My Olympic Medal

I won my first 'Olympic' medal today :D Ok, maybe it wasn't a real Olympic medal but it was a medal all the same.

Wifey and me took part in the McDonald's 7K Olympic Day Run early this morning. It was a race we've been training for quite a while now. While I was happy to run and finish the race, I never expected to come out in the top 100 in position number 61 (for the men's junior veteran category). I even got a medal for finishing among the top 100 runners for that category.

It was a real surprise to me. I was in a state of exhaustion at the finish and was just happy to be crossing the finish line when an OCM (Olympic Council of Malaysia) official hands me a card with the number 61 on it and ask me to go to a nearby table and collect my medal.

I was still a little dazed from the run to even begin to appreciate the fact that I got a medal and it only sunk in a little later. I was ecstatic. In all my years of running, I've never ever got a medal or made it any where near the top 100 let alone position 61. The best I ever did in a race was position number 600 plus (and that was donkey's years ago) so to get 61 this time round was a big achievement for me.

All that training I've been doing with wifey, my partner in crime, who did pretty well herself to complete the race in her own personal best record time, is really paying off big time. I'm really happy with the progress I've made so far. The best part is I'm absolutely enjoying this new healthy and fitter lifestyle of mine :D

The entire event proper was pretty fun today. The only problem we had, or rather I had, was having to wake up at 5.00am to get ready for the race. I'm not a morning person, never have been, never will be and I was thinking to myself how insane I must be to wake up at 5.00am on a Sunday morning to run 7K.

But after the initial grogginess faded, I was fired up and looking forward to driving to the race location. It took us 15 minutes to drive to the heart of town through near empty streets and we were lucky to get parking so close to the start/finish area. There were already loads of people there, with a carnival like atmosphere in progress. Both of us were eager for the race to start and rushed to the front of the starting line when told to get ready for the start.

I don't like starting from the back or middle of the crowd of people cos it would take ages to get past all the slower runners at the start. So we pushed our way to the very front of the pack of runners. The race overall was pretty fun and I ran my fastest personal 7K ever.

The only thing that had me fuming was the fact that I should have surveyed the route way before race day cos it was a darn grueling route with 85% uphill stretches that was hard on the lungs and stressful on the calves. I was expecting it to be a much more flatter route.

All through the run I was going,

'Oh my God, uphill! Damn, more hills! Alamak, when is the hills ever going to end!'

And when there were downhill stretches, it so short that I hardly felt it. It can be quite a stretch especially if you haven't added hill work in your training sessions. Wifey was much more prepared cos she's been doing a lot of hill work during training and probably wasn't cursing as much as me ... LOL!

And speaking of wifey, once again I'm darn proud of her, she completed the race without stopping, with blisters on her foot to boot and finished it within the qualifying time. For someone who never ran prior to five months ago, she's done extremely good for herself. Kudos to you honey :D

Well, we're both really running mad these days and have already signed up for a 10K race two weeks from now and another 11K race, a week after that followed by an 8K race in November ... LOL! Like I said, we're running mad these days!

'The miracle isn't that I finished. The miracle is that I had the courage to start.' - John Bingham
.