Any race that doesn't require me to travel far will always be a go to race for me regardless big or small. Larian MPSJ 10K was exactly that, slotting nicely on my tapering week leading up to Vietnam Mountain Marathon (VMM) next Saturday. Interestingly, I signed up this race rather late, but with the objective of "maintenance", I did not set any goal time and certainly not in the frame of mind to set a personal record.
On the very faithful Sunday morning, I woke up early as usual preparing for the event and heading out with plenty of time to spare. Reaching at the meet up point agreed earlier with Jamie and Nick, I parked my car nicely and planned to catch up with some small nap. Instead of dosing off, I went "OH NOOOOO!!!" I forgot to bring my running shoes!!!! I quickly got off the car and ask Jamie if he has any spare shoes in his car and he said "No"... Dammit, how could the famous jamiepang.com does not have spare shoes in his car. Then I quickly ring up Nick begging for him to bring me any pair of shoes (except sandals) that I can run in, and he was kind enough to bring me 2 pairs for me try on. I decided to settle with the Nike Flyknit Racer.. boy this shoe is hard on the legs by any standard compare to the shoes I ran in but was an absolute fast fast shoes without a doubt.
With the shoes issue settled, all of us including Choo and Zijill head towards the race site and soon we found ourselves waiting at the starting line about 20 mins before race start. None of us was ready to put in a quick time for the race and so we have decided to take things easy and even thought of taking capati at the mamak along the racing route LOL. Without much funfair, the race was flagged of on time by YB Hannah Yeoh and off we go to a slow start in group and at times I think we were blocking some of the faster runner.
1km, 2km grabbing a sip or two at the water station, it was all too familiar as this is the exact training route that we ran in USJ. Nothing exciting to shout about until we hit the 4 km mark where the faster runners were on the returning route, we started counting and realized Zijill was 10th position just slightly behind us. At 5km U-turn point, this was when the race starts to get a little exciting, we have decided to push Zijill for a strong finish. Not that she needs a push from us and without telling her what we were up to, we just ran faster and faster chasing down the ladies in front of us, giving all sorts of hand signal communicating to each other.
Soon enough we managed to catch up with 2 or 3 of the lady runners ahead of us, putting our friend nicely in 7th position before we slowly dropped back our pace at 9km mark, leaving her to run at her own pace to the finishing line. The weather is getting very warm by the time we reached the final straight and I decided to pick up some pace and catch up with Jamie into the MPSJ track for the finishing.
It was a well organized race, liquid were plenty along the race route, finishing in the MPSJ track was a nice touch. However, they could improve on the start time, 7:30am was a bit late not forgetting the 7 km and 3 km will only start well beyond 8am and will be very hot especially for the kids . The traffic cones were not well placed, leaving runners weaving in and out with full traffic will proves dangerous not just to the runner but for the motorist as well. It wasn't a record breaking run and it was nothing like the 10k fun run I had in GCAM15, but the pacing thing was definitely spicing up the run for me today wrapping up my preparation to VMM. Congrats to Zijill for her top 10 run and Nick for a strong comeback race!!