I must admit that I kind of lost the motivation to blog. I've done 3 half marathons, one 25km run and a marathon this year, I took photos and went through online albums looking for my race photos, but somehow did not get down to blog about it. I've trained harder than all of the previous years and took photos of the more interesting routes, but the photos stayed unused in my phone. In fact, I'm still stuck blogging about my Nagoya trip, and I don't think I'll ever blog about the Easter holiday trip to Bali.
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| The mandatory group photo (Courtesy of RD facebook page) |
Anyway, I've decided to just post up photos of a exploratory run I took part in, hopefully it will help me in completing the blog post later on, and here I am!
This is the fifth time I've joined RD in a training/exploratory run this year, and the route is a trail that's newly opened just months ago. As I've signed up for Hakusan Shiragawa Ultramarathon and planning to sign up for MSIG Action Asia and TNF later on, I'm have to add on more slopes and trails to my run.
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| Map taken from Carpark A near the MRT station |
The start point is just next to the new Hillview MRT station on the Downtown line, and it's just next to Dairy Farm. We gathered at Carpark A and after a short briefing, we were off. The last run I did was a 17km mid distance run two weeks ago. After two weeks of zero running, the slopes at the start left me panting hard and after a few hundreds metre, I had to stop to walk up an upslope. There were about 20+ runners and most if not all are regular runners, I was soon left behind working on trail on my own. I was just glad that the sweeper runner had not caught up with me yet. I was not so worried about getting lost as there were crew stationed at important junctions. Soon, a male runner caught up with me, and we ran together till we got a bit confused with directions. We waited for the sweeper guy to arrive with another lady, the 4 of us ran together till we reached the amenities center at Chestnut Nature Park.
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| After 3 km from the Start Point |
I was with the slowest group so I didn't have a chance to take a break, I headed straight for the chestnut walking trail. It was quite a clear cut route but slightly dizzling for me as there were many turns to the left and then to the right, heading upslopes and then downslope. The route was clearly marked out every 100m and there were a few old people walking on the trail. Unlike the earlier part of the run, this area does not have any mountain bikes so it was quite safe. After 2km of winding path, we met the group who had made an U turn after hitting the road at the end. Instead of going back the 2km, I've made a choice of taking a short cut as I was clearly lagging behind. I ran about 100m down the road and arrived at the amenities centre again. The very nice guy I had met accompanied me as he felt that it would be unsafe to leave me alone on the trail. I was very grateful for his kind gestures although I felt I would be fine on my own.
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| The newly built toilets and shelter |
After a toilet break and wandering around for a very short while, the group emerged from the trail and we ran back the way we came. I was still one of the last but it was quite okay as I already knew the path. I really need to put in more effort in running as I'm always the 'dropout' when running with the group. Instead of clocking almost 10km for today's run, I took a few shortcuts as I was quite slow and ended up with my Garmin reading 7km.
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| Back to the Start Poin |
It started drizzling a little when we got back to the Start Point near Carpark A. I did not manage to do a LSD as planned but I was still glad I made the decision to wake up and join the group earlier in the morning. It definitely felt good after a good workout!
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