Met quite a lot of friends, old and new, this weekend. It started on Saturday, June 13, when me with a friend of mine decided to check-out the Second Wind store at Maginhawa St. in Teacher’s Village, where we met Hector (owner of Second Wind) and Migz (tambay lang daw sya dun :P)…we’ll definitely go back for more run stuff 🙂 That trip was followed by a visit to Conspiracy Garden Cafe where we got ourselves an almost still-fresh-from-the-oven copy of Cynthia Alexander’s new album, Walk Down the Road (we were there at 19 East in November, 2008 for the live album recording…yeah!). No new friends met there, though…plug lang ng album ni Cynthia (die hard fan 😛 hehe!)…So off to PTAA. I woke up at 3am…no, it wasn’t coz I was overly excited or anxious (well, I WAS a bit anxious with my knee and all, but I wasn’t THAT anxious)…there was a phone call which turned out to be a wrong number…grrr…so there goes my sleep…good thing na rin, considering all the things I have to prepare pre-race. En route to the site, I saw a handful of runners running the entire stretch of University Avenue going to the assembly area to warm-up 😀 When I got to the assembly area, I scouted the scene for people I know (newbie talaga…imbes na mag-warm-up, eh…). First person I saw was Pojie of Takbo.ph. I recognized him from the pics 🙂 He was with a couple of people from Takbo (whose names right now evade me, unfortunately 😦 I’m bad with names, it’s why I have my Takbo shoutbox kodigo :P)…Next I saw Dr. Nonette Pasco (who won a Boracay trip for 2 during the raffle!), an Ophthalmologist at East Avenue Medical Center, and a marathoner (San Diego Marathon, if I’m not mistaken). And just before the 10K gun off, I met up with Dr. Mon Severino, Pediatric Oncologist of the East Avenue Medical Center, whose patients we were running for on that event. He was doing the 10K. Days before the run, I’ve been thinking about the 5K route, visualizing it in my head. I’ve a bad bad knee on top of my rather weak lungs…I wanted to know more or less at which areas I could slow down for a walk, which parts I ought to be walk-running a li’l faster and such. Last thing I wanted was to run out of fuel so early on in the race…or overwork my knee with kilometers still to cover. I was a bit dismayed to find out that the route had been changed 😦 Oh well. So then we ran. T’was a good thing there were a lot of marshalls manning several points in the race. Not knowing the new route, I was afraid I’d get lost and run the 3K route…or worse, the 10K…I’m happy about the way I ran. For one thing, I consciously resisted the urge to run fast and overtake the slower runners at the start, which is what I’ve done in my last two runs, and which just caused me to start panting after only a couple hundred meters. Everyone was running past me, but I maintained my slow run pace, keeping my left leg as comfortable as possible. Later on, I found I was slowly overtaking runners who had started walking…I kept running my slow run…until I discovered that I had pretty much covered about 2 kilometers while continuously running! 😀 That was great for me! 🙂 I was able to do something like that on a treadmill before, but then, at that time, it was only for about 10 minutes (approx. 1 something kilometers). This was the longest I’ve done so far 😀 At some point during the run, I saw someone who looked like Marga (Margalicious), whom I have never met, but whose pictures I have seen from the internet (facebook). I ran beside her, and truly, it was Marga! 😀 We literally met while running 😛 And so I came to the last stretch. I sprinted the last few meters, and had to overtake a girl near the finish line (is there some etiquette thingie about that?). I finished in 41.59 minutes. I lined up for the finisher’s shirt and stuck around for the raffle (I had a feeling I was going to win something…feeling clairvoyant ba). I could hear a number of people complaining about the process of getting their finisher’s shirts. There were 3 lines, one for each shirt size (small, medium and large), and I could hear a girl commenting about the lack of signs…and an organizer answering back to her that there were signs, except they were there on the table 😛 I understand the annoyance of the runners…we’re all pretty tired, and having to queue after a particularly long and tiring run isn’t really calming for us 😦 While waiting for my name to be called (raffle win), I chanced upon the Takbo.ph gang, about to have their photo op…good thing Pojie spotted me, and invited me to join…coz for one thing, I hadn’t brought my camera 😦 And for another, I got to meet up with the people I’ve been chatting with at the Takbo.ph shoutbox 🙂 Now I have faces to go with my kodigo (list of handles and real names, which I always keep within reach whenever I chat :P) So, to Pojie, Timmy, Marvin, Migz, Rod, Marga, Lauren, Julie, Carlo (buti bumalik ka! :P), Pao, Mike, Topher, and all the others I met yesterday, it was great to finally have met you, I hope to see more of you guys in the next runs! 😀 I may have lost in the raffle (and in the race…duh!), but I won new friends that day…I guess I’m clairvoyant, after all 😛
with the Takbo.ph gang...photo taken form Marvin (thanks!)
photo taken from Marga (thanks!)
A Walker's Run 