Saturday, March 01, 2008

March 1 Marathon

Man, I love being able to say I just ran a marathon.

Maybe Koreans don't share the history of an ancient Greek hero running 26.**miles to warn Athens about the Persians (I know, we don't have the history either: 26 miles was what fit inside London when they held the Games). Anyway, any long run is called a marathon here.

At my current fitness level 7 kilometres sure felt like a long run, although I would have completed it then looked for more athletic stuff to do twenty years ago.

I'm happy with my performance. Around Christmas, I started going to a health club a few times a week and steadily increased my treadmill running distance. Before that, I hiked up the local mountain several times a week. Still, it was only three days ago that I ran 7km inside at the health club, and that was not easy.

Running outside felt great. Today's wonderful weather didn't hurt at all. I ran faster and enjoyed it more today than I have running indoors. I found I could measure my performance by looking around - I could see a few hundred metres down the course which is much better than watching the treadmill's odometer.

I was running at nearly my maximum speed for the entire race. I was at the point where I felt fine when I inhaled thinking, "One, two" and exhaled thinking, "Three, four". The count corresponded to my pacing. Interestingly, my mind wandered and I found myself singing silently. Um those points aren't that interesting, this is: when I was singing, even though I wasn't enunciating the words, my breathing changed to match and I began to cramp up. I had to return to thinking about other things or counting.

My time was within a minute of last year's time so I'm happy about that - again, it was much faster than I expected to go.

Film the gasping foreigner!
I made KwandongAlex his own entry number and we posed after the run.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

They just can't resist filming us, can they! Looking good, anyway, Brian. I admire your tenacity.

P.

kwandongbrian said...

Today, March 2, I am in pain. So far, not too bad but I predict discomfort walking tomorrow.