KL Marathon: Mission fail

I admit, my training has been subpar and I am to blame for that. Far too easily, I get demoralised and duck out from training. Still, the small PR tempered the disappointment somewhat. Anyway, here's my race report.

SCKLM 21k

1.31.02 (1.31.00 net)

Shoes: Brooks T6

After having my legs seize up on my within the first few km the last 2 times I ran here, I made a conscious effort to try to relax. While my calves did tighten up a bit and my right shin was oddly getting a pounding, my plan seemed to work. The tight feeling did not get worse and my legs were able to loosen up after about 5k. I reached that point at about 20.2x. As that portion was a net downhill, I expected a fast split but that time still worried me. With the spectres of my past failures here still lingering, I really stuck to cruising down the declines while trying not to push off too hard going uphill, both to decrease muscle fatigue.

The next few km passed by in a blur. Many would claim that this KL course is easy peasy, but to me, the many twists and turns are a bigger obstacle compared to mere elevation change. For a non-KLite, that made the course a bit unpredictable and really throws you for a loop. Personally, I find it hard to get a nice rhythm going here. All I can do is just focus on the particular stretch I am running on and hope I didn't misjudge my effort.

About midway through, I told my body that it was time to put all that saved energy and fresher legs to use and my body responded by... making no change. The power wasn't there at all. Probably a consequence of my lackluster training, my heart and lungs just couldn't spin into overdrive and my legs couldn't generate any power. It wasn't even like my heart is pumping like mad, I just had no extra gear.

Throughout the race, I tried to maintain a strong running gait and to a certain extent that probably resulted in my miniscule PR. Even so, as I approached the last few km, I was hurting and thought about shifting to a more comfortable gait. Nevertheless, I managed to hang on to the end. Heading down the finishing straight, never mind my target of sub-1.30, even sub-1.31 was slipping away before my eyes. Despite striding (my best effort at this point) all out, I was still a couple of seconds over that barrier.

I would reckon the middle part of the race was the toughest and my stopwatch would back that up. My first and last 7k segments were under my target pace while I really lost the plot in the middle. Bear in mind that I was hurting the last 4k or so. It's either the route is much harder in the middle or they really screwed up the distance markers.

Long story short, I really have to take a long hard look at myself before I start thinking about the full distance.