Bareno Run 2011

I must admit that I was never an athlete during my younger years. The only medal I won was a 4x400m run during my form 3's sports day back when I was in SAKTI. Oh you have no idea how proud I am of that trophy, it was the only one I possessed and actually won!



My parents are non-athletes, they always find it weird that me and my siblings are up into outdoors and adventures because them themselves are not like that. Even in our family, we don't have athlete's genetics running in our blood. I guess my ancestors are non-active bunch of people. :p

Running a marathon was always something that I must crossed out from my "to-do" list. Can you believe it that I never knew that marathon is actually 40km? I never thought it was that far of a distance, that's why when I told people that I wanna run a marathon, they will look at me with amaze and said, "You sure you wanna run a marathon?". And I answered enthusiastically, "Of course!".

But I have to take baby steps of course, 40km is quite a distance I must say.
So I decided to join a pre-marathon run called Bareno Run organized by The Running Club Bukit Jalil. They open 5km, 10km and 21km categories, and I signed up for 10km, which I glad I did, cause initially I planned to do 21km, which after trying to do 10km in the gym I feel it was kind of impossible for me.

So as usual, I dragged MHB into the party and believe me I have no idea if he can actually withstand a 10km run as I never saw him run before. Though I must admit that he has more stamina than I was remembering back how we survived the Kinabalu climb, I am strongly believe that he can do this too.

I did my training twice a week, 5km run everytime in the office gym and that 5km was so difficult until I feel that I should have registered for the 5km instead. But I told myself this isn't about winning the race, it's about making it to the finish line. As long as I can make it to the finish line, it means that I have won already, I have won against myself. My time record for 10km in the gym was 90mins, so if I could beat that time in the real 10km run, I would have been even prouder.

I never thought that there would be so much crowd as I never think that Malaysian are a bunch of active nationals (generalizations are bad, I know, pardon me!). But as I was standing side by side with other thousands of runners, preparing for the starting gun shot to fire, I was indeed proud of myself and for the others. They took the effort to wake up at 4am in the morning and geared up for the run.

I observed that there's so many kind of people joining the run, whoever said the run is only for fit people? I saw an old grandpa running pass me for 21km run, I saw an overweight girl running steadily in front of me, I even saw a down syndrome girl running bravily (is that a word?) alone and keep on going. They definitely motivated me to do more, to push myself harder. I did learn something out of the run. For you out there, who never challenged yourselves for anything, I say get up from your bed on a lazy weekend and do something about it.

Trust me, running on the streets are far more fun and interesting than running in the gym. I hardly feel the distance at all as when I was reaching the finish line, I heard MHB said to me, "This was it? We finally made it!"



And guess what? I did beat my own record! I made it to the finish line at 75mins. Though I wasn't in the top 300 for women category, but I was proud of myself. ~give myself a pat at the back~

Now I'm hungrier for more run. Let's just see if I can actually manage to complete a full 40km run. ;)