Marathon Pacers Kick-Off Run

About 25 of us gathered at ECP this morning for the 2008 Marathon Pacers kick-off. It was good to meet our Pacer kakis from 2007, and immediately memories of last year's run were revived. DO and myself were 4hr pacers last year, and we enjoyed the entire journey of bringing those runners across within the magic 4-mark.

This morning we had very steady runners like Ultraman, Charmane, Brokie, Vincent, Raven join David Tay, Dream, DO, Cokiee, cfred, Marcus, Henry, Kok Sin and the many more TriFam, FatBird and Sg runners to form a good base team, from which we will build upon for a trained Pacers team. Since this was the kick-off, we did a 16km to-fro MacD-NSRCC. The weather was rather cool on the way to NSRCC, and maybe it was National Day, the crowd of inline-skaters, bikers, park visitors at ECP was strikingly small. We enjoyed a good pace of about 5:15min/km for the first 8km.

On the return, the sun came up, and it was incentive for us to hurry along. David Tay was pacing along the bulk of us, as he was into his final 7 week of training for Berlin. Raven too was doing his own 32km in preparation for Berlin. I moved ahead by the mid-point to catch up with Ultra, Charmane and cfred. By then we were at sub-5min/km pace. David Tay too came along as we neared the Chalets. With 1km to go, we saw AiChai and the group in front, taking a nice stroll....hehe.

Once back, we gathered for some isotonic drinks, as we discussed the training schedule and marathon training program. August will still be used to gather more Pacers and because of the weekend races, we would not be too aggressive with the training intensity. It will also be a good time for the Pacers to settle into the training system and routine, as we begin our 2008 Marathon Pacing Journey :)

Distance: 16km__Time: 1hr19min__4:56min/km