Monday and Tuesday workouts

Monday

Ah, Monday. The worst day of the week for most of us. And with reason. For those working on Saturdays you only pretty much have 1 ½ days of rest. Which obviously isn’t enough. It does make you wonder what the meaning of life is. Do we work most of our lives to earn some salary and sustain ourselves and our loved ones? Hard to say. I remember a quote that running is the meaning of life. To a certain extent that was shared by the great Bill Bowerman. I’m not entirely sure if he said it in real life, but in the movie Without Limits he did tell his track team (after scheduling a track team meeting at 7.27am) that “Running, one might say, is an absurd past time upon which to be exhausting ourselves. But if you can find the meaning in the kind of running you have to do in order to stay on this team, chances are you’ll be able to find the meaning in another absurd past time- life.” My take is, if you’re referring to the process of running (i.e. long runs, tempos, other workouts) and looking to improve your times, I guess there are some parallels to life. Nothing is handed to us on a platter and we have to work hard for it. There are exceptions, of course, but I believe that this is the case for most of us. I believe running also teaches us another thing- that health, above all else, is important. With health comes happiness- we are able to do our jobs, and also perform our responsibilities as father, mother, son, daughter, husband, wife etc better.

Well, I’ve resumed my running again after a week’s rest, and I started out cautiously. On Monday at KLCC park, I took my first tentative return to running in one week with an easy 4 laps with Newton and Steven. I wanted to run longer but I had an appointment.

Tuesday

After running for about 40 minutes in the morning, I proceeded to Kg Pandan. It was raining but I was determined to run, rain or shine. Traffic was horrendous and although I managed to leave the office by 617pm, I arrived close to 650pm. Surprisingly Coach wasn’t there. It was barely drizzling, more like spitting rain. When Coach ain’t around there’s always some uncertainty as to what we will do, who will lead the workouts. After some ding-donging of ideas (suggestions of which included 8 x 1000m), we agreed on the menu- 10 x 400m. 1st group: total time will be 2:20 (including rest), 2nd group would be 2:30 and 3rd group would be 2:40. Crazily I joined the 1st group which only consisted of Ah Toh, Ah Wah, Phua and this triathlete fella (don’t know his name). I usually ended the reps 2nd last- although my times were in the region of 1:30 per rep, when you run with them you will feel slow and wonder if you’re running badly. Those fellas were running in the region of 1:24. But I stuck to my pace. The reason I joined the 1st group was the shorter rest time, which, with my time of around 1:30, was already a very long 50 seconds. Ultimately I completed 11 repetitions with them, before joining Ronnie and Kenny. Ronnie and I did another 8 repetitions (Kenny was done by the 5th). With the longer rest period, the last 3 reps were run in times about 1:27, 1:25, and 1:21.

Can't wait for the end of today.