My First Completed Full Marathon at the Cyberjaya Twincity Marathon 2016

So… after my disappointing attempt at the Park Marathon 2015, I knew I was not in the right shape to complete a full marathon. At least, not in a short amount of time.

The main reason I signed up for the Cyberjaya Twincity Marathon was because of the really long cut-off time. Most full marathon events have a cut off that ranged from a strict 6 hours to a usual 7 hours. The Twincity Marathon had a really comfortable cut-off at 8 hours.

I was pretty hopeful that I may be able to complete a full marathon this time, even if I took the full 8 hours. I wasn’t here to complete the run in good time; I just wanted to complete it.

Yes, like many of my other posts, this post is more than a year old.

RUN DAY 24 JANUARY 2016

It had been a pretty full month. Every week in January was full, with the Dragon Back Run and Lunar New Year (blogposts pending). Perhaps I shouldn’t have run so much, but I never trained, and was using the run events as my training.

I was in trepidation when the day came. I met up with Andrew Lu, who had also signed up for the event. There were one or two other friends who had signed up, but they bailed because they hadn’t trained either.

I still remember how I felt when the run began. In most of my runs so far (the runs ranging from 5km to 21km), whenever I started running, I would usually be somewhere in the middle. I mean… I’m used to people overtaking me as I’m not that fast. But I would normally fall somewhere comfortably within the middle of the huge crowd of runners, as I have a mid-range pace.

However, in this case, because it’s a full marathon event, almost all the runners who participated were serious runners. Serious, meaning that they were not leisure runners. They probably train regularly, or at least they had excellent stamina.

So when I started off at my usual jogging pace, I was taken aback by how many runners who had pushed off with a fast pace. And I would normally see runners slow down to a walk, sometimes within less than 1km. I would personally slow down after about 2km. But I didn’t see any runner slow down to a walk for at least 5km. Well… a runner other than me.

It was a real struggle for me to keep running. Actually… I couldn’t even keep running for my usual half-marathons, and this was definitely no different. By the time I hit the halfway point, I was merely walking. In fact, I walked the rest of the way.

I fell into walking with a few other runners, who like me, were not very serious runners and were only aiming to complete the full marathon.

The Twincity Marathon organisers had done an excellent job preparing refreshments for the runners. There were sufficient water stations, with water and isotonic drinks. There were also bananas, and roti canai was provided at one of the stations. Flavoured ice (in the guise of ice cream) was provided at the last station.

We had flagged off at 4am, which meant our cut-off time was noon. It was pretty hot by about 9am when the sun started climbing up, and it was getting increasingly hot as the hours wore on.

And since I was walking most of the route, I was walking a lot in the sun.

I was able to hit a pretty regular pace of about 10 minutes/km towards the end. I was exhausted, but I didn’t want to have another DNF (Did Not Finish), not when this event had such a long cut-off time. So I pushed myself to keep going, and kept up the walking pace as quickly as I could in spite of my tired legs, because all I could think of was to cross the Finish line.

It was with the greatest relief when I finally crossed the Finish line.

It was really slow net timing of 7h18m. But hey, I completed my first full marathon!

Also in this same run event… congratulations to Oppy for completing her first half-marathon, and to Andrew for his first full marathon!