My Twelfth Marathon (My Perspective)
By: Mono Cuber 單立方子
Tags: Reflection, Running, Marathon, Phuket, Sports

I pledge this is the last one in this series. I cannot close this without describing my personal experience. Hopefully this is the most interesting among all, though as a multiple marathon runner, it seems I would do better if it was the least eventful.

Being the first and only marathon event I joined for the year, I assigned myself a rather low bar — I only want to be a finisher. With the 7.5 hours allowance, it seems anyone keeps walking throughout the race will be able to finish it.

So my second target is not to get injured. At least not badly injured. Minor sprain, blisters and cramps are ok, as long as it won’t be permanent or require long time to recover. My target was to restart exercising within 2–3 days after the race.

Therefore, before the race started, I look around for the pacers. Unlikely most other races I joined, the fastest pacers available would be 4 hours. Usually it should be around 3 hours. Since I am not in that league anyway, I looked around for the slower ones. Perhaps because of the rather relaxed time allowance, the slowest pacers were for 6.5 hours, which means 9 minutes 15 seconds for each kilometers, a speed could be reached by walking briskly.

I didn’t want to run too slowly because according to my Berlin experience, it could be rather boring. So I would maintain myself in between the 4.5-hour and 5-hour, hence as long as I am ahead of the 5-hour ones, I should be doing alright and this should be comfortable.

I did my first two 10km in 65 minutes and the third one in 75 minutes. I just ran in a manner as relaxed as I could and concentrated in viewing the scenery around and attending to the music offered by my AirPod. Minutes before the race, I picked a pre-cooked song list of May Day — honestly I don’t know much about them. All I know was that quite some friends are big fans of them and I was offered to two or three of their songs by friends to cheer me up during my worst days. The reason I picked the song list was simple — I need something long enough to last 5 hours or so therefore I won’t need to find another list of songs in the middle of the race.

While it seems I could finish the race within 5 hours as the progress was quite steady in the first 30km, my mood took a nosedive around 32km. It just passed 8am and the sun was fierce enough to vaporize all my remaining strive. At that time, I had a moderately developed blistered on my left foot and a negligible cramp on the left thigh. Both were bearable but significant enough to lead me to rethink, especially when I wasn’t under any pressure to do well. Hence I deflated.

I reckoned and realized that should I reduce to walking from there, I would be able to finish by 5.5 hours. And in any case, I could reconsider when the 5-hour pacers pass by. I could choose to follow them if I want to.

What happened was the pacers were never there, I walked for a few km and since it was getting bored, I attempted a faster pace which was about 8.5 min per km and interesting it was fast enough to surpass a few runners who were (posing as) running (for photos).

I ended up finishing the whole thing at 5 hours 17 minutes. Still a few minutes ahead of Berlin but in-honorable enough to appear like someone who is never trained for this, despite I was running 4–5 times weekly.

In any case, this is it! Hope next year I will be able to find more interesting races that I can keep my mood throughout. Once again, this experience reminded me doing a marathon in a prolonged period is not desirable. Not because of the tiresome, but the boredom accompanied.