MK Training - 10km Time Trial

Went down for Mt. Kinabalu training on Monday evening at the ex-SMU track. We were supposed to do our first time trial for a 10km run to determine the base of the Climbathon participants. I went down slightly earlier, and did a 3-round warm up jog round the track. About 10 of us there; DO, Yulan, Sabrina, Ronnie, Roland, Henry, Timothy, Sim, Jonathan and myself. Shortly, we had the NTUC organizers Carmen and Wilna arrive with bottles of Gatorade, 100 Plus and lots of bananas and some dried peaches...mmm, nice support there.

We started off at 7pm to run the 10km route of Upper Bukit Timah Rd -> Sixth Ave -> Holland Rd -> Fringe of Botanic Gardens -> SMU track. This was not a very good route to do a time trial because of the many traffic junctions, poor road conditions esp. along Sixth Ave, many curbs, heavy traffic. It was a dangerous route for running, and not the best of routes for any good timings at all. Good thing we will be doing our future time trials at the East Coast Park....yeah. Sim dashed away at the start and led all the way. DO and I lost him after just 300m into the run...haha. That guy is fast. Jonathan was running along with the both of us for about the first 4km right up along Sixth Ave. Jon is a triathelete, and is quite a good runner as well. After Sixth Ave, DO and I were running alongside most of the way. I felt slight discomfort in my calves from Holland Road, probably due to the pounding on concrete, and jumping on/off the curbs...really bad surfaces for running. I was running at quite a hard pace, at the same time, watching the roads and traffic very carefully. When we finally arrived back at SMU stadium at around 8pm, it was already dark. The floodlights were shutoff pretty early.

DO and I finished in about 51:30min. Sim was done in 44min...wow... We all agreed that we ran a longer distance, likely to be about 10.3-10.5km. Jonathan came back shortly, followed by Yulan, Henry and the rest. We had nice refreshments and some discussions about the next time time trial, as well as the coming Wed's stair-climbing time trial at Toa Payoh.