The New Paper 10km Walk

My family have been talking about participating in the annual New Paper Walk for the past few years, but we have never got down to doing it. This year, I managed to sign up early along with some friends, and we were ready to walk the 10km non-competitively.

We woke up at 6am on this early Sunday morning. I will normally be going for my Sunday run with the SAFRA runners at MacRitchie, but today, I will be going for a walk instead. I have never really walked much, other than going for the trekking sessions with the gang. I am much more of a runner. We arrived at the National Stadium at 6.45am, only to be diverted away. We ended up parking at People's Association, about 1 km walk to the start point. I immediately sent out messages to my friends, and Lee Chean (Aki) responded soon enough. We met up at the nearby start point, where there was a large crowd of people, with loud music blaring away. It was really piercing to the ears.

Minister Raymond Lim flagged of the competitive walkers at 7.30am, followed soon by the huge bunch of fun walkers. There must have been at least a few thousand of us. It took us about 5min after flag-off to be able to walk slowly. The first 2km was about snaking through the sunday strollers, and social walkers. Once we penetarted through the crowd, we picked up the pace and very soon, my son, Sean was lagging. I dropped back to urge him on, whilst the rest move ahead. At the 4km mark, Beverly, Amanda and Aki moved ahead, and I was with Sean. I took some time near the mid-point to snap some photos with my camera-phone, and that was where I bumped into Adrian Chia.

The Esplanade, about the mid-point of The New Paper Walk

Adrian mentioned that he runs about once a week now, becaise of work schedules as well as him wanting to spend more time in the gym to beef up. After walking with Adrian for abour 1km, I asked him to move ahead with his friend, whilst I carried on with Sean. At about this time, I received a message from Westly that his family was not feeling well, and could not join us for the walk. No wonder. We were waiting to receive news from Westly when we did not see him at the start line. Westly had signed up for this walk much earlier than many of us, and he was looking forward to it. Well, such things do happen, sometimes.

One of the walkers, who later became too exhausted to move

The blazing sun came hard on us after about 1.5hrs of walking. Sean was getting tired legs, and I was feeling a bot from the sun too. We hurried along, and finally reached the finish line. I didn't check the time, but I estimate we took about 1hr45min to walk the 10km. We met up, and all went to queue up for some cool ice-cream, before we talk the 1km walk back to the car, and headed for home. Overall, it was a good sunday activity for the family and friends. Maybe next year, we should do the competitive walk instead, to avoid the large crowd of social walkers in the non-competitive section.