a run to keep my training going until the Penang Bridge Marathon in Nov and hopefully can meet some celebrities like this one during the run:)

Happy birthday to Will

Yesterday was Will's 40th birthday.

Mohana made this kuih (40 of them) to celebrate with him this morning.

Happy belated birthday, keep running and stay healthy..

My target time table

I made this target time table for the marathon run last Sunday.

It's based on 8.5 min per km pace with target finish time of 6 hours.

This table is displayed as wallpaper on the phone I carried along and used to update my facebook status every 5km. I get a lot of comments and encouragement from friends who happened to read my status.

Seeing that you're ahead of the target time at every 5km segment is a great motivation for the run. I think I'll do the same again for my next marathon run but the target time will need to improve. I think I'll be happy to go sub-5 in my 2nd attempt and sub-4 one day before the end of my running career..

Less than 1% of population

After we finished the run last Sunday, CP told me we are now officially part of this exclusive club of people who has run a marathon.

I did some googling later on and found out in North America the % of population who has done a marathon is only 0.1%. I believe this number could be much lower in Malaysia, judging from people we always bumped into during races, I estimate the number of active marathoner in Malaysia is less than 2k. That mean it is less than 0.008% of 26 millions Malaysian population. I'm very proud to be part of this.

What is the main reason the % is so low?

Actually now that I have done mine, I can tell everyone that running a marathon is not as hard as it seen. I believe most people who is willing to commit serious time into training can make it to the finish line.

Our body can adapt very fast to the training - an official beginner's training program from Runner's World website is only 16 weeks. Anyone who is willing to commit their time to it will have very high chance of making it to the finishing line. The hardest part is to make that commitment and stick to it throughout the training period.

So who is joining us (me and CP) in Penang this Nov?

More on KL Marathon result

Who's who
Of the 1492 who finished, 14% were female and 86% were male.

Opposite Sex

For the record, you were ahead of about 28% of female finishers.

Result in Entire Field - 1146th place

346 finishers behind. About 77% of finishers ahead.

Result in Gender (Male) - 998th place

288 finishers behind. About 78% of finishers ahead.

Result in Division (M3539) - 154th place

38 finishers behind. About 80% of finishers ahead.

From Halfway to Finish

You passed 143 runners

And 10 passed you

Average speed is 8 min 5 sec per km

What I'm really proud of is on 10 runners managed to pass me after halfway mark and I passed 143 runners:)

Official result

Quite surprise to see they managed to release official results so quickly after the terrible event.

My official gun time is 5h 42m and chip time is 5h 41m.

Position 1047 out of expected 2000 full marathon runners even though not sure how many actually participated in the day.

For friends who by 4D, please remember to invest in this number: 1047 :)